Yesterday was amazing!
It’s about three weeks until the launch of my debut novel The Ocean in Winter, and I am connecting with the people!
Yesterday, I mailed out a bunch of postcards to people I don’t know, including a woman in India, a woman in Malaysia and several in Canada. I received an email from an author who had a question for me. We didn’t know each other, but then it turned out that we live three towns away from each other, and I’m hoping I get to meet her in person this summer.
Also, yesterday, I emailed the women who signed up for my Women’s Fiction Day drawing and picked a winner. We then exchanged a few emails to figure out what baked treat she would like along with her Women’s Fiction Day selections. (She went with the chocolate chunk cookies that are my mother’s famous recipe. An excellent choice!)
Oh, I’m not done yet. A reader on Goodreads left me a note saying that it was bad manners to give my own book four stars, so I apologized and corrected that (but left my review saying that the book had changed my life – because it did!) She said, no worries, turns out she read the book and liked it, so I invited her to send me her address and I would send her a few bookmarks. Turns out she collects bookmarks and she’d love some of mine, and do you know where she lives? England!
So, this is just a quick note to let you know: I am here to connect! If you send me your address, I will mail you a postcard. Or if you’d rather have a couple of bookmarks, I can send you those too. You can enter my giveaway – this goes until the end of June – and get a chance at winning a free Advance Reader Copy.
Do you have a book club? I can come and talk to your book club. Do you have a library? I can talk to your library! If you’re not in driving distance to me, we can do virtual. If there’s anything we learned in the madness of 2020-2021, it’s that we can connect over distances, using so many different tools, but we’ll call them all Zoom just as a shortcut.
Drop me a line, tell me about yourself. If I can’t read your email the moment you send it, I will read it later. Writing is so solitary, and I don’t mind that at all. In fact, I love it. But the wonderful thing about going from unpublished to debut author is, people (possibly you!) will be reading all those words I spent countless hours picking, arranging, relocating and deleting. It’s kind of a mind-blowing moment for me. I’m trying to project all this to my solitary-writing self, and my discouraged-over-rejections self, saying hey selves, look! Someday you will have readers!! And postcards and bookmarks and readings and reviews on Goodreads and a social media team so many other amazing, miraculous things, you won’t even know what to do with yourself.
My projections aren’t really reaching those selves, though, because they’re pretty focused on what they’re doing, and that’s okay. I guess I couldn’t have gotten here if those selves hadn’t been there. And I am so full of gratitude, you have no idea.
So, hey, hop on board! There’s room for everybody.