Zen and the art of publishing

The last week has been very full and productive and I'm on one of those elusive writer highs. Also been meditating faithfully every day (possibly a correlation....hmmmm.....) and just a few minutes ago, while listening to my beloved Jon Kabot-Zinn CD, I remembered something that happened a long time back. Ten years maybe.

I was in New Mexico, on my way to a Native American retreat. It was a typical western landscape, i.e., very blank. One narrow road through a rocky red landscape, one dusty gas station beside that road. I stopped and was shocked when a man actually came out to pump the gas. I was rummaging in my purse looking for cash because it also hit me that this gas station probably didn't take credit cards. As he was standing beside the car holding the pump he had time to take his measure of me, the rental car, the new-agey books in the back and he asked, sort of grumpily, if I was going to the meditation center. I said yeah - probably 99% of his clientele was either coming or going to the meditation center, there didn't seem to be anything else on this road - and he said"You don't have to go to a place like that. I can tell you the secret of life."

I had the feeling I was getting ready to get a great big jolt of Jesus but I nodded anyway and he said...

"Just don't take everything so damn personally."

Through the years I have thought about him several times. I don't know that anyone I've ever met, and I've known my share of philosophers and brainiacs, has ever improved upon his advice.

It's good council for the ups and downs of publishing. You send something out and you don't hear anything back and in those long weeks of waiting it's easy to tell yourself all sorts of stories. None of them kind. None of them fair. Or it's so easy to take the absense of a marketing campaign or a low advance or a bad review too much to heart. They don't like me. They don't like my book. It's easy to lose sight of the fact that publishing is a large, lumbering, and multi-headed beast and that very little that this beast does is a direct reflection on Kim Wright Wiley of Charlotte, NC. If I could just let things happen without rushing in to define and analyze the situation I know I'd be a happier person. Probably a better writer too.

I'm glad I thought about the gas station prophet during my meditation. And I will try to not take everything so damn personally. At least not today.