Into the Fire

In baseball a shutout is a major accomplishment. Not necessarily a no-hitter, but it could be. A shutout means the pitcher held the opposing team to no score. Nine innings without anyone crossing home plate. Most shutouts don’t involve a lot of hits. Because in the major leagues if you string a couple of hits together, you’ll at least score one run. So it’s quite a feat when you can prevent the other team from scoring at all.

In spite of all the books on all the shelves in all the stores, there are a tremendous number of shutouts in publishing. Writers keep writing. Agents/editors/publishers keep rejecting. Some writing merits the rejections. Others not.

The reasons for not getting “a hit” in publishing are as varied as the screwball pitches a batter faces in the big leagues. We’ve discussed the meaningless platitudes offered by professionals in the industry, but there’s always a book published which destroys their credibility. A head-scratcher. The only ones who are apparently surprised when the book tanks are those who published it.

But most lies have some basis in truth or they wouldn’t be easy to sell. So the reason the platitudes are taken seriously is because of those books which are beauties, which speak words which captivate or coerce or deliver or intrigue. These are the works of art which all of the publishing world wishes were “the norm”. But in fact they are not. And everyone knows this, but in order to spur writers on to reconsider what they’re turning in as their finished works of art, they claim the bar is set so high that only the highest leapers can tackle getting up to it, let alone over it. And for the most part they pull off their little ruse because of the elite few who know how thin the air is at the top, how it feels to hit a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth with the score at zero-zero.

If you’re shut out of royalty publishing at present, if the curve balls have you second guessing what you’ve written, if the high fast balls ring like a strike against your work, or if you missed a fat one right down the middle of the plate when someone asked for a “full” and then rejected it, go sit down. And get ready for your next at bat.

Why am I talking baseball in the near winter? No idea. I guess it’s the word shutout. It’s how I feel in the publishing industry. The problem is I’m not all that broken up about it. I feel more like the pitcher than the batter. I believe in my work, so I’ll keep writing what I write for the simple reason that it’s what I like to read. These are the stories I must tell. So I will. Shut out or no shutout.

Father, you welcome everyone to your splendid dwelling. You even provided the way to gain entrance. The only way to get shut out is to deny the reality of Jesus and what He did for us all. Thank you, Lord. You go before me, you have a plan, you are trustworthy. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.