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| Barb Polan Barb’s Recovery |
Like many bloggers, I am a writer, and writing blog entries is the best way for me to respond to what has happened to me. If I were an artist, my coping would probably involve creating artwork; a football player, I'd be bulking back up; if a bus driver, getting my license back.
In my 30 years as a writer - both studying and practicing - I have written 4 novels that were never published. Part of that is because they suck. I gave up fiction-writing when I realized I was getting to the point of being pathetic. Giving up is not one of my deep-inside characteristics; in fact, I am the opposite - I tend to stay the course through every storm, promising myself that I will hold out through whatever the trouble is. I compromised, though, by considering John Updike's point of view. As both a writer and an editor, Updike saw writing as sailing on the open ocean, while editing is "hugging the shore." So, I became an editor. It wasn't that clear-cut at the time: the newspaper that employed me as a reporter needed an editor and selected me: I was reliable, a solid writer, met every deadline, and, after a bit of feedback, could successfully edit my own articles, which I have found to be the most challenging editing task because I am attached to each phrase I write and I know exactly what I mean by it.
"Giving up" was something everyone advised me to not do. Friends and family members encouraged me to be persistent and not give up writing fiction; they told me the story of Theodor Seuss Geisel having a book rejected hundreds of times - as the legend goes, while Wikipedia claims it to have been 27 times - before one publisher took a chance and published "To Think I saw it on Mulberry Street," one of the Seuss books I did not memorize as a child. I memorized others to prove that I could read, on which there was pressure to do early in our family. As proof, I would sit on the floor of the bedroom I shared with my sister with a book in my lap and recite the story, keeping my eyes focussed on each page. And I thought it was even more convincing to turn the page at the correct spot in the text, so I figured that out too. Agreed, I was a self-confident show-off at a young age.
Back to giving up my fiction-writing career. If it wasn't pathetic to have 4 rejected books, how many would I have to write to hit "pathetic?" 10? 27? 100? The thought of going through rejection letters for 100 books was unbearable. As it was, my agent stopped sending me rejection letters that contained no constructive criticism because all I ever wanted to know was "Why?" She couldn't answer herself - she had told me that she could sell the 2 mysteries.
How does this relate to my recovery?
I am currently writing a book about my recovery; it will comprise many of my blog entries. (Yes, that is the correct use of "comprise;" it means "include," and should not be used as "something is comprised of." Look it up.) Its title is "Stroke After Stroke." It begins the day the stroke occurred and will end with the first day I row - for real, not with help -again. And I WILL finish it; this time I will not give up. Forget about convincing someone else to publish it; I will publish it myself - digitally and in soft-cover. It's something my dear son, Brian, knows how to do. For Christmas, he gave me a hard-cover volume containing the first mystery novel I wrote. Of course, the gesture made me cry, but the author blurb he wrote for the inside of the jacket was even more touching.
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