It is an interesting story, isn't it? When I first opened the newspaper this morning, I groaned, thinking, "Oh no, not another self-published author." (Our newspaper tends to promote self-pubbed authors, even giving them half-page spreads. That's nice, but....)
And actually, I should have used the term "encouraging" rather than "upbeat," but I didn't have my second cup of coffee yet. The man's wife died after they'd been married such a long time. So he turned to writing to help him through the rough times. (If you read the entire article, he did have one book pubbed awhile ago, but, as he said, it seemed to sell only one copy. And he was a writer pubbed in literary magazines, and he was an editor who actually turned down Gone With The Wind. Lost his job after that, he said.)
So, there is hope, no matter what age you are. It's ultimately: great writing, polished manuscript (void of spelling and grammatical errors), interesting story, and a little bit of luck that it lands in the right hands; the editor who says "Wow!" As he said, he was turned down by several agents and editors before Random House picked it up.
