One-Book Wonder

Writing used to be sitting down at a typewriter, not a "keyboard", having an idea and putting it down to paper. The idea, time and determination sometimes led to a publisher taking up your "book" via an agent and publishing it. These days that is but a dream. In the first place, it's all too easy to be a "writer". I know because I am among the lost souls with manuscripts piling up. Where does one find an agent and then a publisher? In Dream Land, unless you have something written about a far-away desert  fraught with political strife, a lot of guns and narrow escapes. Exceptions are genre mavens who do romance, mystery or chicken soup. Weird diets, recipe books and how-tos come next. The latter two groups are not what I would call writing but I am no expert. Writing comes from the heart and creative mind, not hey-what's-popular-that-will-sell penners. So you bend over your keyboard and write it out anyway knowing that it is a for-my-eyes-only kind of project. It satisfies and as the pages pile up or the file fills on the desk top, you know that one day it will all disappear into cyberspace and who cares. At least you have purged. But, and these are mostly always big buts, there is the odd true writer who is discovered and who makes it onto the market. As a friend of mine, slightly more cynical than I, once remarked, when it sells to all of the relatives and friends, that's the end of the book. It's true unless the book "catches on". Who can predict the market? No one. It is a fickle thing that market. Only those who have become well known make money at the writing game, so don't quit your day job. Not true? Add up the hours one puts in on a book and even at the latest dead-end job rate, it doesn't pay. But it does make writers happy and gives us all something to talk about over a glass of wine or cup of non-black tea or mugged coffee. The conversation runs to authors who are well-known and quite awful but get away with having a name, thus selling. There is one dreadful writer, not King who is a superior writer but onagain offagain, but another best seller whose writing is obviously done by more than one. He has a plot and gurgles it down on paper and has his "ghost" fill in the descriptive passages. The gambit is obvious. And annoying. The two styles are vastly different, but he sells. He is genre. No one wants to read about an escape from the clutches of a killer through a woodland area to suffer through a lengthy page or two about what kinds of trees there are in the scene and their botanical history.  Get on with the chase and never mind that you don't have your nice five hundred pages of book to sell at a big ticket price. Ahhh, what happened to the books tossed out there that were mostly bad but a few were accidentally exciting to discover. The audience chose them, not some publisher whose palm was gold-laced with big star names to emblazon on covers of their latest grocery market Best Sellers shelf. Keep on hammering away on your keyboards, darlings, you never know. You may not become a billionaire, but you could  be the next One-Book Wonder.