Sometimes when I’ve been away from this site too long (I haven’t done a post here since June), I call on my younger self to remedy the situation.
Because I’ve been keeping a personal journal since 1969, and I often re-read what I’ve written in it, I’m still in touch with my younger self, who you see in this 1968 identification photo taken so he could work in one of Inco’s mines in northern Ontario.
Though I’m a bit wiser than he was, I’ve found that, through the years, he and I have always seen eye to eye.
Now I’m deep into writing this book mentioned in my June post – Autism Dreaming – which is progressing – 80% complete now.
Since the rejection of my novel The Birdcatcher in 2006 by the commercial publishing industry (I submitted it to 20 agents and 20 publishers), I’ve simply self-published my books as I completed them. But this book has so much to say, and so much of it surprising, that I think I owe to autistic people to see if it can’t get a larger readership.
So I’m researching agents at the moment. But I can’t help asking myself – will publishers be willing to start working with a new author who is 78 years old? How many 78 year-olds have you seen publish a first book commercially.
But recently I was sitting in a coffee shop with a Mennonite friend who is much younger than me. At one point he said something about me being someone in his ’60s. “No,” I corrected him, “I’m 78.”
He looked at me for a moment then said, “I don’t understand.”
I told him I didn’t understand either, which was true. I’m not your every-day 78 year-old. For example, I’ve been running since I was 17 years old and even now, though I’ve slowed down, I still do a mile twice a week. When I told a young doctor this in 2022, who was dealing with a foot injury I’d come to him with, his eyes opened wide.
Meanwhile, besides writing books, I have for some time been working on getting rid of accumulated paper.
This week I confronted a box full of the paper copies of all the short stories written between 1969 and maybe 1994, original manuscripts that have travelled with me for decades. I began checking them carefully to make sure copies of them are safe in my computer and hard drives before I tore them up for good.
In the course of doing that, I couldn’t help reading some of them again. I was struck once more at what a good writer my young self was, even if he was slow. I rarely see anything I want to change. At least two thirds of his stories deserved to be published. But despite his patience in submitting them over and over, year after year, not one was ever accepted.
This week, as I was tearing those pages up, it occurred to me that maybe the reason I’m still younger in my body and mind than I’m supposed to be, is that he, my young self, is still with me, right beside me, still writing, unfazed by all that rejection over the years.
That’s it I think. He is as much the author of this coming book as I am.
Alan Conrad 