I'm Somebody Now

Overcast, spitting rain and cold enough to harden the drops so they sting when the wind whips them into your face. What a beautiful day.  Because I got these:



Yippee! Squee!

I’ve never been so glad to still be able to turn a cartwheel as I am today.

Why do I feel vain staring at my book? It is more beautiful than I had expected.  Even my book’s spine is attractive; straight and colorful and with the title and my name.  I petted it. 

I hadn’t expected to be so overwhelmed when I held my book in my hands.  But when I flipped through and saw chapter titles that I had come up with and the little anecdotes at the beginning of each chapter and the stories within the story, I grinned like a loon. My elevensie daughter paged through one of the paperback additions and quirked her own grin and said, “This is cool.” My eighteen-year-old daughter, off at college, facebooked me to ask where she can get one. My husband is dropping my name like I’m somebody. Do you GET how special that is?

Right now I feel connected to every other writer who has experienced this unfathomable joy.  I want authors who think it will never happen for them to be able to tap into this feeling and take enough hope to get them through the next bought of desperation.  And I want to be able to bottle some so that the next time I’m trudging through the submission trenches, dodging rejection bullets, I can open the bottle and take a whiff of this joy and know it is SO worth it!

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