by After a few days of feeling close to gone, I’m almost back to normal. That’s a huge relief. I still have to catch up a bit from being so exhausted and clumsy and disorganised – this living room is a mess, for instance – but at least everything isn’t totally unmanageable as it was two days ago. Tomorrow (Saturday) I have lessons from 8:30 till 7 with very few breaks; I was worried that would be impossible for me.
I spoke to the woman at the “publishers” today (the inverted commas are there for a reason), three and a half months after we sent off the proposal or whatever it is they call it. It wasn’t accepted, or rather it was ignored. Lack of funds, or lack of interest, or both. I don’t really care what the reason is, and anyway I’d have been surprised if the outcome had been anything else. I told her what I wanted to do next, which is not waste any more time. I might end up having a coffee with her and Dorothy, just to be polite and to put the final full stop to the whole thing.
I told Dad about this. After all, he’d done 25 brilliant illustrations for the smaller of the two books. Don’t worry, I enjoyed doing them, he said. And you’ve still got all the text and artwork. You might bump into a publisher. Seriously, bump into a publisher! That’s not how it happens at all, Dad. If there’s anything that living with (probable) autism for 45 years has told me, it’s that you don’t bump into anything. Not anything good, I mean; you’re more than capable of bumping into piles of shite. You might have bumped into a publisher, Dad, and in no time at all had royalty cheques zooming in from America, all ready to be cashed at the wonderful rate of a dollar ten to the pound, as it was in 1985. But that isn’t how things work for me. I think I may have mentioned that at an autism group. If you’re autistic, connections are hard to make. Chance meetings are rare. If you really want to change your life, you have to actively make the change, hard as it is, because nothing will fall into your lap. Changing my lifestyle involved moving halfway around the world to a country where I didn’t know anybody and spoke little of the language: the very opposite of bumping into it. Anyway, I will need to actively pursue publishers here; there’s no way around that. For one thing, the vast majority of Romanian publishers are located in Bucharest.
