There's not a whole lot Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley and I have in common. There's that prize, for one thing. She's extraordinarily tall, I'm extraordinarily short. Even our names are of wildly different lengths - I've got her whole 10-digit name beat with my hyphenated last name alone.

But there are at least two things we do have in common. 

1) I remember reading once that Ms. Smiley suffers from blogophilia, that she blogs on a wide variety of topics, in a wide variety of places. I can relate to that, even though it's doubtful I'll ever write about horses, a subject dear to Ms. Smiley's heart.

2) I've also read that Ms. Smiley sends an astonishing number of Letters to the Editor at the New York Times. Despite that they'll only publish letters from the same person - no matter how famous that person might be - no closer together than approximately 60 days, still she writes, every time something in the paper strikes her as comment-worthy. I, too, have sent my share of Letters to the Editor at the NYT, but...

I NEVER THOUGHT THEY'D ACTUALLY PRINT ONE!

Seriously, for years I've sent letters, with by no means the frequency of Ms. Smiley, but still. And I've always thought my letters were well written - not so different than when you send a book to an agent or editor, thinking you've done your best, that your book deserves to be published...and then...and then...not getting published. Rejection. When you regularly write letters to the NYT, you get used to getting rejected in a different way: by silence. You know your letter has been rejected when you fail to hear anything back. And you *really* know you've been rejected when you see someone else's letter on the very same topic appear in the paper - a letter nowhere near as well written as yours, I might add! - and realize that for whatever reason you are just not up to NYT snuff.

Despite years of the silent treatment from the NYT, I kept writing letters, because it pleased me to write them. I would write the letters and send them, with no hope of a reply - kind of like when I was five and my family owned some property where we used to go fishing and I used to swing the wormless string attached to my bamboo rod back and forth from shoulder to river like some unusual metronome, never stopping to look if I caught anything after the first hour or so because I knew I never would...

Until, of course, the day the teenage son of a family friend stopped me midflight to show me that I'd caught a fish! And not just any fish, not just some kind of puny minnow/salamander/goldfish/what-have-you, but a serious fish! (OK, maybe it was only about six inches, but six inches was like Orca for that river, which was more like what you'd get from a leaky faucet than resembling anything more substantial like, say, the Thames.)

As it was with fishing the faucet, so it has become with the NYT.

A week and a half ago, in response to an Op-Ed piece by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, I fired off a letter to the NYT, sure my bamboo stick and string would never catch the fish. Imagine my surprise then when I received an email back from Tom Feyer of the NYT, saying he wanted to use my letter, which you can read here.

Finally! Finally.

Now, because I know you are dying to know, I will ask and answer the question for you:

After waiting all these years, did it change my life???  

No.

The letter did get reprinted a few places on the Internet, I even got some fanmail about it, and it made my 86-year-old non-Internet-using mother ecstatically happy once I explained stuff like "Sergey Brin" and "Google" to her. (OK, she still doesn't get the joke contained in my letter but it still makes her ecstatically happy, her only daughter with her name spelled perfectly correctly in the NYT.) But the statcounter on my website didn't go through the roof like it does when I guest on agent blogs, I don't think any stores experienced mad runs on my latest novel - really, it was a day like any other day.

But here was the truly great thing, at least for me.

After all the years of sending letters to the NYT only to be met with silence, even if this letter hadn't made the paper, even if all I'd received was that email from Tom Feyer of the NYT saying my letter amused him, it would have been enough.

At the risk of speaking for Jane Smiley...Oh hell, if I'm going to do this, I might as well go over the top and speak for all writers (or at least most). Writers write because we have something to say and because we want someone to hear it. Getting a letter published in the NYT is wildly exciting, because it makes a person feel as though she's succeeded at something, even if that something comes with no quantifiable reward - like, you know, cash. It's nice to be read by a few million, but really, like my mother used to say about friendships, you only really need one.

So I'll keep writing letters, keep throwing out that bamboo rod and occasionally maybe I'll even remember to check the string. Who knows? Maybe one day, but not for at least 60 days, the NYT will print another one.

AND I'LL KEEP HOPING THEY REVIEW ONE OF MY BOOKS! (But that's another story.)

Be well. Don't forget to write.