The Origins of the Windemeres are Shrouded in Dense Nagging

Overthinking: something Bob never, ever does.
He does, however, frequently overlick.
This leads to hairballs.

It's hard to believe it's been two weeks since my first novel came out, which makes it sound like "The Golden Feather" discovered its sexual identity, so perhaps that's why people say "released," which sounds like it just got out of the big house after a 20-year stint for armed robbery, so maybe I should just say "got published," but that sounds like this magical thing that happened sort of all at once, when in fact there was a year-long trail of teeny tiny milestones, sort of like reflectors in the middle of the highway, and the only all-at-once thing that happened was the moment I looked up and saw the giant headlights of Amazon with the words, "Status: available" etched into the grille.

So, yeah. I made a book.

The questions I've been most frequently asked are:

1. How long did it take to write?
2. Where did you get the idea?

The adorable face (and blue hair)
of persistence.

Both questions have the same answer: Betty.

In October 2016, Betty was obsessed with fairy tales. We bought books of them at Half Price Books from countries all over the world. Her favorite is a dark green hardbound collection of both Grimm and Andersen (she prefers Grimm). We read those stories night after night. After night.

One night, after yet another round of Grimm, Betty had an idea: why couldn't I write her a fairy tale? All it needed was a princess and some talking animals. Could I have it by tomorrow?

Now, I had not written anything longer than a 10-page short story at that point. And I hadn't even written a short story in a couple of years. All I'd written were poems, and those were generally short. Really short. I've written dozens with fewer than eight lines.

However, it was an interesting challenge, and Betty is a world class nagger, in the manner perfected by youngest children, so I accepted. During my lunch hour the next day, I started sketching out Betty's fairy tale. The princess was, of course, named Bettina (of Windemere), and she had a pet leopard named Malalah, because Betty's fondest ambition is to own 200 cats and a goat, which also explains why the wise nanny goat Amalthea charged into the book later on.

Where's that chapter, Mother Dear?
You HAVE finished it, haven't you?

After half an hour or so, I realized I had a problem: what I'd written wasn't a fairy tale like those we'd been reading. In fact, it was more like the Cliff's Notes summary of a fairy novel. 

Well, I reasoned, we'll probably both get bored before I finish a book anyway, so why not start and see? So that night, after everyone was in bed, I wrote Chapter 1 and read it to Betty the next day. She immediately begged for Chapter 2. Which led, after many, many nights, to another couple dozen chapters. She'd bounce up and down for the suspenseful parts, cackle at the funny parts, cover her eyes when Bettina was in danger (especially if the danger was embarrassing herself), and squeal with delight when something wonderful happened.

Every night she was with me, she'd beg for a chapter, and most of those nights she'd have one, if only because I couldn't bear to disappoint her. Reading the drafts out loud made problems with pacing, voice, and cadence easy to spot, and I could see my audience reacting (or not) as I read, so usually after reading the chapter aloud, she would go to bed and I would immediately start editing what I'd just written.

Betty unwrapping the box of proof copies
of "The Golden Feather." 

The final chapter was finished at 1 a.m. Christmas morning, just eight weeks after I began. Betty (and her siblings) were to go to their dad's house for a week after Christmas lunch, and Betty wanted to hear the end of her book before she went.

Now, writing anything that fast means there's a lot of editing to be done on the back end, and that is for sure what happened with "The Golden Feather." I went to several workshops at The Writing Barn, each resulting in extensive rewriting. The first and last chapters in particular are almost unrecognizable from that first draft.  There followed developmental editing, then copy editing, then proofreading, then more proofreading.

But the book would never have been there to edit in the first place had it not been for the daily, persistent, refrain of, "Do you have another chapter, Mom? Do you? Do you? WHY NOT?????" of my youngest child and most relentless taskmaster, Betty.

Adventures in Publishing

It has been a while since I've posted. Or written significant poetry. Or written in my journal. Or done much more than work, eat, sleep, chase children around a merry-go-round of end-of-year events, and play silly games on my tablet. Why? On some level, of course, I was kept busy by all of the aforementioned distractors. But, on a much deeper level, I was waiting for this:

I know, right? I actually wrote an entire book. And I've been feeling a little bit held in suspense, waiting for the launch. Of course, some of that was my doing. I had 50+ edits to the final draft, then, after getting the proof copy, found another 50+ edits. In my defense, at least some of those were necessary edits, the sort of thing that constitutes a minor plot hole that a dedicated reader would eventually question. Others, of course, were the kind of wordsmithing that you'd expect from a Virgo with almost 30 years of editing/proofing experience, and I swore that, after that last round of edits, I was DONE. I would not allow myself to read it one more time. This whole re-re-re-re-reading thing was just me sabotaging myself by not allowing the book out into the world.

And then, a few hours after the final files were uploaded into CreateSpace, a nagging feeling came to me. You know, self, I thought, you didn't check that one last sentence you requested a change on in Chapter 3. Maybe you should just take a peek, so you can stop obsessing over imaginary errors and get some sleep and not fall asleep in tomorrow's federal meeting and accidentally get deported. (It's annual federal meeting time! Spoiler alert: these are the nice feds and nobody got deported.)

So I open the file and go to Chapter 3, and discover...a typo. Not just any typo. The sentence was supposed to start, "As they walked through the forest..." It actually started, "Ass they walked through the forest..."

This is a middle-grade novel.

My ensuing email was titled, literally, STOP THE PRESSES! I went into Kindle Direct and pulled the eBook, my editor fixed the typo, and we relaunched, hopefully without traumatizing any middle grade students or parents. Although, as the parent of two middle grade children, the most trauma that would actually have occurred would have been "cramps from laughing" or "snorting a booger" because middle grade children find potty language hilarious. In fact, it might have been a selling point.

Anyway, the error was soon rectified, and I managed to talk myself out of re-re-re-re-re-reading the entire book. The files were re-uploaded last night. Amazon said it could take 3-5 days to appear, so I went back to playing silly tablet games.

And then at 8:15 p.m., I got a text:

Wait, what? Quick search of Amazon, and there it is! Online and available for purchase. Only a true  friend would find your book on Amazon before you even knew it was published!

And now, after a long spring of anticipation and waiting, I'm ready to put aside my silly tablet games and get back into writing...blogs, journals, the August Poetry Postcard Festival, and, yes, even a sequel, to be titled, The Hundred Year Island.