Waiting for a Book Release/ Literary Mom Hacks to the Tenth Degree

Today a thousand thoughts and stories are in my head all at once. My book release is in eight days and it is as if I am riding the coat tails of some strange, creative whirlwind and still feel at peace about just about everything except that the fact that I have to wait two days for my audible account to refill. Now that I am publishing a book, devouring recorded books has become a justifiable obsession for me. I call it 'research.' This research usually includes a smoothie, a stroller, and walk the neighborhood while I listen, feeling like I have accomplished a literary mom hack to the tenth degree.

If, as fate has it, my six month old is sleeping in her stroller when I return, I do something self-indulgent like blogging or working on my next book, while relishing in the fact that my audiobooks have just whisked me away to Africa or Egypt or a castle in the mountains.

Some of those books, like Paulo Coelho's 'The Alchemist,' or George Macdonald's 'The Princess and the Goblin,' are so riveting that they take only a few days to devour, and I'm left at their conclusion with the same melancholy I feel when a close friend or family member has come to visit from out of state, but has returned home. I'm not without others to enliven my days, but no two are exactly the same. No two friends, no two moments, and no two books. There is something about reading that allows you to embark into the lucid dreams of another, and that, to me, is magic. It's personal in a way that as a new writer, I am beginning to understand. In moments when ideas are flowing, its as if you are in a state of dreaming while you are awake; pouring these thoughts through your fingertips and into your computer, where they can be recorded forever or changed and molded into phrases that you hope will cause waves of impact deep enough to leave a mark upon your writers-that maybe, at the conclusion, they will feel a little melancholy because you have taken them to a place and introduced them to characters and even parts of themselves that they might not have found without your prodding.

As a writer, you expose your thoughts completely-for better, or for worse. You leave your mind stripped for the interpretations of others-for better, or worse. You have made an exchange of authenticity and vulnerability for anxiety about how your own thoughts will be received... and you wait, hoping that somehow, what you have written will be interpreted and discerned in a way that is beautiful and unique for each reader, and that with even your limited view of the world, they will learn something from the way you see it.

Now, as fate has it, my baby has awoken. It is time for my voice to stop flowing into the clicking keys of my keyboard and to transform into that of a panda bear... while I read my child her favorite Eric Carle book, and ask what she sees.