Let me tell you a story.<\/p>\n
This may ramble a bit because it goes both into the ancient past (well, my<\/i> ancient past) and into places far away. But it begins with Ms Lynn Shepherd, she of the infamous “JK Rowling should get out of the way so no-talent hacks like me have a chance,”<\/a> HuffPo journalistic fart.<\/p>\n I never told you, but for a very short time, I was a magazine editor. I mean a very<\/i> short time. We quickly ran out of ways to praise the airline whose magazine it was and the CEO lost interest.<\/p>\n But in the moments it lived, it took fiction submissions. And paid decently for them. Even then, fiction was dying out in magazines. Had been for decades. The golden days with golden pays of the 1920s-40s were long gone. Nobody wanted made-up stuff anymore. They wanted relevance<\/i>. But we took fiction submissions.<\/p>\n Boy, did we ever. After our birth announcement appeared in a major writers’-market magazine, we took nothin’ but. Two-foot-tall heaps of it.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n That stuff broke my heart. It freakin’ broke my heart in ways I’ll never forget.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ninety-seven percent of everthing that came in was unalloyed crap. I didn’t even have to finish the first paragraph to tell that the person who created it should be ordered to carefully step away from the keyboard before somebody gets hurt.<\/p>\n Something less than one percent was fabulous. I wanted to hug the authors of these stories. I wanted to dance around the room. I wanted to be in the places they described (or not, depending on how they described them).<\/p>\n But that was a problem, because even one percent was more than we could buy. So I’d write long letters, pouring my heart out, telling the authors how wonderful their work was, but. And I knew knew exactly how they’d feel, getting those notes. Heartbreaking.<\/p>\n Then there was that final two percent. These stories and their authors … had something. It was there. You could feel it. But you could feel it only as a distant drumbeat under the sense of something missing. Characters almost came to life, but couldn’t quite<\/i> escape being stereotypes. Some brilliant premise would be waiting in the first paragraph … but would take a wrong turn on page 6. And break my heart.<\/p>\n Even though I was a snotty little b***h in those days who would sometimes read the worst stories aloud to my boss and office mates in contempt, even though I envied the great ones even as I loved them, I wanted to help<\/i> those few in-betweeners. I wanted to reach them and teach them and help them arise from the pods and cells of their own limitations.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n As an aside, I’ll say before I forget that Ms Shepherd’s writing (now that I’ve taken a quick peek) falls into that two percent. The bottom of that two percent. But still — a person who had “something there” if she possessed the humility, the hard work, and perhaps a dose of the good luck to find it.<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n A long diversion<\/b><\/p>\n This isn’t actually a diversion; it’s just going to feel like one. It’s part of the heart of the story, though. Really. So trust me and come along. We’ll get where we’re supposed to go. I promise.<\/i><\/p>\n Shortly before all this, I had gone to Ireland. Three weeks. Solo trip. Driving a backwards car down backwards roads. In the middle of nowhere.<\/p>\n I’d hoped to find my roots. I’d always thought I wanted to travel. I found nothing — except a growing conviction that I really, truly hated to travel.<\/p>\n Before I even got on the endless flight from San Francisco to London (and then onward to Shannon, never mind that it’s going backwards<\/i>), some married guy had spotted the lone female adventurer and was oozing all over me.<\/p>\n My hotel in London had a radiator you could remove from the wall and carry across the room because it wasn’t attached to anything. The plumbing didn’t work. It didn’t work in spectacular fashion, actually.<\/p>\n In Ireland, the friendly ever-smiling Irish of the brochures were shy and silent. The hosts at my B&Bs were strange or rude and ran establishments that I later learned met none of the standards of the Bord Failte<\/i> (I have to check that spelling), the Board of Welcomes. Gory Catholic pictures (not to mention images of John Kennedy) glared down at me from the bedroom walls. Sheets and blankets were damp and rooms odorous with moisture.<\/p>\n I have to mention the famous archaeological sites, though after that I promise to get on with it, I really do. But the famous archaeological sites were the “highlight” of the debacle. I’d drive hours<\/i> into the middle of nowhere to see the site of some famous battle or the finding of some national treasure. Only to find a cowfield and a sign that said something like, “If you were an archaeologist, you’d recognize instantly and be very impressed that the slight muddy rise Bossy is standing on over there is the site of a Pre-Medievalist, Proto-post-modernist, Druidic, Arthurian, Anglo-Saxon-pre-Norman hill fort.”<\/p>\n What can I say? Ireland was a very poor country. And I was a California girl used to museums and monuments worthy of the name. (By golly, if one of our famous Missions had had the nerve to fall down, we’d have rebuilt it. Out of concrete.) <\/p>\n I was not impressed.<\/p>\n Sometimes I wouldn’t make it to the famous archaeological sites at all. And there I resume my story. (Or rather, resume this particular apparent diversion. Which actually is<\/i> the story. But doesn’t look like it at the moment. Are you following me?)<\/p>\n —–<\/p>\n In these days before the “Celtic Tiger” and eventual EU bailouts, young men in rural Ireland had nothing to do. Leaving was still the best option. The smart ones, the ones with spark, got out.<\/p>\n The rest stayed, drank, and got up to pranks. A favorite prank, for reasons my feeble brain still fails to grasp, was turning the road signs around. So the unwary would think they were going to Kilkenny and would end up on a one-lane (and when I say one lane, I mean one — not one in each direction) gravel path in the middle of nowhere, hemmed in by stone walls so you couldn’t even turn around.<\/p>\n And besides that, there’d be herd of sheep in front of you.<\/p>\n Well, one day I fell for it. I drove hours into nowhereness.<\/p>\n I was spared the one-lane track this time, but instead of ending up where I was trying to get, I ended up in …<\/p>\n Well, I’m not going to tell you that. Not one of you would have heard of it, unless you’d grown up in the neighborhood.<\/p>\n