Mark Twain: An open letter to 'Literary Agents'

 

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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