KMS Blog

An interesting year, to say the least.  The hard work and sacrifice that go into creating art is an intense experience.  To those of us on the outside of this process, it can look romantic, even a wonderful expression of something that so many of us attempt at some point in our lives. We say, "Wow, that's great!  It must really be rewarding..."  And it is, for certain.  But the view from within can be far more complicated and harsh, and the psychological maneuvering necessary to stubbornly pursue your artistic dreams, at the expense of other more practical realities, can create a casualty list of its own.  It can certainly create its own demons.  The photos here, taken this past summer ('08) are of the nearly 300 rejection letters I masochistically  kept before I finally got published. 

But having gotten published, after over a decade of trying and many hundreds of rejection letters, has been an experience that is difficult to describe.  It has freed up a defiant part of me, a defiant part that was largely the part of myself from which motivation sprung.  Now I have a publisher, and anything I write can at least get into print, for the first time in my life.  And that prospect is, strangely, terrifying.  So the work I am doing now is letting go of this bare-knuckled and intensive “writer” who was willing to sacrifice so much to get published — letting that part of myself go, and finding a more mature way to express it.

If nothing else, it should make a good story :-)