Picasso goes for a walk

Yesterday morning I was at the Atlantic/Pacific station waiting for my transfer. As the crowded train approached I realized I wouldn’t be able to continue reading and I looked for the bookmark to put it away. It wasn’t anywhere in the book.

I flipped the pages front to back. Nothing. I opened up my bag and poked and rummaged through it while getting my head almost all the way in. No sign of it there either. I lost it the way I always do – it must have fallen off the book when I took it out on the platform while waiting for the earlier train.

There it would be, lying on the ground waiting to be trampled or getting coffee spilled on. Or maybe it had been blown on to the tracks by the swish of wind that precedes the coming of trains where it would end its days flattened and sliced by the power of the machine and its hundreds of commuters or be electrocuted by the third rail.

The poor bookmark didn’t deserve it. A gift from a friend who had recently been to Barcelona, it should have been kept safer. I’m a careless bookmark keeper and now the poor Picasso cats would suffer the consequences.

I grabbed a receipt from my wallet, stuck it in the book, and got on the train to go to work

It was a long, slow day with nothing exciting to report, but when I got home I found the Picasso cats bookmark back on my bed.

Every once in a while we get a glimpse at the secret lives objects lead while we’re not looking. It’s because of a hint of that knowledge that we repeatedly lift the couch cushions looking for a remote that wasn’t there the other three times we looked – because sometimes we find it the fifth time.

Just like I found this.



Every time I went to the co-op I would check the lost and found bin for the glove I lost in late December. It wasn’t there any of the other times I checked, but when I saw it last time I went grocery shopping I couldn’t contain letting out a noise like a cat who’s found a fly on his side of the window.

The two gloves are happy to be back together, but I wonder when I’ll hear about what happened between when I lost it on 12/29/09 and when it decided to make its way back to me and join the other forlorn inmates of the co-op lost and found bin on 1/02/10.

MMX

Roman numerals make everything cooler. And a year that looks so good in Roman numbers has got to be a good one.

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions. I make plans. I break things down into lists and I start tackling things one by one until they're all done. Whatever I want to accomplish, I try to figure out how to do it and then I do it – step by step.

Sometimes plans get revised. Others get ditched. Sometimes despite best efforts things don’t work out as planned. Sometimes the plague strikes. Life happens.

I had grand plans for 2009. I planned on getting an agent and selling a book. That hasn’t happened yet, but I’m revising my expectations, refining my plan of attack and moving forward.

But I’m not done with that one. In MMX I’ll get an agent.

And I’ll do my best to run the New York City Marathon.

Those are my two big plans for the year. There are also some other smaller ones. There’s even one involving a tiny panda, but I’ll save those as surprises for you.

Happy New Year! Accomplish all you want in MMX.

Dream it. Plan it. Live it.

In search of rejection

This a word cloud I created using Wordle. I grabbed my book – the whole tamale – tossed it into worlde and this is what came out. The more often a word appears in my book, the larger it will show in the cloud.

If you take a look at the cloud, you’ll know there are games, soccer, parks, friends, and beer in the book. There’s also plenty of trying, things are hard, there are plans, and there are Pirates in New York. And there’s home – the finding of it.

Here’s what’s going on: I’ve written a book and now I’m in the early stages of the torturously slow process of finding an agent. It's going well, but the book business moves at a snail pace.

I’ve queried. I’ve gotten rejected. Twice. But I’ve also queried and gotten requests for more. Twice. I’ve sent more and now I’m trying not to tear the skin off my thumbie as I wait to hear back from them.

I also had an amazing meeting with someone who works on the other side of this – on the book buying side – who gave me great advice and offered me some candy. I grabbed onto the promise of that candy like it was the last helicopter out Saigon.

But I haven’t heard back about that candy and I don’t know when I’ll hear back. I’ve been busy following her advice and working on getting short pieces published and on developing the blog, but I need to move beyond that and start getting things done.

Rejection is hard, but I need to stop being such a wimp, leave the comfort of my couch, and get out there. Rejection is good. Rejection puts me in great company, as this post I read today points out. Getting a rejection doesn’t prove anything but if I’m not getting rejected, I’m not querying enough. And I have to query if I want to find an agent.

The holidays are looming and the publishing industry breaks away from their computers and goes caroling. Which means I need to get my ass in gear.

On my to do list for this week: re-work query, send queries out to agents (at least three), finish a first-person essay that’s been lurking in my computer, and run faster.

My objective for December: to get rejected more!