My Precious Book Hoard

A dozen copies of my first novel, The Innocent.

I just got my first box of my own books from Amazon! I am so excited. They are so lovely to me. I am so happy to see them.  I suddenly feel like a miser. I want to hoard them in piles all around me.  I envision stacks of my novel in a vault piled to the ceiling. I am rich. Rich! I don’t want to give even one away. I want to keep them with me forever. My precious! Gollum! Ahem.

Then I showed one to a librarian at our local public library. She thumbed it and opened it and turned it over in her hands. Careful! Careful! I thought even though I knew it was meant for her. She wanted to read it. Oh, God! One of my babies, my fledglings, was hopping out of the nest.

No! Why? Stay with me where it is safe. I love you. I felt like I was walking around with a box of adorable puppies and people were scooping them up and taking my heart away with them.

Then my precious was gone. The librarian said she would read it on her vacation. I was happy and sad and scared. Happy that someone would want to spend their vacation time reading my debut novel. I went back to the car to drive home. The book’s twin was in the back seat. It would go too, quite soon, to a Goodreads reviewer in the Netherlands.  It already had a destination. They all had to go into the world like children who had grown up and were heading off to college. That was what they were meant for. Like my character in The Innocent, Alexa, they had wings, so they could fly.  

Any other authors want to share the panic attack they had when handing out their first book?  

Serendipities

I just came across this quote by François de La Rochefoucauld, a French nobleman of the 17th century, author of several collections of maxims: 

"True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen" 

Oddly, this quote is very similar to one from a main character in my novel, The Innocent, a 12th-century knight with a very similar surname: Cristien LaRoche. 

In the novel, Cristien talks about true love too. He says, “True love came, unlike the way it did in fairy tales, after a long time, years. It was a well-molded sword, tested and pounded, shaped and honed in the fires of passion and then plunged deep into the cool maw of reality until the flame was all but gone. It was the thing that survived the burning, that lived on after the war, honed and sharpened, true and unyielding, a thing of legend rare as Arthur’s sword. I had heard of it but never witnessed it.”

The universe is so cool and weird!

P.S. Yesterday, while driving around, I was thinking about the obstacles that can be created critics, those who have the power to make the path of a writer more difficult, when I stopped behind another vehicle. The license plate read "GATEKPR." Apropos, I thought. Today, I continued to contemplate the challenges of a writer's life, the difficulties of publishing and promoting, when I pulled up behind another vehicle with a vanity plate. This time, it read "NVRQUIT." Signs from the universe to keep doing what you love!

I know I'm not the only one, so dare to share some serendipitous happenings in your life in your comments.