It's A Book!

The first of two amazing July deliveries arrived just the other day, leaving me proud, awestruck, and totally wiped out.  I had been given a mid-July date for its expected arrival, but you know, sometimes The Fates have other ideas. In this case, the bundle came early.

So anyway, here are the vitals...

Birthdate: July 5, 2011
Height: 61 inches
Weight: 72 pounds

One day I will read them all!

And as you can see from the photo, this bundle is a little literary monster that's already trying to leave home.

Here's the thing. It would have been more than enough seeing just one copy of my first novel, Thank You For Flying Air Zoe. This was a project that spanned about four years between inception and fruition, so I'd grown attached to its fate. Yeah, if I had been given even a single copy of this, I'd have been ecstatic.

But I didn't receive just one copy.

I received 96 copies. All at once.

So I did what any author would do when presented with such a rare opportunity. I stacked them on top of one another so I could see which one of us was taller.

Three-quarters of the way through the stacking, things got serious. Kind of like when you're deep into a game of Jenga, and you realize upon surveying the unstable wooden tower in front of you that physics will not allow you to extract this next piece. To be sure, the game is just about over.

Yes, at about 85 books, my tower started to topple. However, just as I did when I was bogged down while writing the novel, I swore, pouted and stomped like a two-year-old, swore again, then blindly pressed on. Rome wasn't built in a day, but this book tower would be.  Never mind that it was closing in on 11PM, or that my 38 weeks pregnant wife was staring as though she was just then realizing that all adult decisions regarding parenting would heretofore be made solely by her. My wires had crisscrossed. This tower needed to be completed.

Apparently publication itself was not the end game.

The end game was a five foot tall book tower that needed to be raised, at any cost to the collective household sanity.

So... You wanna know what happens when you see your book in print for the very first time? Or analogously, what happens when you achieve something that's been on your to-do list for one hell of a long time?

You completely lose your mind.

But you know what?

My kid is totally gonna have a dad who can build towers out of pretty much anything!

So I think it was all worth it, don't you?

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