The search led to a long list of blog posts about people who had sadly elected to give up writing because, basically, rejection letters were hard on their egos, and they were tired of begging people to read their stuff. Not that I'm belittling that. Rejection letters aren't much fun, and the one time I was actually published, I found the process of being edited (ruthlessly edited, I point out) uncomfortable (I was tempted to refer to my editor as "The Esteemed Attila the Hun, Scourge of Western Civilization").
"What, they took out the Khrushchev line? That was GOLD!"
And it's mildly irksome to have people say "I'd love to read your stuff" and then never acknowledge it.
"Did you read that Lovecraft-style short story I sent you six months ago?"
"Oh, the dog ate it."
"I sent it by email."
"Um, I have a cyber-dog."
Maybe I'll feel worse about if I was actually writing for a living. Being reduced to gnawing the varnish off the baseboards for your evening meal because you can't get anything published is probably pretty disheartening.
And then there are the people who say things like "Gosh, after all this time and effort I'm still not published... Maybe I just suck."
Where I come from, this is tantamount to cadging for sympathy sex, only in this case, they're hoping that some big-hearted agent or publisher will swoop in and make everything better with a giant advance. And like cadging for sympathy sex, it doesn't usually work, and even if it does, it still leaves you feeling kind of funky.
Besides, it sounds kind of funny to me to write and publish a letter resigning from the act of writing. It's like people who post on Facebook about how they're going to quit posting on Facebook, or who write tearful blog posts about how they're going to quit blogging. Just do it already, sport, and save us the histrionics, because as a first approximation I don't think that many people really care.
I'm a talentless hack who writes unpublishable genre crap. And I'm okay with that - I write it to please myself and nobody else. I have a couple of manuscripts that by some fluke of planetary alignment turned out to be pretty good, and one day I intend to query them around, but I'm in no particular hurry. And if they don't sell, well, they weren't really intended to sell.
My point is that I'm not sure how I would choose to quit writing. I write crap, but I write a shitload of it. The dreck piles up faster than I can shovel it off my hard drive, and I wear out keyboards the way drag racers wear out engines. How exactly would I quit that?
I can't. But I'm also aware that I shouldn't quit my day job either.
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