The point of it all

The American Dream: being able to work hard from scratch to acheive great things is the greatest lie anyone could have ever told. I think it is possible, and I believe people have done exactly this. Put to make it sound like hard work is all it takes seems a little to self involved.
I will give you an example that is all too close to home. Being a writer that has never truly published anything is worth absolutely nothing in the writing market. In fact, if their was a totem pole of writers that towards the top was the likes of Dan Brown who has two huge books and several others that are not as known, or someone like Terry Brooks who just published his thirtieth novel, then towards the bottom of that totem pole would be those one time published people that would incorporate anyone who has published something because they have the popularity to do so(but in reality the project is only promotional) to a person that just broke into the feild and had maybe published some things in small documents before. That would leave those of us who aspire to be published somewhere underground, but not the foundations, no that parallel is for people like Shakespear who made writing worth reading--no, we are the ones no one will ever read, you will never see. We have to get lucky. Our amounts of hard work only take time and money as we begin to print out our manuscripts only to edit them over and over again, constantly second guessing ourselves because the editor doesnt think it is good enough. Even if people want to read you manuscript they have no idea how much ink it would take to print out 380 pages just for them to read, and then if an agent or publisher would get a hold of it the manuscript will probably evolve into something vaguely reconizable from the original story. Sure the plotline may be similar and teh characters the same, but the descriptions and the tone may be completely changed by one editor to the next.
In other words, it becomes an endless battle. The funny thing is, all that work that was put into the piece in order to try to submit it to the agents or publishers in the first place is only the beginning. Because when you finish you come to the part that I like to call demoralizing and the realization that you have done nothing. People are amazed when they hear you have written a book. But if no one ever reads it, what is the point of ever writing it? Sure, it may help you understand yourself better, or maybe you needed to do for some deeper reasons, but in all reality every writer has something to say and if no one ever reads it you will never be heard. And what you want to say will never be worth anything more than if it had only stayed in your mind.
Still, we have yet to go through the demoralizing stage. You see, when you finally think your manuscript may be worth sending, prepare yourself for rejections purely for the fun of rejecting. That is, I get the feeling that these queries I send out are not even read. It doesnt matter if my query is catching, worthwhile, provoking, or even the best one ever written. All that matters is if that particular agent will take the time for you. And what I failed to understand is time is not a commodity anyone has, especially any agent who has put their name into any book for us writers to get a hold of. As soon as this happens, they at least claim, but I tend to believe it to be true, that they are bonbarded by all of these queries and have too many clients so they can't even take the time on little old you. So here come the pre-typed inpersonal query rejection letters. The ones I truly like apologize for being unable to respond personally, of course one of these was to the agency that requested the first 20 pages of my manuscript only to send back a post card. The only cost it would have been for them(because of Self Addressed Stamped Envelopes) was the damn post card they had the balls to put in my SASE(see capitalized previous statement). I want to call them bad names at this point, but I will refrain in light of this being a publich site. Really though? You dont have time to read the query that you determined the guidelines for? You have me send this load of paper that cost me ink, paper, and postage only to say you are not going to even look at it!!! Here, in and of itself, we see how hard work does nothing. When we put ourselves on the line to try to get our names noticed, a small few are noticed, and then the rest of us will never be remembered for anything more than syntimental reasons because we had a kid.
So, go ahead, work hard, hope for that raise and or promotion and or break. I on the other hand am beginning to believe that my hard work will only be prayed for and never go anywhere. But to those few writers that go the route I have gone and try to publish something in a fasion that is respectable(instead of just throwing money at something despite how good, or more likely, how bad it is) I solute you. Now put in a good word for the rest of us hard workers.