Here’s My Sign

The cool way I learned it wasn’t time to give up writing

It might seem silly to need validation over something I’ve been doing for most of my life, but I did.

Perhaps more than ever before.

I came to my love for writing in second grade. My teacher, Mrs. Miles, had us write and illustrate our own stories — two sentences per page, and a picture — then we made our own covers and string-laced our pages and cover together into a little bound book.

Mrs. Miles took me aside (as she probably did each of her students) and told me how impressed she was with what I had written, how I had elements that were beyond my age. How my ending was a surprise that I had properly foreshadowed.

I had no idea what foreshadowing meant but clung to the word; later asked Mom what it meant.

A seed was planted in me that day. It became deeply rooted. My first love.

Yet I’ve allowed life to get between us over and over again.

In a perfect world, I would have become a writer right out of school. Would have a stack of published books by this age. Instead, I have stacks of columns and short stories and unfinished novels.

I’ve done okay for someone who has only been partway in, whose day jobs and night jobs and projects consume so much time and space.

But I have also missed opportunities, the biggest of which happened around 2006, after I submitted a piece to Glamour magazine’s “Story of My Life” contest judged by Terry McMillan, author of Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Even though my story didn’t win, McMillan liked it enough to pass it along to her agent, Paul Cirone. He contacted me.

This kind of opportunity never happens. It just doesn’t. Certainly not to a one-toe-in-the-pool writer, like I was at the time.

But I had no manuscript at the ready to give. Since I was working a full-time job and a part-time job, with a daughter in grade school, I knew I couldn’t pull something together in a reasonable amount of time. So, I had to step aside and watch as the opportunity whooshed past, certain I’d never see the likes of it again.

I might’ve been wrong about that.

Last year, since it was too cold in our windowless warehouse in winter to do much physical work on the place, I wrote several short stories. Once I had them well polished, I submitted them to several contests. There were six entries altogether.

Aside from my columns and a half-dozen new shorts, I hadn’t been writing as much as I had in the past. I still poked at my novel here and there, but finishing it required larger chunks of time than I seemed able to give.

This old warehouse Don and I are rehabbing — with its basement crowded with project pieces in need of refinishing — is enough to fill many lifetimes. Where does my writing fit in that dirty yet wonderful world?

I have wondered if perhaps it’s time to be practical and put my writing aside. Use that energy for sanding and scrubbing and rebuilding instead.

So, I made this deal with myself. If nothing came from any of the six contests I entered, that would be my sign. But even a 10th level honorable mention would keep me in the game.

When the rejections began to arrive in my inbox, one after another, I began to feel scared; began to wish I’d sent out more stories or chosen less significant contests.

Began to wish I had believed in myself enough to not need validation to continue doing something I’ve loved as much as this all my life.

By February, I had been rejected by every contest I entered but one. The biggest of all, Writer’s Digest. Their first-place winner would receive a significant purse as well as a trip to pitch an agent at their New York City conference.

First prize included something else, too.

A sign telling her it’s not time to quit.

So, here I am, with another chance at an agent and nothing finished to pitch. But I have until August. The warehouse can wait. I’m not going to let this opportunity whoosh past me again.