Gratitude

As a writer, it’s easy to fall into the habit of focus­ing on what’s miss­ing, on the goals you fail to accom­plish, and to take for grant­ed the vic­to­ries you do have.

In my own case, I’m in the mid­dle of a major vic­to­ry. My char­ac­ters of Dako­ta and Svet­lana are mak­ing it pos­si­ble for my wife and me to go to a place I’ve dreamed of for over twen­ty years. I’ve want­ed to go there since I was 19 and read Hemingway’s A Move­able Feast. The place is Paris.

We leave in one week.

 

 

It was always a ques­tion of time and mon­ey. When we had flex­i­ble jobs that gave us the time, we didn’t have the mon­ey for such a trip. When we had the mon­ey, we couldn’t get the time off from work (we were too busy earn­ing said mon­ey).

Final­ly, this year, time and mon­ey came togeth­er. I write full-time, so my sched­ule is wide-open. Alexas works for a ter­rif­ic employer—Vassar College—that let her take a full two weeks off. And we have the money—from mas­sive sales of A Real Piece of Work back in Feb­ru­ary and March. (Thank you, read­ers!)

 

 

Of course we’ll be see­ing all of the major sights (e.g., Notre Dame, the Lou­vre, Ver­sailles, etc.), but we’re also going to spend a lot of time sim­ply walk­ing the streets and tak­ing in the real Paris. To this end, we’re stay­ing in an apart­ment in the cen­tral­ly locat­ed Latin Quar­ter.

But this entry isn’t about the specifics of our trip. It’s about grat­i­tude. My best friend helped me real­ize this as we drove to Sarato­ga the oth­er day to play the ponies.

 

 

When I com­plained about the recent slow sales, the dif­fi­cul­ties of find­ing a new lit­er­ary agent, and the rejec­tions I’ve received from mag­a­zines and lit­er­ary jour­nals for my short sto­ries, he was quick to remind me that I am one of very few writ­ers who has actu­al­ly earned sig­nif­i­cant mon­ey from his own writing—enough that my wife and I can go to Paris com­fort­ably for two weeks (not a cheap propo­si­tion).

He fur­ther point­ed out that if I always look at what I don’t get, at the goal I don’t reach, I’ll miss out on the many good things I do get in the present, and the trip to Paris is one of them.

 

 

So is com­plete free­dom of time; I report to no one. So is com­plete free­dom of sub­ject mat­ter; I write what­ev­er I want to write. So are my health and Alexas’s health, my fam­i­ly and friends, and a grow­ing read­er­ship.

He was right, and I’m tru­ly grate­ful for all of it.

 

 

Yes, I hope this will be the year that I get one of my sto­ries into a major mag­a­zine or lit­er­ary jour­nal. Yes, I hope the Dako­ta Stevens Mys­tery Series (excuse the brand­ing) will be picked up by a tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­er so I can sign copies in book­stores next Decem­ber. And yes, I hope I’ll return from Paris with enough mate­r­i­al for two books and a dozen sto­ries.

But in the mean­time, I’m deter­mined to be grate­ful for things like this trip, and to enjoy every moment of them.

 

 

Thank you again, Dear Read­er, for help­ing to make this trip pos­si­ble.

By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.

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