Happy Tuesday-After-Superbowl! What a day!
So, in allusion to the title: the other day I was trying to send an email (a difficult task in this day and age) and my fool self typed in .caom instead of .com. Needless to say, the email bounced back. Usually I don’t read the server response to an email that bounced, but for whatever reason I read this one, and this is what it said:
“Technical details of permanent failure:
DNS Error: Address resolution of yahoo.caom. failed: Domain name not found
Techno-babble blah blah blah”
I got really, really hung up on that first line.
“Permanent failure”
I struggle against the concept of permanent failure, probably because failure to me always means coming back and trying again in a different way. Failure is impetus for harder work, and certainly isn’t permanent. If anything, failure is transitory.
Now, I do understand that for this singular email, failure is permanent. There’s nothing it can do to not fail. Poor little guy. Despite that reality, the language got me thinking.
I’m in the process of querying at the moment, which means I’m getting rejection letters. That’s okay by me in and of itself, because it means people are actually receiving my queries. I’m just glad that the concept of permanent failure does not apply to the query process (or any other human process). Even trying to imagine a world like that defeats my feeble mind. It would be the ultimate dystopia: a place where you only had one shot to do anything… My strategy has been to send out two query letter for each rejection letter I receive. Not the same letter, mind you! That would be Einstein’s definition of insanity.
In any case, landing an agent, publishing, and that sort of hooplah is an eventuality for me, not a question. It may not happen this year, hell, maybe not even for this book, but it will happen.
And that’s because a single mass-less point on a continuum is only permanent if you stay in the same place.
Mountains!
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