The world ended early last December. You probably missed it. You were busy; it was the holidays.

                I’ll come back around to the world ending thing shortly.

                I've just celebrated—well, had—my 49^th birthday. Among other things, this means that I:

• Am as old as my father was in his last full year of life
• Can no longer ameliorate or ignore the various impertinences of my aging body (Two words: Bi. Fucking. Focals.) (Bite me, Microsoft Word word-counter.)
• Find it far more difficult to think of myself as a child prodigy.
  

(And also? I am having a harder time justifying my belief that bullet-point lists are hi-larious.) (Not to mention my love of the serial parenthetical.) (But I digress.) (Constantly.)

                Specifically, I'd always thought of myself as a child prodigy at writing. I published my first short story in a national magazine—the same one Stephen King had, a few years before, published his first short story in—when I was 17, I had an agent before I was out of my teens, and I wrote a novel when I was 21.  (It was small but quite pretentious, as I described it at the time, which, along with the publishing industry's longstanding and well-known bias against short people, may explain why it was never published.) (Or it could just have sucked.) And then, a few years later, with nothing to show for all my work but a few nice rejection letters from The New Yorker and The Atlantic, I put writing away with all my other childish things (roller skates, cigarettes, hope) and concentrated on my day job and my marriage and my kids and all that quotidian noise that is much louder than the little voice that tells you that you have to write or your soul will wither up and die by some small increment. Writing was just too much trouble for too little reward.

                Yeah. That went well.

                After the divorce, the vast and growing disenchantment with my line of work, the realization that raising kids, especially as a single dad, was not something I was naturally meant to do (due largely to my being a monster of vanity and self-regard, and despite my neurotically overdeveloped sense of responsibility), the thing that pushed me over the edge was tiny, the breakup of a very short (but very intense) relationship. I started writing again. I started a novel.

                And after a couple of thousand words, gave it up for two years. I might be a little bit of a moron.

                Two years zip by. Women are dated. Jobs are found and lost. Voices are made passive. Big giant donkey balls are sucked by life.

                (And oh, yeah, buildings were flown into and incredibly stupid wasteful wars were started, too.) (Hi, monster of vanity and self-regard here, remember?)

                At yet another low point, I started writing again—and petered out (who is this peter, anyway? And why can't he finish anything?) after a few more thousand words.  And then another start, and this time, mirabile dictu, the good advice of all my writing teachers and all the writing books I read overcame that bone-deep self-destructive stupidity of which I seem to have an overabundance, and I made writing a job: knock out 500 words, every day, good or bad. Because all those teachers and all those books had it right: some of the worst crap you'll write will come out of you as logorrhea, when you're most inspired, and you'll wrench some of your best work out of you like an ingrown wisdom tooth, painfully and without the benefit of drugs. (Well, most of the time.) Writing this way is hard; it's not like falling in love, it's like going to work. Being a first novelist—a first novelist in his 40s, no less—doesn't make it easier; if you're thinking of publication—as what writer isn't?—you will, every time you sit down at the keyboard, face the paralyzing fear that no one will ever read what you are writing. In my case, the only way I could deal with that fear was to think, I'm doing this for myself, and if it's published, great, and if not, well, fine. This was of course bullshit of the purest ray serene, but it got me through the year of writing, the two years of rewriting, the 10 different revisions it took until I felt ready to say, "Go, little booke..."  (The first time I ever saw that phrase, I wondered why Chaucer was writing to his bookie, then I understood: he was trying to get rid of him. I totally get that.) (Stupid slow horses.) (Stupid slow pretty horses.) I thought Freeze!  was pretty good. So did my first readers. So I started thinking about publication. (Well, not like I'd ever really stopped, not completely.) Yes, Emily, it is the auction of the mind of man; I hope my mind goes for a big-ass advance!

                Let me be clear: even in my wildest dreams I didn't think Freeze! would be a bestseller. I aspired to being a midlist writer, whose book, and then books, would sell steadily over time, if not spectacularly. I know now that this is unrealistic; driven by the giant conglomerates that own them, publishing houses aren't looking for steady sellers (not that they ever did, but less so now); they're looking for blockbusters, literary nuclear weapons that explode and change the climate for years to come. My book was a firecracker.

                Back in the day, you could send your unsolicited rubber-banded or written-on-a-roll-of-toilet-paper manuscript to Max Perkins and he would recognize your genius and offer you a giant advance, even if in every way other than your writing you were kind of a dumbass and a little shaky about personal hygiene. Now, however, in today's fast-paced world of the future, your unsolicited submission not only would not be read, it might well be blown up by the NYPD bomb squad. The only way to get your book read by a mass-market publisher is to get an agent, who will, in theory, get your masterpiece before an editor, who must then ask a committee—one of those things with four or more legs, two or more bellies and no brain—for its blessing to put your quirky little slightly lopsided freak of a novel before the public. Somehow knowing this did not daunt me; I'd had an agent before, in my youth, and was sure I could get another one. Because, as noted, I am a moron.

                So I read about how to craft the perfect pitch to an agent (writing a novel and writing a query are two vastly different sets of skills), about the things I can do to "deserve" to be published (among them: don't sleep with an agent; sure, now you tell me), and I wrote and rewrote my query letter until I was so weary of those couple of hundred words that I never wanted to see any of them, including "the" and "and," ever again. And I sent that puppy (you understand: it wasn't really a puppy, because that'd be inhumane) out, almost a hundred times, every day dreading seeing the SASE in the mailbox, occasionally being momentarily bouyed by an email request for a portion of the manuscript or for the whole manuscript, but never getting the response I was looking for: Yeah, I think we can sell this, and I want to represent you. I became obsessed with publication. I stopped being a writer; I was a salesman now. I've written hardly anything since finishing the novel. Each rejection—all 90-something of them—punched a tiny little perfectly-round chunk out of my soul.

                This past December, hundreds of editors, publicists and others in the publishing industry lost their jobs. And I lost the last shred of hope that I had for a mass-market publication. World—a world, if not the world, so, yeah, I lied back there at the start, sorry—ended. If there had been the tiniest chance for my little freak to see publication, it ended the week that my publishing industry friends—of which I have none—call “the week we all got shitcanned.” There’s a reason they’re in the publishing industry and not writers.

I will still try to get Freeze! published, perhaps by a small press, but even that is decidedly iffy, and I'm not holding my breath. I won't go the self-publish or PoD route; that's basically just non-publication that you have to pay for. (PoD publishers like PublishAmerica claim that they select their books carefully and edit them equally carefully, but I've yet to hear of anyone being rejected by them, and have read that manuscripts are basically unedited, and—most importantly—when was the last time you saw a book on Amazon that was a PublishAmerica imprint?) I'm sure there could be a better more-efficient system for getting books from writers to the audience, but what it might look like I haven't the faintest, and I probably won't be around to see it when or if it appears. I'll write another book—I have one in mind now—but Freeze!, while still thrashing about, is probably not going to be published.

                So look, let me make this clear: it is not a tragedy that no one will ever read my novel. I have my day job, I have my kids, Joss Whedon is fucking finally producing a new show, with Eliza Dushku yet, and oh yeah, I hear our new President is kind of cool too; things could be worse. Years ago, the City of Chicago in its godlike wisdom decided that cats had to have licenses and I fretted about my cat's lack of one (though not enough to, you know, actually get her a license) to my vet, who said something like, "There are kids starving in Jackson Park, so your cat's legal status is probably not going to concern the City all that much." That, and this, are decidedly First World problems. No one is bombing my neighborhood or rounding up my family. So I'm not asking that this matter to you, but it does matter to me. Because in a large sense, no matter what else tends in the other direction, I feel that I've failed. I don't think that that failure matters, except to me—and I can always look at our former unlamented Dear Leader in his spider hole in Crawford, TX and cheer myself that no matter how badly my life might go, it can never get that bad—and I don't think there's a Big Book where all one's victories and all one's defeats get totted up.  I understand how self-pitying all this sounds (why, yes, I would like some cheese with that whine, because mmmmmmcheesemmmmmm), and how like the lament of a writer who was just not good enough, which it may indeed be; I can't claim to be objective about my own novel.

                But, if it's okay with you, and even if it's not, I feel kind of like shit.