"Holly Lisle - Mugging The Muse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

Really? Think again.
Let me define the act of writing for you. As a writer, you're going to attempt to sell
the products of your mind to a world that doesn't care right now whether you breathe
or not. You're going to strip your soul naked and parade it in front of editors and
agents, publishers and eventually тАУ if you're persistent and lucky and talented тАУ
readers. You're going to say, тАЬWhat I carry around inside my head is so interesting,
so compelling, so riveting, that you, the agent, are going to want to risk your
reputation with editors for being a shrewd judge of talent to present the products of
my fancy to them; and that you, the editor, are going to want to put your career on the
line to fight to bring my imaginings to press; and that you, the publisher, are going to
want to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars presenting these imaginings to
a world that has never heard of me; and that you, the reader, are going to want to put
your hard-earned money on the line so that I can tell you a story that will give you
nothing tangible.тАЭ
While you are reaching out to editors, agents and publishers, you're going to fail.
Over and over and over again, you are going to send things out and they are going to
come back with impersonal rejection notices, with no notices at all, with the
occasional signed memo that тАЬThis isn't for us.тАЭ You are going to stare at your words
and sit in a darkened room and wonder, тАЬWhat the hell is the matter with me?тАЭ You
are going to take the rejections personally, are going to hurt, are going to bleed.
Agents will turn you down, editors will turn you down, places that don't even pay for
stories will turn you down.
So say you have courage. Say you go on, and you take one step more than you think
you can, and then one step more after that, and then one step more after that.
Eventually you will sell something. You'll get paid. You'll 'succeed.' Your story or
your book will enter the marketplace, and maybe you'll do well with it, or maybe you
won't. In either case, let's say you keep going. You sell again.
Even though you've succeeded, you're going to fail some more. You'll get hostile
reviews. Letters from people who don't think you can write. Comments from critics
questioning your talent, your vocation, your species. These will, if you're lucky,
come interspersed with glowing reviews, a nice sell-through, an offer from your
editor to buy the next thing you're doing тАУ but don't think for a minute that the good
things will offset the pain of the bad. They run in parallel courses, these good and
bad responses, and they don't touch each other's worlds at all. I'm always delighted
by the good reviews, always hurt by the bad ones.

HOLLY LISLE
 13
MUGGING THE MUSE: WRITING FICTION FOR LOVE AND MONEY

But go on. You take another few steps, and these seem easier. You do more books,
find an audience, settle into a flow. You discover one of the ugly facts of success тАУ
that there are people who you thought were your friends who were only your friends
when you were failing. Now that you have, in their eyes, reached success, you have
become the enemy. A target. They want to see you fall down, because when you are
standing, you make them feel their own failures more.

You leave the false friends behind. You keep writing, keep selling, get fan mail,
generate some nice reviews, make guest appearances at conventions and seminars,
become (as much as any writer ever does) a celebrity in your field. And somewhere