I growled standing by the apartment cluster mailbox on a sultry afternoon of July 3, 1979. "Did they just throw away or steal the stamps from the self-addressed stamped envelope I sent along with my piece?!"

The New York Times logo on the front of a postcard in that day's mail sparked my ire. I had dropped out of Virginia Tech three years before, confident that I didn't need a college degree to make my way as a writer. But my strikeouts vastly outnumbered my few successes. My ego had been on half rations for longer than I druthered. A few weeks earlier, I'd sent out maybe my last volley of submissions before throwing in the towel on freelancing. One by one, my pieces straggled back, rejected from the New Republic, Playboy, American Spectator, and Washington Post. There was only one very long shot left in play.

And now this dinky little New York Times postcard was all I had to show for my busted publishing blitzkrieg. Scowling, I flipped it over to peruse another form reject: "We have tentatively accepted your manuscript for use on the Op-Ed Page. If and when the article is scheduled for publication an editor will telephone you to discuss any question that may arise in the editing process…."

Okay, that was better than sending back my manuscript.