With an abundance of players at our Friday park district location, we asked if the dilapidated third table could be brought out. After a long wait, and a second request by a female player, the reluctant employee relayed back that it wasn’t usable because it didn’t have a net.
‘No problem, bring it out.’
The ever resourceful Jeff, turned his attention to a large bookcase along the wall in this multi-purpose room. By George, in no time he had found a suitable stack of books and aligned them very close to regulation height.
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| A Cat and Mouse Game…Tom and Jerry |
The playability far exceeded our not so Great Expectations. We hit the Dickens out of the ball, and even got some spine shots (aka ‘nets’). A low shot into the book cover gave a definitive solid ‘whomp’, a resounding confirmation that your shot had been rejected.
This rejection however, gave me a bit of PTSD (Post Traumatic Submission Disorder). You see, an excellent literary agent from a top notch Literary Agency in NYC had pulled my query from the ‘slush pile’ and requested my complete book manuscript for consideration.
Ninety-nine percent of submissions are rejected, and I was on an anticipatory high as a one-percenter. Getting this far, I read the odds of getting a book deal was now about ten percent. So the total theoretical probability of being published is about 1/1000! Well, one month elapsed and the bad news came. ‘Pacing,’ a commonly used term for rejections arrived in my email. Dreams of a healthy advance faded. But, the big positive takeaway was that the premise of the book had real credibility. From there I took the self-publishing path.
A final note. Here’s some ‘dressed up’ tables combining function and fashion. Simon, along with his wife, collaborated to make four of these table ‘skirts’. The disruption of play has been greatly reduced. A real game changer.
