FRONTLINE

People will try to tell you that all the great opportunities have been snapped up. In reality, the world changes every second, blowing new opportunities in all directions, including yours. —Ken Hakuta

News from the publishing front is staggering. The war is lost before I begin. I know that going in. I go in anyway. Some days, I don’t care what the situation is. After all, all I ever wanted to do was write.

There are those other days. Those days with little hope, less encouragement. The news, RWA, writer’s magazines is full of rotten news about mergers, buy-outs, publishing houses folding or bookstores going under. And there certainly isn’t anything positive coming out of the financial news or Washington. Casualties litter the path. Just keeping track of where to send a manuscript is a daunting full time job.

I’ve trudged through the battlefield for many years, more years than I care to reflect on. The landscape, oftentimes, looks barren, scarred, even abandoned, but not but me.

There will be more wars, more scrimmages and all out battles. I’ll watch and listen to the news. Some writers will be wounded; some will be lost. A great many writers will give up—surrender.

I’ve felt like surrendering often, but— I won’t. I’ll struggle on. I’ll gather my weapons, sharpen my skills, firm my resolve. I’ll be a holdout. I’ll keep writing the books I was born to write.

It doesn’t seem fair. Celebrities get book deals; flavor of the month books top the New York Times bestseller list. Published seem unwilling or unable to take risk. The bottom line rules.

But—as much bad new I hear—there are war heroes—the author who keeps winning battles or new recruits who take the hill. They’re just like me, struggling through with hopes and dreams tucked close in their heart. They didn’t give up, not even when the struggle seemed hopeless. The cream does rise to the top. No amount of homogenizing will change that.

When the VCR’s first showed up, there were warnings and worries that they would bring the demise of movie theaters. Instead, there are more and bigger theaters than before. In my mother’s time, there were predictions that once movies became popular, reading would decrease sharply. That didn’t happen. The same prediction was bandied around with the advent of the TV. Yet, more people read than ever before.

We all hear what will happen as the e-reader becomes more popular—the end of hard-cop books. Change is simple that—change. Or what I like to think of as opportunities. I think it will be thus with the e-reader. I think content will become valuable. I write content. Writers write content.

The future is uncertain, simple that. It always has been. I think it means good things, opportunities. Do we lose things?—yes, but we gain far more. Would you really like to go back to outhouses? Not me. I think embracing the changes, figuring out how to work them to my advantage is what’s called for.

The future holds new inventions, things we can’t even imagine. There will be new directions, new fads. E-books today; who knows what tomorrow. I intend to keep reading, writing and growing. I intend to be ready.