MARK TWAIN:
An open letter to
Literary Agents; no ordinary memoir
by
Anthonystjoserph
In a recent query letter that I am sending
out to the elusive animal titled the ‘Literary Agent’, I allude to myself as
someone equivalent to Mark Twain and I am sure that some of these Literary
Agents in their small minds say to themselves, ‘how dare he’, or they may just
suffer a believable and understandable physical jolt and fall out of their
chairs laughing. But I must say that it
is a small mind that would think that the world only has one Mark Twain. I make reference to the ‘fact’ in my query
letter that when Mark Twain was born, Haley’s Comet passed through Earth’s
atmosphere and then exactly seventy six years later in the week of Haley’s
Comet’s return, he died. In certain
writer’s lives, there are mystical occurrences that stop them in their tracks
and force them to do the bidding of the Universe, or God as some put it, and
tell the stories they are deigned to tell.
I am one of those writers and it is a difficult path indeed for I never
wanted to be a writer.
I will say that I always extremely loved
and love sharing true and unbelievable stories that always seem to happen to me
as well as loved others loving to hear my stories. I also have always been counseled by these
listeners since I was an adolescent to pursue telling these stories and that
one day I would be this and I would be that.
My First Sergeant in the Army said to me upon leaving the Army’s service,
“I want to see you on magazine covers one day!”
I laughed and barely consumed his admiration and others encouraging
thoughts throughout my life for I only knew one thing, “I was on a mission and
a search to find out why, who, and what was causing all of these mysterious
things that I was seeing and why, who, and what was causing all of these things
to happen.
You see, when you live a life like Mark
Twain and it seems that your life and death have more importance than anything
that you can possibly imagine, you initially try and deny it. A sane person has to deny it. You say to yourself over the years and as a
young child, “I am not going to accept these things that are happening around
me because then I would be a crazy person or someone that even I myself would
have to call delusional. You go years
and years holding up a blinder and discounting all of the evidence. Even when you might pose a question openly in
your mind to God, or again, some might say the Universe, out loud and ask,
‘Should I do this’, and then an invisible finger actually physically pokes you
in the back as in saying, ‘yes, do it’, and then you do it and then you are
physically faced with a physical answer in ‘YES’, ‘I’ told you to do that and
this is the Universe or God saying that “Yes, it’s all true”.
The incredible events that surround my
life have sometimes left me unable to deal with normal material needs in this
world although I have always been someone who can easily earn means. I have made more money in a month than some
people make in a year and then at times I have to sit and do nothing and
consume the random spiritual ‘pokes’ in my back to carry out tasks that I am
apparently already deigned to carry out.
At times in my life I have actually tried to deny my destiny and
disregard these tasks. During these
times of refusal I have actually been approached by strangers who tell me
random and what some would call weird statements, “God sent me to talk to you.
You’re going to be one of his strongest teachers. He’s crying for you right
now.” One person who came this close to
being a stalker, of which I seem to have had many, said, “You’re supposed to be
sharing this. You’re supposed to write this for the world.”
Granted, this may sound crazy to the
average person and as it was happening and unfolding in my life I also felt it was
crazy and did my best to ignore it. But
when you’re standing on a street alone after having been touched and prompted
by an invisible finger in your back to do something that you just mentally
asked God if you should do and you look to the skies for an answer and then
when you lower your head and that answer is spelled out perfectly in English in
front of you, you have to accept that you are not crazy and that someone or
something is guiding you.
So when I compare myself to someone with
the spiritual implications of a writer like Mark Twain who was deigned to write
and deigned to share I am not saying it lightly. One of my favorite author’s, Richard Bach,
wrote a book called ‘The One’ which had a premise of something in the Universe
revealing a ‘library’ to him of all of the books that had to be written and
were ‘deigned’ to be written and I understood his meaning then and I understand
it now. Because no matter what I do, it
seems that I must complete certain task in my writing career, in my life.
One sincere Literary Agent recently mentioned
to me that what I was marketing was an ‘inspirational memoir’ and that she
couldn’t help me because her contacts only wanted memoirs from famous
people. I took slight umbrage to this trend
in the industry because some of the best memoirs and biographies that I have
read have been of people with remarkable lives who were not famous; like
Augusten Burroughs memoir titled ‘Running with Scissors’. There is also that once unknown little girl
called Anne Frank. Literary Agents only
seem to be interested in clients who have flipped a table over on a reality
‘housewives’ show or someone who has won a cooking contest on the latest
reality show. It’s almost as if this
Literary Agent was telling me that my memoir was ‘good for a taste, but not for
a swallow’. Well let me tell you
something, I’m marketing and pitching a swallow. Something for the whole world to swallow.
I must say that living such an extraordinary
life has led me to many questions of why?
I will never show or feel any true regret as to being mistaken for crazy
or delusional because I have been privy to a world within our own which is so
magical and informative that I have to only feel thankful in the end. So, to all ‘Literary Agents’ who feel it
ludicrous to compare oneself to Mark Twain or Richard Bach’s theory in which
certain books have to be written, I’ll simply say this, Haley’s Comet comes by
more than once.
By
Anthonystjoseph
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and protected by law
