I’m overtaken with melancholy every time I pass a magazine rack. I think of all the magazines I’ve queried with no success or even acknowledgment. It reminds me very much of being turned down for a date or a job. You wish you could have proved yourself, shown yourself capable. But, alas, you were never given a chance.
And there they sit, all those faces on the covers of the magazines, each blankly staring, announcing with silence that you don’t have a place. As a writer, have you ever felt this way? Does it tire you, too, to think of all the markets to be queried, likely unsuccessfully?
Fortunately, my mood passes fairly quickly, even if returns on the next visit. Other things present themselves. And I think of Churchill, “I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.” Forward.
