Do you ever have feelings of impending doom?

I do, quite often.

I can't put my finger on the exact source of this feeling - it's more of a quiet sense of unease, as if I can sense the approaching tidal wave without knowing how high it will be or what direction it will come from. I think it has something to do with not having a Plan B. It's important to have a Plan B these days because so many Plan A's are in jeopardy. I'm better positioned than most but still, when I see a homeless person I think, "There but for the grace of God go I."

Never have I felt such displacement. For most of my adult life Plan A was to write novels - not just write them but sell them for living money. I followed what I thought was a reasonable path to that goal: write short stories while honing my skills, sell them professionally, develop name recognition with editors, then graduate to the longer form.

But something happened along the way. I lost confidence. The form fell out of favor.

Only now have I begun to understand I was never as good as I thought I was. Oh, I was good - actually better than I had any right. But I wasn't smart. I never worked the system the way a writer trying to break into the marketplace should work the system. For instance, at a convention I shared breakfast with an editor at Bantam Books. I had her all to myself. She asked me point blank, "What are you working on?" Instead of pitching the three or four book ideas swimming in my head I told her the truth: I was still putzing around with short stories and novelettes.

Dumb.

I once shared a cab with an editor from Scholastic - you know, the folks who publish Harry Potter. She asked if I had an agent. Instead of telling her no, the two books I'd written were work-for-hire but I was looking for an agent to represent my original material, I responded with a lame mea culpa that my books were too nichified for the mass market. I could see the knowing acknowledgement in her eyes: This guy is an amateur.

Dumb dumb dumb.

I started working on my first independent book-length work in the late '90s. I'm about 34,000 words into it. I go back and read what I've written and it's not bad. It starts kinda slow but then so did Stephen King's "'Salem's Lot" and that book achieved best-seller status. Of course that was in 1975. This is 2009. Would a slow-starter like "'Salem's Lot" sell today?

That's when I began to question the marketplace. Books, it seemed, were suffering from the same malaise as newspapers as people stopped reading, saw their discretionary time nibbled away by the web and videogames, and demanded instant gratification. Would anybody have the patience to read a novel where the first 34,000 words consisted of character introduction and scene setting?

That's when I began to wonder if the novel, as an art form, were going the way of poetry and theatre. I had always centered my aspirations on the mass market. I was never a literary fashionista, although I did try to imbue my work with qualities that would nourish the body and soul, like a good steak marinated in a costly wine. I believed writers like Stephen King, Dennis Etchison and Neal Stephenson were given a bad rap by the literary snobs who appeared to believe that if a book were popular it couldn't possibly be worthy of their attention. I wonder how they explain writers like Joyce Carol Oates, Joseph Heller and Alice Siebold?

I found it difficult to go on. I couldn't envision spending a year of my life producing a work of fiction that would be turned down by agents because it wasn't marketable, or rejected by an editor because it lacked fire and explosions on the first page. The thought of endless rewrite demands made me shiver in my office chair - I'd gone that route through my work-for-hire experiences and it sucked the fun out of the process. What began as a cherished idea became a demoralizing exercise in product creation. While I understand and appreciate the financial risk a publishing house takes on by accepting a book, I didn't want to hand over the keys to my fictional racecar to somebody who was chiefly motivated by dollar signs.

Maybe that's the latest and newest way I've been dumb.

Books are still selling, though they lack the cachet of my youth. Walk into a bookstore and you still see people milling about the aisles, though the ratio of gray hair to pierced nostrils is about 10 to one. Independent bookstores have taken a hit and even the chains are suffering. While you hear a great number of people professing their loyalty to books, that loyalty has not translated into sales that can sustain a diverse body of creators. The numbers may be equivalent to yesteryear but the reality is megasellers like John Grisham and Janet Evanovich occupy the biggest chunk of the sales pie. New writers fill a big part of the remainder. The mid-list writer - the category to which I might have belonged - has suffered greatly.

Still, I wonder if it's worth my while to dust off Plan A. Plan B has worked for many years - support myself with a job that, while it may not be my life's dream at least it pays the bills. But Plan A is where I'd rather be.

Plan A is the only plan that, when I stand back and consider it, I see what Yeats described as that "roseate glow." While it is fraught with ugly realities of selling and marketplace demands it is also the plan that offers any degree of hope. Such a trite and hackneyed expression these days, that word "hope." It has been worked to death by the marketing departments of a thousand corporations.

Yet the antidote for doom is hope.

I would like to hope again.