This year had a lot of ups and downs for me. This past spring, I felt about as low as I have felt about my writing since I started. My book was going nowhere. There seemed to be nothing I could do to better its chances of being sold. I was unsure if anything I was writing was any good.Then something happened. And that something was nothing at all.There’s a story Stephen King tells about his first novel, “Carrie,” my more frightening namesake. The novel, to hear him tell it, was in the wastebasket. (This was in the days when ...