Q: Is that what you want? To have a book published by New York, reviewed in national publications, sold in bookstores and taught in university writing programs?

A: I want to make a technical writer's income writing enema vérité.

To do that, I need to sell a book to New York and have New York put its muscle behind it.

Q: Is that a realistic goal? New York doesn't publish enema vérité.

A: Writers like me break through, eventually.

A publisher takes a chance, makes money, and the reversal in fortune follows.

Think of when Cormac McCarthy broke out, with All the Pretty Horses, or when William Kennedy broke out, with Ironweed.

Q: Or Henry Miller, with Tropic of Cancer.

Jack Kerouac, with On the Road.

William S. Burroughs, with Naked Lunch.

A: Something like that.

Q: Sometimes the writer dies first.

A: Like John Kennedy Toole, with Confederacy of Dunces.

Or Barbara Pym, barely in her comeback.

Q: It's a crapshoot.

A: And it's slow.

It takes decades.

As the maestro said to Andrés Segovia, "You have chosen a hard road. I hope you don't lose heart."