Addendum to previ...awww, shit

I just had to press my luck, didn't I? I just had to keep piddlin' around on the internet after writing a perfectly nice blog post about how emo-tastic I am. I just had to load up Booksquare and then I just had to go read this post on Booksquare and then I just had to go on from there and read the article that was linked to from Booksquare and you know what? You know what?

Hell. Beats me. Here's a quote from the article.

Kaavya Viswanathan is set on becoming an investment banker when she graduates from Harvard University in 2008, but a phone call that the 17-year-old freshman received from a literary agent might just cause a change in her plans.

The agent, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh of the William Morris Agency, told the Franklin Hills, N.J.-born Ms. Viswanathan that Little Brown & Company, one of the oldest and most prestigious American publishers - now part of the Time Warner Group - agreed to a two-book deal with the teenager. The sum approached $500,000, a staggering amount for an unpublished writer, let alone someone who'd barely left home for college.

You see what's so...oh, so grr-ighteous about this, is, whenever I get a rejection letter in the mail--which I did, yesterday, though it wasn't my fault: the lit mag in question was going out of business, so, you really can't take that personally--I chalk it up, no, not to the fact that I'm a crap-tastic writer, no. I chalk it up to the fact that I'm young. I'm young and that means I don't know anything and therefore I shouldn't get published. I'm not worthy of publication yet. So I don't see it as a big deal or anything, because, you know, I'm young.

Which of course begs the question of, how will I feel when, seven, ten years from now, wife and mortgage and 2.3 kids in tow, how will I feel when I'm no longer young and publications are still beating me off with sticks. It's a question I care not to consider.

Usually.

But, oh, now. Now! Now that I've read this article! On the Internet! Now! Oh, piddle, me. I'm young and I'm old and. Oh, oh...

I desperately need to go play the saddest round of hop-scotch.

(We'll just go ahead and neatly purge all memories from our mind of the fact that our first rejection letter for our first novel's query letter came from the William Morris Agency. Really, no good can come of such memories in dark days like these.)