Speaking of agony memoirs, as I did last week, I'm thinking of writing a book about my 40-year struggle to give up writing.
My disappointment over that book reading - the one that produced very few sales despite being well-attended and enthusiastically received - followed me home and carried over into the next day. It wasn't until I came in here and started to work that my mood improved.
"The cure for anything," Isak Dinesen wrote, "is salt water - sweat, tears, or the sea."
But for a writer, as she surely knew, it's writing.
The problem with editorial silence replacing rejections is that the latter, even when impersonal, were still an affirmation, an acknowledgement that you were a writer who had written something. Whereas a non-answer would seem to confirm your non-existence.
I was sitting on the patio of Louie's Backyard having drinks with a former magazine editor who once agreed to send me to Japan to walk the Kiso Road. After about 45 minutes he put down his glass and said: "I owe you an apology."
"Yes?" I said, caught completely off guard.
"I should never have changed "rucksack" to "backpack."
Writing a memoir you never worry that somebody else is working on a book on the same subject. But you do think ahead to the future rejections, which will be not just of your writing but of your life.
I finish assignments early so I can savor my sentences before they all get rewritten.