By Janine Mick Wills
Writing is often a lonely and thankless job filled with more rejection than acceptance. So why do I keep at it?
After my 300th rejection, I asked my non-writing friend if I should continue writing (And yes, I have a friend who doesn’t write. Someone needs to keep me grounded).
“Keep your day job,” she said.
“But I want to get paid to write, so I can stay home in my jammies all day.”
“At least you have job security where you work now. Trying to get paid to write is as improbable as Donald Trump being reelected.”
I couldn’t argue with her logic, but my passion for writing began before I graduated from training pants. My mother insisted I spelled out “I want to be a writer when I grow up” with my wooden blocks. Maybe I got my desire to write fiction from her.
I loved English and creative writing all through school. I had a crush on my high school English teacher. It didn’t matter he was homely as a mud fence twice torn down and happily married with six kids. He once said I had writing chops. When I figured he wasn’t referring to last night’s dinner, I fell head-over-heels in love with him.
But when I realized Mr. K wasn’t going to leave his wife and kids for me, I married my “hunk-a-hunk-of-burning-love” high school sweetheart . This detour kicked my writing to the waiting curbside. For the next ten years, I followed Jeff around the country, courtesy of Uncle Sam and the U.S. Air Force. The only creative things I produced were three crumb snatchers, I mean, children.
But after the kids were safely ensconced in school, I took pen back in hand and wrote my first book “Is There Anything Harder than Raising Teens: Other than Finding a Parking Space at the Mall the Day after Thanksgiving” (Yeah. The title needed work).
When I told my fourteen-year-old daughter Jennifer that I was writing about her and her older brother, she rolled her eyes and moaned, “You won’t quit until I’m completely ruined, will you, Mother?”
“Now, Sweetie, when I get published and appear on the New York Times Best Seller list, you will thank me.”
“Yeah, right. And Aeropastle is just another clothing store.”
She slammed her bedroom door with such force that her stuffed animals cringed. She’s slammed that door so many times it’s filed for Workman’s Comp.
I didn’t tell my oldest child Jason that I was writing a book about raising teenagers. My life insurance premiums weren’t paid up.
As for my youngest, Jared, his enthusiasm for my tell-all tome held no bounds. Jared wouldn’t be a teenager until November and still thought I could do no wrong. If only he had stayed that age. The glorious time between “I love you, Mom” and “Would you please walk, not four steps behind me, Mom, but four states behind me?” Where’s Peter Pan when ya need him?
So, why do I keep writing? It’s because I am a writer, and a writer’s gotta write like a chicken’s gotta swim. I mean a duck’s gotta swim. Freudian slip there. But I’ll take a Freudian slip over a rejection slip any day. Wouldn’t you?
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