I was on the floor. Literally.
Not metaphorically. Not beautifully. Just tiles under my back, a bottle of wine in one hand, the mail in the other. Rejections from everywhere. From agents, from publishers, from magazines with three followers and an editor who calls himself a “curator of literary nuances.”
They all said the same thing – but in different fonts:
“It’s not for us.”
“Now is not the time.”
“It doesn’t match our current interest.”
Translation?
“We want a legend, but not yours.”
“We want a voice, but only if it sounds like something we’ve already bought.”
“We want women, but not women who bleed like you.”
There were days when I didn’t write a word. I just sat there, my mouth dry, staring into the absence. And the pain was sharpest not because they were rejecting me, but because I was starting to believe them.
That I wasn’t a writer. That my book was just some mistake in writing form. That my characters were hallucinations, not fate.
I cried. In the bathroom.
Naked, drunk, embarrassed that I had ever believed it.
Embarrassed that I wanted it so much.
Embarrassed that I had written a book in the hope that someone, somewhere, would want to read it.
Then I heard.
Not in reality – don’t be witty – in my head.
The one, the other one, that keeps telling me:
“Write. And don’t sell your book like cheese in a supermarket.”
And I remembered:
I didn’t start writing to be liked.
I started because my characters wouldn’t shut up.
Because they would come to me at night and say: Tell them about us. Make us real.
Because this wasn’t a product – this was an obsession.
I got up from the floor.
I lit a cigarette. I whispered to my story, ‘I trust you. I believe in you. Let’s go.’
And I wrote. Not for approval. Not for markets. Not for blurbs on covers.
I wrote for myself.
For them.
For the women who keep their manuscripts in drawers and their orgasms in brackets.
For the men who think they discovered irony in ’94.
For the kids in bookstores looking for a world to take them in.
I know this: My readers are out there.
The ones who want a book that tastes like sweat and paper cuts.
And someday, when I see “The Dimension of Fantasy” on a shelf that smells like rebellion, I will touch the cover and whisper:
“Do you know how much it cost me to get you here?”