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.