Failure and Determination

I recently participated in Nathan Bransford's Surprisingly Essential First Page contest, found here: http://nathanbransford.blogspot.com/2008/01/surprisingly-essential-first-page.html That was a difficult thing for me to do, but I had a current work in progress that I thought I would put out there and see what kind of reaction it got. It didn't get shredded by the few people that took on the task of trying to critique all the entries (there were nearly 700) but it didn't get any "wows" either. And I didn't win. Or even make the finalists list. I don't think I was even considered to be honest, and I can see why. The finalists really did have awesome first pages, especially the winner. Duh, right? Well, often I can find a way of saying, "Pshaw, my stuff is as good as that." Ha! Not this time. There were some good pages. The winner, who went by Heather!Ann! wrote a great first page that I definitely want to read more of. Nicely done Heather, if that's your real name. I was impressed.

There's nothing quite like a contest to make you feel inadequate. Well, not if you win the contest, but if you don't even place in a contest like this you begin to question yourself. If my first page wasn't good enough to be in the top ten of 675, then how is it going to be good enough to stand out in the thousands of stories that agents see every day? One person commented on the blog after the contest and stated that he wished he had never entered, because now his confidence was shaken. I can understand that. But does that mean I'm going to quit. Nope. I don't think I'm going to get any worse at this whole writing thing, at least I hope not, so what do I have to lose? I keep writing, I keep getting better, and maybe one day, that awesome first page will be mine. I still have plenty of stories to tell, and who knows which one of those might be the one that makes everyone stop and think, "Hmm. This might be the next big thing."

Writers often hear stories of how many times they were rejected before they finally got a book deal, just as entrepreneurs and inventors hear about how many time businesses and inventions failed before they finally succeeded. That's what I like to keep in the back of my mind. Every failure is another step toward success. There are those who succeed with their first novels and I congratulate them wholeheartedly. Jessica Verday, one of the members of the Querytracker.net community just signed with Rachel Vater, and she had the enviable displeasure of having to choose between four well-known agents that offered to represent her book. Wow! Is that better than paying your dues and getting rejected hundreds of times? I would say so! I also think Jessica paid her dues through her work, perfecting and polishing it until it was ready to go out. Alas, such fortune did not occur for me. I have learned much, and I do believe I am improving, so I will continue to tap away. I will wear keyboards out. I will watch laptops go obsolete, and maybe one day, it will happen to me, too. I just hope I'm still young enough to enjoy it.

Ninja and the Geek

Yes, ninjas. I have had a fascination with the whole idea of the ninja ever since I saw Berry Gordy's "The Last Dragon" back in the '80s. Sho 'nuff! Great movie, for as campy as it seems now. Taimak was really fantastic in it and at one point he dressed up in shinobi shozoku, or ninja uniform, and went to rescue his girlfriend from a group of thugs that were holding her captive. One guy armed only with some throwing spikes (shaken) and his fists taking on gangsters with guns! Man that would be awesome! Completely insane, as I learned from years of martial arts training, but, hey, it was a movie. And it was a lot of fun. Anyway, that inspired me and several buddies to spend the summer of 1985 skulking around our neighborhood in really cool black uniforms that we ordered from some martial arts catalog, throwing cheap shuriken at poor, innocent trees. Yeah, we were living the dream. Never once were we spotted taking out those trees either. You better believe it.

In the next few years I did a lot of research into the martial arts that the ninja studied and their methods, and as is usually the case with these sort of fantastical characters, once you start to learn about them, you find your illusions being shattered. The real ninjas were mercenaries, spies, and assassins. They handled the jobs that were too dirty or dishonorable for the nobles or elite samurai. There is a very famous story of a ninja who hid in an toilet for three days until the nobleman he was hired to assassinate came in to use it. I mean down inside the outhouse hole. You know there wasn't going to be a samurai doing that. Certainly not the glamorous image of a black-clad warrior throwing deadly blades and then disappearing into a puff of smoke. Though they were used, they were always looked down on by the upper class. They were thugs and gangsters, and though they had their place, they were not respected in the culture of the time. And worst of all, ninjas almost never wore the black uniforms that we all associate so clearly with ninjas! Their objective was to blend in and get close to their target, so they would most often dress as samurai or monks or peasants, whatever allowed them to assimilate with their surroundings. A peasant ninja? How boring, right? But when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Even when ninjas performed night raids, they often wore dark green or blue, even purple to blend with the natural colors of the night and the surroundings. A purple ninja?? I could hardly even stand the thought! So many of my preconceptions about what made the ninja so cool were disproved, and I found myself disenchanted with them. I studied the samurai for some time and found that though their code (bushido) was appealing, it turned out that many of them were just as bad as the ninja. So now what? Well, sadly, I gave up on them.

Then, after a long hiatus from the ninja obsession, broken only by the revival of GI Joe and Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, I played a game on PS2 called Ninja Gaiden, and you know what I decided? Who cares if the fantasy ninja never really existed? The fantasy is still fun and interesting. Yes, I know I'm probably too old to want to be a ninja, but I refuse to let it go. I probably won't be attending Ninja Academy this year, but I will always be a ninja in my mind. Who knows, I might even write a book. The world needs more ninjas.