Whimsical Wednesday

I wish I could take the credit for this one, but alas, I can't. I found this little gem in an e-mail I printed off over 10 years ago. Why yes, I am a pack rat. Your point?

Ahem. On to the whimsy. :-)


Hamlet’s Soliloquy for Writers

To write, or not to write: that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The rejections of outrageous editors,
Only to resubmit, And by resubmitting end them?
To die upon rejection: to sleep fitfully, awaiting the next;
No more; and by an acceptance letter, to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That acceptance is heir to, ‘tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, and are published.
It must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long awaiting ‘discovery’;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of editors,
The sharp pencil, the checkmark in the column “Does not meet our needs at this time”,
The pangs of waiting, the mail’s delay,
The insolence of assistants and the polite responses and suggestions.
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his publication make
With a major publisher? Who would a million editors bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary pen,
But that the dread of something awaited forever,
The undiscover’d book tour from which
No traveler returns, puzzles the writer
And makes us rather not submit
Than send our pet projects to those that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of smudged ink
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of rewrites,
And enterprises of great worth and promise
Are shoved in a drawer or recorded to a disk
And lose the name of action.—Soft you now!
The fair Writer! Muse, in thy orisons
Be all my submissions and publications remember’d.

By Jo Loving Gann, 1999