Writing is a crazy business. There’re no two ways about it, it’s just nuts. And if you choose to follow the writer’s path, it will drive you nuts, too. You may have thought you were slightly off-kilter simply because you want to be a writer (and you are), but the writing life is guaranteed to drive you right over the edge. It can’t be otherwise; there are far too many factors beyond your control. (The same arguments may be made for other artistic fields, but this is the one I know.)
You can control what you write, but after that, you’re at the mercy of time, the elements, family, friends, editors, jobs, publishers, reader tastes, world events…pretty much everything. Now you may point out, correctly, that everyone is subject to these forces, but as a writer, you are subject to more of them, and they are more than usually whimsical.
Think about it: The very first step on the way, after you finish your manuscript (the only part of the sequence in your control), is called “submission.” This goes against everything we’re taught (in America, anyway). Submission is the loss of control, submission means you’ve lost. Unfortunately, it’s an entirely apt term for the process. Once you have sent you ms. to an editor/publisher, you lose it. Not permanently, but for the duration. And even if you use a handy tool like the Submission Grinder, you can never know exactly when you are going to get it back. Sometimes you don’t get it back; you simply have to mark it “lost in transit” and take it back. But even then you might never know what happened, and you have lost something.
Ironically, submission is the only path to “domination,” as in domination of the market. There’s no other way, except self-publishing, and that will drive you to distraction even sooner and more surely. Either way, you have to submit to dominate, and by doing so you have to cede control. Whether it’s to a publisher or to your readers, you will always be submitting until the day you reach that plateau of domination, and unfortunately, most of us never will.
So if you want to be a writer, you have to recognize that you likely will never control your own destiny. You will come to see that no matter what the stated return time for a market is, and however faithfully you chart your progress on the Submission Grinder, very often the editor will appear to take a lengthy vacation right before he reaches your submission.
Because there are far more markets that take longer than they should than there are markets that fulfill their promises to unsolicited writers. A market which has always responded within 60 days for the past year will suddenly leave you hanging for six months. A novel market saying, “We intend to respond to all queries within 90 days,” means a wait of at least nine months. Count on it. You’ll probably never know why. And there isn’t a darn thing you can do about it.
Except one. You can leave that piece alone and work on another. Then another, for however long it takes. You can submit to the wait.
If you want to be a writer, accept the insanity. Don’t expect things to make sense. Don’t expect editors to be consistent–but most of all, don’t give up on a piece you believe in, and never submit a piece you don’t believe in.
Because that choice is entirely in your control.
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Graffiti on the Walls of Time 