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The Hard Lemonade Incident By Tom Sanders
My drunken next-door neighbor followed me down to the lake the other night, to the beach we share, and started shouting, ranting, and generally acting like a NASCAR fan whose cable was out, while waving a half-empty bottle of hard lemonade. I told him that if he planned to sneak up on me again with a drink in his hand, the least he could do was bring one for me. Also that if he started disturbing the peace again, booze or no, he could expect to see a black and white police car outside his back door real soon. Before he wobbled back up the hill to hide for the night, he left me with, among several famous quotes that won’t make it to the "Jeopardy" board, this challenge: "Go ahead and write your (expletive) book, and live in your (expletive) fantasy world…" I sat there in the twilight for a while, staring out over the water, listening to waves breaking on shore, trying to regroup after this ambush. Then I walked home and did what any professional writer would do: turned on the computer, opened Word, and wrote a query letter for my (expletive) book. I printed and mailed it the next day. With a SASE, of course. Since I first wrote CHAPTER ONE at the top of the page one, the fictional setting has become real. The characters have become old friends. They live. They will not die as long as they’re on my hard drive. Shark-filled critique groups have not killed them. Form rejection letters from agents have not killed them. Technical misadventures have not killed them. (My best wishes to the inventor of the built-to-fail floppy disk.) The lunatic next door will most assuredly not kill them. Even if all I had was a chapter heading and a concept in my head, it would survive. It will survive. The book will be published. Pretty harsh sounding stuff, right? Welcome to the world of writing. You’ll find that it can be a not-so-very-nice place. That it isn’t one big crit group with rules and a moderator and folks who type ((( ))) around your name. That there are people just waiting for you to fail and, in fact, looking forward to the day it happens. That a certain shell-like hardness is often needed just make it through a day with your sense of worth intact. Since the Hard Lemonade Incident, life at paradise by the shore has resembled life along the 38th parallel. Two maxims that writers might want to consider have also been reaffirmed. Be very, very careful to whom you reveal that you’re a writer. There are places where being a writer is one step up-- or down, depending on your perspective-- from being a witch, a sex offender, or someone who’s never donned blaze orange in November and shot a deer. A shattered sense of self esteem can kill a project or make you never want to touch a keyboard again. Your writing future isn’t worth it. Also be very, very wary of those whose living quarters display no books. No books means no respect for the printed word, the effort required to create it, or those that make that effort.
Tom Sanders is a writer from Lexington, Michigan, whose work has appeared in The Mainspring, Writing For Dollars, Decalcomania, and Linn’s Stamp News. His (expletive) book, October Fourteenth, has just survived its fifth rewrite.
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