Book Birthday!!!

This is it! Today's the day. My book is born.

I have a huge knot in my stomach. I don't know why. I mean, nothing "happens" today. It's really just another day, and I am in the middle of writing a very fun scene for Silksinger, but my mind keeps wandering. As if something is going to happen. Some mysterious surprising thing. But it's not. I feel very weird. Today would be a good day to go for a long hike in a remote place, actually, and just breathe and look at the sky and maybe take a nap on a warm rock, like a lizard. Try not to wonder what is going on in the bookstores of America.

Most blogs I've read or interviews I've heard, writers just seem so happy and grateful to have a book published, and I am totally happy and grateful, but I'm also anxious and. . . sheepish. There's this whole thing, all throughout the process, of learning to keep excitement in check. It's not just the publishing process, it's sort of the whole process of trying to make a creative career happen. You send out postcards of your art work to publishers and try not to expect to get any response, because you probably won't. You submit stuff to contests and annuals, and try not to get excited. The first time I got a call from an art director wanting to hire me. . . that was a moment when excitement was allowed to actually bubble forth -- it was great! And with the sale of Blackbringer, there were lots of mini-moments of almost-excitement, interspersed with fretting and incredulity -- you know, I'd had a lot of experience with tamping down the excitement by then, and I started to experience this weird detatchment, like I didn't even know what moments were genuine excitement moments anymore! So weird! And a year and half has passed since selling the book to Putnam. A year and a half!

My most memorable moments of the past year and a half:


• getting my first editorial letter. . . It was really, really short and I thought that meant my book was perfect {heh heh} and didn't need much editing. Well, that was only the first editorial letter!
  
  
• going into the Penguin offices in New York and meeting everybody! Champagne lunch with my editor and publisher (and my husband/illustrator). WOW! I felt very special! (But the very next day, I was unable to get into the "pro" party at a writing conference because my book wasn't published yet. Un-special!)
  
  
• speaking at ALA Midwinter. That was awesome. The most pure and undiluted pleasure I think I've felt during the entire journey. Thank you, librarians. I love you. And what a perfect first signing it was -- a huge line of librarians with my book in their hands! Pinch me! No wait -- don't pinch me. It's too good.
  
  
• reading my first review, and loving librarians even more!
  
  
• getting a photo of my first-ever child reader dressed up as Magpie Windwitch for Purim! (Her attention to detail was fabulous! My character was really out in the world -- a child had dressed up as my character!!)
  
  
• speaking at the library in Topeka, Kansas, when the teenagers in the audience actually lined up to buy my book after! The whole sheepish thing, I had prepared myself for no one to buy it, and then they did!!

I might be forgetting something. I probably am. The thing I'm thinking about today a lot is how many writers and artists I've heard speak who have said that the very most important thing is to love the work itself -- that everything else is just gravy. And it has to be true. It really has to be. Because the excitement moments, when they come, glorious as they are, are not enough to buoy you through the uncertainty and the waiting. You have to actually love doing it -- that's what gets you through. Being lost in the world of the next book on the day the first one comes out. Thinking ahead to a lifetime of books, to the steady building of an oeuvre, one book at a time, and savoring those moments when the outside world comes in contact with the internal world, the thing that is born in my head. And only in my head. That's what's great, really. Like the famous quote by Martha Graham:

". . . because there is only one of you in all of time [your] expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it!"

So, happy book birthday to me!