You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
The Rejection letter.
God Damn it!
As soon as I read the words, Thank You for sending DEADLINE, we have now had time to review….
Oh uh.
I didn’t have to read another syllable.
As many of you know, I have been trying to cross the threshold from hack to paid writer for decades.
I’ve knocked on the door of every agent that breathes air and asked him or her to give me a chance. They all treat me like a leper selling used vacuum cleaner filters in a subdivision where the sign clearly states no unsolicited sales people allowed.
Get off my lawn before I call the cops, they all say.
Over the course of my life, after writing to every single snake oil salesman this side of Jupiter, I eventually run out of options, wind and desire to take another kick to the teeth.
And then, once again, for lack of a better Chinese Fire Drill plan to follow, I put my project away, tucking it to bed in the cold darkness of anonymity.
Back into the box it goes. Duct tape, tear, seal, back on the shelf in the garage.
Poof. Gone. A memory that will not haunt me again.
I have a box of literary dreams gathering dust and providing a wonderful place for spiders to make baby spiders.
Screenplays and Teleplays and now a Novel that I think, is pretty good.
There in the subject line, I see all I need to see. Thank you for sending DEADLINE.
Sons of bitches. They actually went and did it. They read 50 pages. They hated it. They passed on it. They gave me a cupcake and a pat on the head and told me to go stand at the back of the line. AGAIN!
As you know, I wrote a 400 page belch of a story, called Deadline.
Premise: News guy crosses the crime tape and then saves the God Damn world. You know a day in the life of you know who.
So when I saw the email, cheap and unsolicited and not accompanied with a phone call or flowers from FTD, my heart sank.
By the powers vested in me, I now declare you a writer with inadequate talents not suitable for public dissemination.
I was pissed. I was sad. I was disheartened. I was angry.
Anger. Yes, Anger. My old friend. Embrace me once again. Rub my shoulders and fill my combustible engine with the juice that makes me dare to say Get in the Ring Motha F***ers!
I stole that angry chant from Axel and the Boys at Guns and Roses, who once famously sang: F you Motha F’ers. Get in the Ring.
I think that was the band’s angry way of dealing with constant and chronic criticism by people who know how to stand on the fringe and comment on those who dare to step inside the ropes and let people punch them in the face.
It takes Cajones to bare your soul and give your heart to an open auditorium of savage eyes and demented persuasions of unknown proportions.
But that is what the artist does when he births his baby and sends it into the world to be chastised, criticized, ridiculed by wolves and hyenas.
So I get the letter and it proceeds to tell me that “We found that the story was fast-paced. However, our readers felt that the narrative suffered from a lack of characterization and it was hard to follow where the story was going.”
Ok. What the hell does that mean?
Characterization suffering? Well that’s a kick to the groin. My main character is in every scene. He cries and screams and sweats and screws. He is pure emotion, adrenaline, a toothache of a man without novacaine.
Lacks Characterization? I think your readers lack balls. OOPS, did I say that?
Yes, I did.
GET IN THE RING!
And the story was hard to follow where it was going?
Did you guys smoke crystal meth before reading? Were you seated in a microwave oven, wrapped in tin foil, the dial set to stupid, when you gazed upon the holy smoke?
The story is a mystery.
HELLO.
You are not suppose to see where it’s going. It’s a journey a trek, an experience shared by the reader as discovered by the main character.
What if Rocky just ended with the ref holding up Apollo Creed’s gloves and Rocky yelling Yo Adriane. What if you saw that coming after you finished eating your first handful of popcorn. Is that any fun?
Misery loves company and so I went to the internet to bathe in my despair. I typed in: AUTHORS WHO ONCE SUCKED AND THEN GOT REVENGE BY SELLING THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
AH HA!
How many times was JK Rowling rejected by publishers?
Miss Rowling has faced literary rejection. In 1996 the manuscript of her first Harry Potter book was turned down by 12 publishers before Bloomsbury picked it up for an advance of just £1,500. The series went on to sell more than 450 million copies worldwide.
To prove how nescient and pedestrian you readers really are, she sent in another novel, but she used another name.
She sent The Cuckoo’s Calling, a crime novel, to a literary agent and “she was summarily rejected.”
The author told one of the world’s biggest selling novelists, “It didn’t stand out.”
Shut up you filthy blow hole. So much power to change lives and all of it based on the subjective whims of a flea brained bacteria stain.
GET IN THE RING.
What if JK Rowling’s name was on the top of my novel, Deadline? You think they’d publish it? You bet your ass they would.
Even my favorite literary doctor had his run ins with flea brained publishers. According to the internet “The publication of “Mulberry Street” is a lesson in perseverance. The manuscript was rejected by 27 publishers. Dr. Seuss was about to burn it when a classmate from Dartmouth, who was new to the children’s book business, bought it. By the time it was published, in 1937, the author was 33.”
So I could put my latest story in the box. I could give the spiders a place to fornicate and create more baby spiders to creep in the dark void.
Or I could take all this hostile anger and be the next Harry Potter.
I have a chip on my shoulder. I am Tom Brady, draft pick number 199, 6 other nameless, worthless, quarterbacks picked ahead of me. He’s going to the Hall of Fame, and they are selling women’s shoes at Macys. Someone gave this Michigan kid a chance to shine and he shined like the Hope Diamond.
I am Robert Conrad daring you to knock that battery off my shoulder. “Go ahead, I dare you.”
So I’m going to send my query letter to every single agent who is stupid, smart, who takes a breath. If they squat to pee or stand to urinate, I’m going to send them an email blast that smacks them in the face and says “F you motha F***er, Get in the GD ring!”
You guys want a sure thing. You guys want to make easy money and ride the backs of wordsmith cowboys. I get it.
But sometimes to find the diamond in the dirt, you got to dig a little.
Maybe I’m Tom Brady, take a chance. Maybe you are the agent who can’t recognize a story by J.K. Rowling.
Think about that.
So while I get in the ring with some of these literary stains, I submit for your reading pleasure, a random chapter from Deadline.
Get in the ring with me. Take the journey. Knock the battery off my shoulder Motha F***ers!
DEADLINE
CHAPTER 4: The Sheriff’s Dead
Van rushes to his trunk and opens the hatch. The back looks like a FEMA playground, filled with rain gear and batteries and tripods and cables. He sorts through the mess, like a surgeon reaching through a bowel obstruction. He tugs on his Ikegami 3 tube camera and places it on the ground. He hoists the ¾” porta-pack from the trunk and puts it beside the camera. He pulls a 12 pin cable connector and tosses it down on the hot asphalt. He stares at the tripod for a moment.
“The bad guy’s firing shots at people. I don’t think I’m going to be standing up making myself a target,” he says under his breath.
The equipment is clunky, heavy, as he assembles it and moves
quickly to the state trooper laying in the dirt. Van drops down near him.
The law man is wearing mirrored sunglasses, his police hat is turned backward. He is staring through a sniper scope, his semi-automatic assault weapon trained on the bank about 60 yards from his location.
Van doesn’t see any other news units. His heart quietly smiles as he turns on his camera, white balancing and zooming into the bank.
Van recognizes the trooper beside him. They worked a crash on the interstate a few weeks earlier. They are not on a first name basis, but there is a mutual respect since Van is well known for being pro-cop, willing to give the man with the badge the benefit of the doubt. This reputation is probably all that is allowing him this unbelievable seat in this breath taking cathedral of spot news.
“What do we got?,” Van says quietly, looking at the bank in his black and white viewfinder.
The trooper keeps his eye pressed to his scope. He spits a long stream of Copenhagen out of the corner of his mouth. The stream is brown and pungent. It puddles like a lake in front of the officer.
“It’s bad, boy. The sheriff’s been dead over an hour now, done been killed in the breezeway.” The troopers words are slippery southern, with consonants and sentences rolling into one another like a semantic train wreck of conjugation and bad sentence structure. “Bank robber ambushed him. Sheriff was 1st on the scene. Poor bastard didn’t even know what hit him.”
Van absorbs the words while zooming into the breezeway of the bank. He sees a slumping form in a uniform leaning against the front doors. He sees the sheriff’s star glimmering in the sunlight. He sees the sheriff’s head covered with blood, and the glass of the bank smeared with a purple goo. The Sheriff’s 9 mm is still in his hand, as if he were going for it the weapon as he took his last breath.
“Jesus Christ,” Van exclaims pulling his face away from the camera. “I talked to him just last week. Fuck!”
“It’s a God Damn shame,” the Trooper says his finger resting nervously next to the trigger. “We can’t get him neither, because the bank robber’s inside and he’s got 2 hostages. Cleaning people. Every few minutes we hear a woman scream and he comes out and fires all over the god damn place. “
“Who’s in charge here?”
“I don’t know who’s in charge. I’d say the God Damned sniper in there. He’s in charge.”
The trooper pulls his face away from his weapon for the 1st time. He looks at Van studying the news man’s face. “Look. We both know you are too close. But I ain’t got time to baby sit your ass. You’re a big boy and you know the risks. Stay low and when that son bitch comes out shooting and he will. Take cover.”
Van nods affirmatively as the trooper presses his eye back against his scope.
Van is pressed against the dirt. He is using his thick 3/4 inch record deck like a shield in case the scene gets hot with flying lead.
How many high velocity rounds would this Sony tape deck stop?, he wonders. He knows the answer is zero. Van uses his camera like a grainy black and white eye. The tiny viewfinder has a red record dot that is blinking rhythmically. On and off. On and off. Even through the tiny screen, the scene feels chaotic and unsure. He feels a twinge of nervousness as he watches officers in the distance reposition themselves, moving like commandos and throwing themselves down behind slave walls and taking up positions behind 100 year old buildings.
Van gathers himself, taking in a deep breath. He is the only newsman on scene. He is the only one without a gun. He is the only one without a bullet proof vest.
He watches the rhythmic pulse of the record light. It’s hypnotic, almost soothing. He concentrates on holding his shot steady, counting to five, before stopping the tape and finding a new focal point.
Every time he pushes pause, the tape in the porta-pack stops with a clunk. When he finds his next shot and he pushes the button on the camera, the light blinks and he hears the tape begin to roll.
This is crazy, Van thinks to himself. There is no definition to the crime scene. There is no crime tape, no public information officer directing him to a centralized location. It’s unfolding at the speed of news while a man decomposes in the breezeway of the bank. Van feels like he is inside a news kaleidoscope that is changing with every passing second.
Van notices two officers hiding behind a dumpster, their rifles trained on the front of the bank. The men are wearing bullet proof vests. They look hard and serious. It’s an adrenaline rich atmosphere peppered with caution, fear and anxiety. The officers are only a few yards from the sheriff. They want to go get their fallen brother but the mad man inside the bank is calling the shots for the moment.