I had two hard things happen to me today. The first was that Anne and I put our cat Thomas to sleep. The second was that I learned that my next book will not be published.

When we adopted Thomas, we were living in Iowa City. I was there because I was enrolled in the Masters’ degree program in Creative Writing at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. If you aren’t hip to the hierarchy of writing schools, U of I is highly regarded, and I was lucky to get in.

Truth be told, I didn’t thrive there. Living in the midwest was difficult, and I was doubtful about whether I was any good at the art I was studying. Nonetheless, my wife and I cheered one another up as best we could, and we were further cheered by the two cats we invited into our lives: Otis and Thomas. Otis we found in a wilderness area, and Thomas we adopted from the pound, thinking Otis might like a friend. Thomas’ name at the pound was Big Bubba, which we sometimes called him ever after. He was a slim, orange polydactyl with a great love of life and an irrepressibly positive attitude about living it. We dubbed him “the ambassador,” because he always welcomed people into our apartment and seemed proud to show them around.

If you know me, you know my personality tends toward the depressive. I think this is genetic. My life, measured by most available metrics, has been quite easy, but I’ve never had a particularly easy time living it. However, there were some good days back then. I felt like I was embarking on the career I’d always dreamed of. I was successful enough to graduate from my program. When Anne and I returned to Seattle, I had an MFA in Creative Writing, and two cats.

As time passed, our household aged at the regular rate. I had some unrecognized years trying to write without publishing before getting a lucky break and a sale, which led to my first book. I had an even better sale next, a two book deal with Houghton Mifflin that resulted in two more books: The Wrap-Up List (which was a finalist for the 2014 Washington State Book Award) and The Trap. In 2012, with The Trap in the pipeline, I started working on what I hoped would be my next. As always, I had Thomas’ support.

He would sit on my shoulders like this for hours while I worked. It was very nice to have such a friendly guy close at hand while I doubtfully arranged my sentences.

Reader, let me say this about writing books: It is hard fucking work. For someone predisposed to feeling blue, it isn’t the healthiest emotional occupation, either. I was thrilled when I made the sale to Houghton Mifflin, but all three of my books have sold terribly and lost money for their publishers. Maybe I’m not that great of a storyteller, or maybe the books were badly timed or didn’t receive the right kind of marketing to the right audiences. Whatever the reason, they entered the world with all the fanfare of a quick trip down an open manhole.

It was with crossed fingers that my agent and I floated the new novel, a ghost story called The Curse of Plum House. Sadly, the rejections followed quickly. I learned today that all of the votes are in, and the book will not be published. It’s a bitter pill to swallow to work for years refining a product that won’t ever see the marketplace. William S. Burroughs said that he knew Junky wasn’t a very good book, but if it hadn’t been published he’d have given up. This is sensible. Try it out. See if there’s a good result, and proceed accordingly.

This morning as I sat crying over my dead cat, I thought perhaps changing my lifeplan around this issue might be a healthy decision. There are only so many hours in a day, or a life, and at the moment I can imagine better ways of using the time remaining to me than tapping out stories that won’t be read. Here is a linocut I made this week illustrating a related principle, that the speed of life runs the same for both industrious ants and feckless grasshoppers:

I’ve been composing a lot of music lately, and making a lot of art, and I also went back to teaching college. I’ve been enjoying all of these. It’s gotten me thinking, you know that old aphorism, “When God closes a door, He jumps out the window”? Well, that is a very strange saying. I think it must have to do with a time when God accidentally locked Himself in the bathroom.

More to the point, I’ll relate my favorite story about Thomas The Cat. He was about fourteen when it took place, which makes it all the more amazing. Anne and I had both noticed he’d been slowing down a little, though he was still healthy.

We used to let Thomas roam the yard of the house we lived in. He loved being outside, and his daily ablutions involved nothing beyond the determined indulgence of an inexhaustible, heedless will to race around, here and there, to and fro, hither, yon, and occasionally plaguing the cat of the woman who lived below us.

This house had a large maple tree outside, down by the parking strip. The tree had had all of its lower limbs lopped such that it was only a straight pitch of trunk to about twelve feet up. This particular morning I walked out the front door and was greeted by an impossible sight: Thomas was up in that tree, just walking around in the branches. It was surreal. I’ll never know exactly how he managed it, but I imagine something like this: In a fit of joie de vivre, he rushed out into the ever-wonderful world. Suddenly, before him, there loomed the tree. Perhaps he’d never come at it from quite this angle before, or ever felt precisely this degree of enthusiasm concomitant with its interposition in his path—whatever the reason, Thomas did not stop, no, he leaped on, heedless, up that impossible wall. And it was not impossible.

It was easy.