Indirection

As a freelance writer and editor, I am extremely familiar with the scenario Julia Cameron describes as, "...we shake the apple tree and the universe delivers oranges." I've come to accept that any advertising I do will fail to garner attention from its target audience and will instead, in some off-hand way, result in someone utterly unimagined asking for my services. My best jobs have come to me through oddball connections and my luckiest breaks have come as kindnesses returned years after the initial acts.

To offer just one example--when I was the poetry editor at The Missouri Review, I convinced the editor-in-chief to accept some poems that were ambitious but unpolished and I worked with the writer, then pretty new to the business, to get her poems fully ready for publication. We met briefly at a writer's conference later that year and she thanked me profusely for my generosity, both in believing in the poems and helping her realize them more fully. Five years later, totally unbeknownst to me, she was part of an editorial panel that awarded my poetry manuscript semi-finalist status in a major contest. Somebody else had noticed the merits of the poems, but she vouched for me as somebody that would be great to work with if the press were to proceed with the publication of the manuscript. Both were important factors in the manuscript getting that far.

In the space below, write or draw a memorable incident from your life where indirection played a major part. To include writing and drawing, cartoon or diagram it.