Between a funeral and road trip, it’s been a very long, rough week. Until Friday, averaged five hours of sleep for too many nights in a row and logged three times more car miles than normal.<\/p>\n
Thinking out loud about the agent situation \u00e2\u20ac\u201c i.e. no news yet, twelve days left on the clock \u00e2\u20ac\u201c with The Wife, she shared a very good analogy. <\/p>\n
A man is lost at sea. Delirious, God appears in a vision, and promises a rescue if he trusts in signs.<\/p>\n
Moments later, a small fishing boat appears and the owner tosses out a preserver; the man declines. This was not the sign he expected. Two hours later a barge approaches, the crew also offers assistance. Again the man refuses. Surely God intended something grander than a battered dinghy and a rusty barge.<\/p>\n
A faithful man, he waits. Patiently he holds out for the “big one” and lets nothing distract him. <\/p>\n
Eventually, he drowns. Meeting God, he asks why the sign never materialized. The response: “I sent you two boats. What more did you expect?”<\/p>\n
When the wisdom of this sank in, I made a list of as many signs \u00e2\u20ac\u201c some small, many inconsequential \u00e2\u20ac\u201c that happened along the history of this manuscript. I’ve been a bit too fixated lately on a big sign, without recognizing the more subtle ones. Looking at them with different eyes, some are far from inconsequential.<\/p>\n
A very small extract:<\/p>\n
1)After months of frustration, spent 60 consecutive writing sessions in a row working on the same 50 pages. The only goal, write 50 pages that read like a book. Made a deal with myself. If I could write something that I truly felt was up to snuff, I would continue. If not, to quote Mark Twain, I’d go pound wood. Never tested my hammering skills.<\/p>\n
2)Handed a draft over to The Eight. From that, gathered good feedback and discovered a great way for field testing writing projects. One of The Eight punted on their reading duties, and enrolled a SWAT guy who became one of the weapons and technical consultants.<\/p>\n
3)First agent approached about the book agreed to review the entire manuscript, rather than dicker around with synopsis and twenty-five page extracts.<\/p>\n
And there’s others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Between a funeral and road trip, it’s been a very long, rough week. Until Friday, averaged five hours of sleep for too many nights in a row and logged three times more car miles than normal. Thinking out loud about the agent situation \u00e2\u20ac\u201c i.e. no news yet, twelve days left on the clock \u00e2\u20ac\u201c […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.samhilliard.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}