So, ever think of publishing? Good for you!
        So, ever get published? Aw, too bad!
        Well, if the world isn't eager to publish what you have written, what can you do? There are "vanity" presses that will produce your book for an exorbitant price and, despite their promises, do almost nothing to advertise or otherwise get your work sold. I know. Been there. Got cheated. Whimpered.
        We often have to admit, in the dark, sleepless nights that seem to plague the creative, that what we offer is a lousy business deal for a publisher. He must sell a lot of copies of your work to get back his initial expenses. He might even have given you an advance, thereby increasing the number of copies he must sell. Friends in the real publishing business have told me that they must look at hundreds of manuscripts a year to select the ten or twenty that will do well enough to carry their share of the overhead. Now, is yours one of the top ten? Look at the New York Times lists, or others, and see where you'd put your pet.
        Those of you who have works 'way better than the Times lists, stop reading. The rest of you (us) will have admit that we face toil years of toils and swallow years of disappointment. For some (many) the answer is, not that we can't write, but that we aren't economically useful. Or we prefer to write fiction, which doesn't sell nearly as well as the "As told to" or "How to" non-fiction. (Look at Oprah's lists.)
        That's the "Aw shucks!" part of writing. My own story is typical, I think. I had written three superb novels and started six more. These I hawked around to fifty or so publishers, some with, some without agents. Once I even paid a well-known publisher to provide me with a detailed critique. It was revelatory. I was doing the writing chore well, getting the mechanics and grammar and plot structure and characterizations almost flawlessly.
        What was wrong, then? The answer, revealed after some digging and nagging, was that the novels were too long and of too narrow an interest. In other words, not the sort that would turn a profit.
        So as to have something to show and peddle locally, I had the finished ones assembled into books at my expense, (fortunately by a chap who owed me a favor). They're still too long and too narrow. After sending some to my family and friends, I still had enough left to hawk at book fairs and bazaars. All told, I sold about thirty. Then I did what I should have done earlier. I took

 off a year and studied what was wrong that was fixable and what was not. I finally had to conclude that none of the three were salvageable at all. So it goes. (Whimper!)
        Now I started to write short stuff. Short stories and essays. Surprise! I could do that. I managed to sell about fifty stories and essays and one short novelette. In that interval I also placed (not sold) another three hundred short stories in "small press" magazines, which don't pay but have at least a modest circulation. I had learned that I wasn't a miler, but a sprinter.
        Another outlet I found was writing articles for an encyclopedia publisher. That pays very well, indeed, but it's not creation. Running low on "fresh" ideas, I started a magazine, then another, then another. By printing forty-some pages of other folks' work, I could justify sneaking in a few of my own. It's dishonest, but when you're getting paid about a negative half-dollar an hour to put the thing together so others can see their work in print, you do feel some absolution.
        So, now what? Since I am living in the fourth quarter of a century of life, I have to make sure that the descendants know all I want them to know. So, I started a bio, much dealing with life in general in my nonage. The finished two pieces total seven hundred pages, but I want my great-grandkids to know how it was in the 1930s and 1940s, etc. They'll never get that from TV or Hollywood. In addition, I write, write, write. I am still hacking at the unfinished novels and have, in a weak moment, started another. That's a common trap. One may get almost through a novel only to find it stalled. Instead of working on it, which takes some self-discipline, one is tempted to charge off on a new one.
        So, many mistakes. Too-long, too narrow, to warrant the expense of publishing as books, or too trivial for any serious magazine, or abandoned because the "fever" broke, or general laziness. Chuck in a bit of vicarious success in publishing other people's works. Add the refusal to accept the fact that writing for the almost-good-enough is, like a yacht, just a hole to dump money into.
        Would I do it again? All of it? Probably not. Just the dumb parts? Probably. But there is no hobby like writing for getting thrills without falling off horsies or stepping out of perfectly good airplanes aloft.
        This is supposed to be a column in a magazine touted as "A Writer's Workshop by Mail." Well, I suppose it fits that description. But, as the saying goes, "Do as I say, not as I do (have done)."