It's the Day!

Okay, so yesterday I come home and sitting on my porch is my JUNE release (my, they are efficient). A nice big box of them. Of course, that also simultaneously makes me queasy because I'm afraid I will open a book and find a typo. And lo and behold, my bio is wrong, but the picture of me looks fab--very crisp! (It still has my Florida bio, not my Virginia one.) So that was fun. A box of books!

But today is THE day. Magickeepers, Book I: The Eternal Hourglass is released. When my 11-year-old daughter opened her eyes today, she said, "Today's the day!" And then she asked if we could go to Barnes and Noble after school to hold one IN the bookstore. And that is why this has been the best book experience of my life.

There are other reasons--feeling so valued by my publisher, the hardcover, the cover artist, the jacket, the incredible support of every person at Jabberwocky that I have talked to, the writing process itself, the incredible editor I worked with. But in the end, writing a book my kids can be part of is the absolute best part.

Genius often blogs about how being a writer affords him a flexible schedule for his sons and how that is THE perk. And like Genius, my kids, too, do not know me as anything other than a woman who works from home as a writer. They did not see the "Editor in an Office" years when I actually donned business attire instead of sweatpants, and carried a bag stuffed with manuscripts, and ate breakfast in the car.

But by the same token, working from home has meant my work seems to spill into my private life. Demon Baby, especially, is very jealous of my computer. He sees it as THE thing that hogs my time away from him when we should, rightfully, be outside blowing soap bubbles. And because they have no frame of reference--no day care, no aftercare, no long commute, no 9-to-5, they can see the negatives of this life more than the positives some days. And then at the end of the whole writing process, a box of books comes that they don't read. Adult books that really don't relate to them all that much. Even my YAs were a little old for Baby Girl when they came out.

But this time was different. If you can believe it, the origins of this book go way back. Spring and summer of 2006. Then there were contract talks, then the writing, then once it was going to be a lead book and in hardcover, it meant making sure the book--and publisher--had time to be written and prep the promo, then editing, then . . . then . . . when you are 9, 10, and 11 (the years of Baby Girl in this process), this is a LONG time. And today is the day. It's kind of like OUR day. She is the model, right down to appearance, of the girl on the cover, the descriptions in the book, the character's name . . . this is as much her day as mine. It's my kids' day.

Today's the day.

I've never known how to feel about holding one of my books in my hands. It was never the strange thrill I thought it was going to be. Mostly, as in the case of Freudian Slip, I felt panic. But this is different. THIS is THE day.

So the question today is . . . what's your favorite part about being a writer?