All week, I’ve been haunted by a strange and disturbing feeling: happiness.

I suppose I could blame it on the weather. The unseasonable heat a few weeks ago that forced the landscape into bloom has given way to the kind of dry, warm days and crisp nights usually reserved for fancy West Coast zip codes.

Then again, it could be the steadily rising tide of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a sign, perhaps, of the beginning of the end of this awful recession.

But there’s a simpler explanation. The agonizing wait to hear from publishers that I described a few weeks ago? The one that had me driving a digging bar through a buried slab of wood out of sheer frustration? It’s over. My novel sold.

It’s hard to explain just how huge this news is to a writer, whose work often seems completely imaginary. And not just in the literal sense, as in, “a product of his imagination.” When I’m writing a novel, months go by when nothing much seems happen. Or worse, when the novel seems to be un-writing itself. There are plenty of awful days that involve setting aside, or even throwing away, whole sections of a story. Worst of all, a nearly finished story can collapse under its own weight and vanish before your eyes.

You’ll get up from your desk at the end of a day like that and say to yourself, “So much for the last three months.” Or six months. Or a year.

Then you’ll go out and dig yourself a few choice post holes.

The imaginary nature of the work is painfully obvious to your family and friends, who don’t really have the slightest idea what you’re doing in front of your computer all day, and many of whom fear the worst.

It feels imaginary to you, too. You think to yourself, “Who am I kidding?” You compare yourself to your favorite writers and feel puny and talentless. Sometimes — often, even — you feel like a phony. How can this miserable tangle of words, these vague characters, this threadbare plot, possibly add up to something worth reading?

Beyond your intimate circle, the world ignores you. You might as well be a figment of its imagination.

You work for years without pay, without recognition, because you can’t imagine doing anything else. Your friends in more sensible lines of work excel. Some of them accomplish great things. The world understands them perfectly.

Your friendships become strained. It’s hard for friends to tell you how well they’re doing. They’re embarrassed. For you? Of you?

And still you write.

Let’s say you stick with it and ride out the bad times. At the end of, say, two or three years, you have a novel. Wonderful! Time to celebrate! The hard work is over.

But in reality, you’re only halfway home. Or maybe even less than halfway, if, like me, you find the process of bringing your work into the world to be reliably humiliating.

Showing your work, even to supportive family and friends, can be a trial. But showing it to agents and editors whose job it is to say “no” all day, every day, and who are just as likely to let your precious novel molder in a mailroom as they are to pronounce it “difficult,” “unpleasant,” or “unpublishable — ” well, it might just as easy to stick your finger in an electrical socket and hope for the best.

Like, a thousand times in a row.

But then a day comes, like it did for me last week, that brings a “yes” instead of a “no.”

And part of you can’t believe it, but the rest of you lifts off like a rocket.

You hang up the phone and walk downstairs to the kitchen. Your wife and daughter are working on dinner. They don’t suspect a thing. You play it cool. You say something like, “Well, I just got an interesting call.”

And then the cork pops, and the champagne pours, and you kiss your wife and tell her that there were times when she was literally the only person in the world — including yourself — who believed in you, and your daughter comes over and the three of you squeeze each other deliriously next to the butcher block.

It’s a feeling beyond description. Beyond imagining.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 22 April 2010

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com