Not really related to suicide...
Has anyone ever been hit hard by the death of an almost-stranger?
I just tonight learned that the first editor I ever encountered —she wrote the first rejection I ever got, for the first manuscript I ever submitted— died a couple years ago. We never met, never had much to do with each other, but the kind words she so generously wrote to me, as a novice writer, have been perhaps the most important piece of guidance I ever received in my career. "The plot soon eclipses the character development." She was absolutely right, and it was a critique I have never allowed myself to forget.
I had submitted the manuscript unsolicited, "over the transom," and it made it through two out of three cuts at Del Rey —an astonishing feat, looking back at it. And she wrote a personal rejection letter, something I had never dreamed of getting (it was rare then, 27 years ago, and is unheard of now). Of course I still have her letter in my files, the first sheet in a very thick folder of rejections, but even without it I never forgot her name, and on a whim I tonight did a web search expecting to find her at the head of some imprint. Instead I found her obituary: knocked down by breast cancer at age 50.
I don't know why this is affecting me so deeply, but it sure is.
Vita brevis, ars longa, of course, and her ars will indeed be longa. But I wish her vita hadn't been so damned brevis.
Has anyone ever been hit hard by the death of an almost-stranger?
I just tonight learned that the first editor I ever encountered —she wrote the first rejection I ever got, for the first manuscript I ever submitted— died a couple years ago. We never met, never had much to do with each other, but the kind words she so generously wrote to me, as a novice writer, have been perhaps the most important piece of guidance I ever received in my career. "The plot soon eclipses the character development." She was absolutely right, and it was a critique I have never allowed myself to forget.
I had submitted the manuscript unsolicited, "over the transom," and it made it through two out of three cuts at Del Rey —an astonishing feat, looking back at it. And she wrote a personal rejection letter, something I had never dreamed of getting (it was rare then, 27 years ago, and is unheard of now). Of course I still have her letter in my files, the first sheet in a very thick folder of rejections, but even without it I never forgot her name, and on a whim I tonight did a web search expecting to find her at the head of some imprint. Instead I found her obituary: knocked down by breast cancer at age 50.
I don't know why this is affecting me so deeply, but it sure is.
Vita brevis, ars longa, of course, and her ars will indeed be longa. But I wish her vita hadn't been so damned brevis.
