More apt than I thought

I posted a comment to this thread at Miss Snark's earlier today. I was responding to someone who said that it's cruel of Miss Snark to get our publishing hopes up when 98% of us can't even write a query letter, which of course means we haven't a hope in hell of writing a decent book.

I talked about the importance of being a beginner and compared the whole process to learning to ride a bike. Yes we fall off at first but we eventually get the hang of it.

I thought about this off and on for the rest of the day and decided it was an even better example than I thought because even when I was an accomplished bike rider, riding my bike across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Francisco State U a couple times a week, I still managed to do something stupid enough to give me a concussion and quite a lot of torn ligaments in my arm. (I bent the handlebars with my arm when I fell)

And of course we've all seen published writers do the same kind of thing, that godawful sequel to Rosemary's Baby that Ira Levine wrote comes to mind. No matter how accomplished you are you can still take a nasty spill and look like an idiot in front of anyone who happens to notice.