Hey Lana, Want to Share Your Milkshake?

I am old enough to remember the story about how the famous actress Lana Turner was discovered while sipping a milkshake at a soda fountain. 

Sometimes when I have exhausted the lastest list of publishers and I have received the last rejection letter, I imagine myself sitting in a cyberspace soda shop, starily moodily into space while jotting random meanderings down in my writer’s notebook, then having some publisher in a checkered jacket from, say, Random House, come barreling in and proclaim for all of cyberspace to hear, “Hey, Baby, You’re It!” 

He would admit to being one of my secret readers for years, then slap a contract on the table and tell me to sign on the dotted line. And that would be it. I would be on the way.

How wonderful it would be to wake up to such an email.

Instead I am going cross-eyed looking through dreary lists  of publishers, sending out proposals and, in the absence of contacts, hoping against hope that, instead of having the manuscrupt getting stuck behind the radiator in some Toronto office, the manuscript will somehow land on the desk of somebody who will look at it and see a spark.

I am trying to publish a volume of essays that I’ve published over the years. I’ve been writing them long enough to know that I have readers. Lots of them. But none of them are publishers. The kind of thing I’m trying to publish seems to fall between the cracks of what publishers publish. 

So now I’m reduced to fawning on nice rejections letters. I’ve had some sweet ones, one that says my work is creative and that the editors have even enjoyed reading it. Do they say that to all the girls? Or do they mean it? Do they really mean it when they say they’ll respect you in the morning?

Then there are the philosophical implications:

Is a nice rejection letter better than a form letter?

Is it possible to be rejected if you don’t read your rejection letters?

Does getting rejection letters somehow build character in a mysterious way that nobody understands?

Does a rejection letter somehow invisibly reproduce itself on your forehead so that everybody you meet knows you’ve been rejected?

There seem to be, in fact, enough philosophical implications about rejections letters to write a book about it.

But it would probably get rejected. 

Hey, Lana, move over. I’m not leaving the soda shop.