HOW PATRICK RYAN MADE IT TO OUTER SPACE AND THE FIFTEEN UNPUBLISHED NOVELS HE WROTE ALONG THE WAY

Sophia Efthimiatou in Literary Hub:

He was at a meditation retreat in the Catskills, sitting cross-legged on a big flat rock on the side of a lake, eyes closed, pulse steady, surrounded by chipmunks and beavers and deer and newts, when Patrick Ryan decided he would never again try to write a book.

He had completed seven unpublished novels by then, attempted eight or nine more unfinished ones, all of them shoved away into manuscript boxes that took up as much space in his apartment as a child’s coffin. As he was nearing 40, there was nothing impressive about this activity of his—writing, that is—but a sad compulsion that bordered on the absurd.

It wasn’t that he had experienced no success at all. In two decades of writing nearly every day, he had seen some of his stories published in literary journals, and he had a few close calls with publishers and agents who found value in his work but ultimately could not sell it. One of them, an editor from Simon & Schuster, had even invited him to lunch after reading one of his novel submissions. Ryan walked into that restaurant on a snowy January day thinking that his time had finally come, only to be schooled on the concept of track records.

“I really love it,” the editor told him of his unsolicited manuscript. “It’s depressing but funny, and I think the writing is wonderful. But if I publish it, it’ll be the end of your career.”

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