At the Brink of What I’ve Always Wanted

On a novel's first public appearance

I taped this piece of art I found on Etsy to my wall a few years ago as a way to visualize my canary-themed novel becoming a real object.

I am curled on the couch in my PJs, with my puppy Waffles in my lap, thinking about inside and outside.

Tomorrow I’m emerging.

I’m leaving the house, this dog, and even my pajamas to attend the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association tradeshow here in Portland, Oregon. It’ll be my first major in-person event since March 2020 and I am giddy with the swirl of anxiety and excitement.

That’s the actual, physical emergence: leaving my house! It’s a vaccine-mandatory, mask-mandatory event, which I appreciate so much.  

The other kind of emergence is a metaphorical one: from “just” a publisher to debut author who also happens to be a publisher. Tomorrow, on the tradeshow floor, Lanternfish Press will share galleys of my debut novel with attendees.

Booksellers—many of whom I’ve known for years—will meet my book for the first time. They will learn its title and see its cover.

I’m balancing today on the scant hours between Before and After.

Before: all the years I’ve worked to become a novelist.

After: when my debut novel is circulating among people WHO MIGHT ACTUALLY READ IT.

It’s the first truly public step my book will take in the world.

The gulf between these two states of being is immense. Not just because art and commerce don’t always play well together, but because I have been dreaming of this moment my whole life. Since elementary school when the librarian took me aside and taught me how to bind one of my stories into a real book.

After all those years of preparing for this day—of writing and revising, of spending 12-hour retreat days obsessing over a story arc, getting to know individual booksellers’ reading tastes, and teaching myself about the industry—tomorrow I will hand the first copy of my debut novel to the first bookseller in line, and the transference of object from my hand to hers means the waiting spell will be broken.

Before will turn to Now. Crack.

Becoming—over the next months leading to my April pub date—will become Being. Bend.

I’m going to have to adjust from the wanting and the dreaming to the actual reality of being an author. What I want is turning into what I am. It’s strange and I’m giddy and nervous.

All I can do, in these waning hours of Before, is sit with what this feels like. And also think about what I can write in galleys tomorrow so I don’t freeze.

My author Stevan Allred made a list of signing lines in 2012, when Forest Avenue published his linked story collection, A Simplified Map of the Real World, and again when his debut novel, The Alehouse at the End of the World, came out. Now that I’m about to autograph copies of my very own novel, I am thinking about how neat it was for Stevan to have fabulous pieces of language ready. Words that opened the door to the work beyond the title page, that a reader could puzzle over and sit with before dipping in to the text itself.

Quotes could also take the pressure off coming up with something in the few seconds I have to make a connection with the person standing in front of me. This one feels like a good option because it matches how I’m feeling about this moment:

“It was a momentous thing, to realize the reach of one’s daily work. Its marvelous wingspan.”

And maybe:

“He climbed trees to conjugate verbs in the branches.”

Or possibly, because it makes me laugh:

“This is why they invented coffin bells.”

The gift, I always tell my authors, is in every step of the process.

The thing about what happens after your book is available is that you can’t crank time backward or fold the story you’ve written back into your heart. It’s too big for you by then. It belongs to the people who have it in their hands. You and the readers and the publishing team.

My publisher dropped some copies off for the tradeshow yesterday. We sat at my front-yard rainbow table, sipping tea and talking about metadata. I cried when she handed the copies to me and again when I showed my parents.

I promise I’ll announce the title and cover once PNBA is over; Lanternfish wants to do the big reveal at the show! But for now, because I know how slippery and tender this time is, I am spending as much of today as possible staring at my galleys. Just being present with the object-ness of them. Thinking about how a printout of my cover might look on my wall, instead of (or next to) the slightly wrinkled canary art I have taped up right now.

Last night, before bed, I set up a Forest Ave bookstand on my art table to display one copy, as if it’s a real book. I suppose it is a real book—just in galley form. Tomorrow it’ll cease being mine alone.

In the meantime, here’s my latest essay, “Water Damage,” about memories and what we keep and what gets lost along the way. It’s now out from About Place Journal.

I have another essay, “Jam,” about loss and peaches, forthcoming from The Vincent Brothers Review, issue #24, which you can preorder now.

Another piece, an essay-turned-speculative fiction, is forthcoming in Alternating Current’s And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing: Parenting Stories Gone Speculative.