If you follow this blog at all, you know it's been a time of great happiness and immense sorrow for me lately, as my first book was published in the same week my mother, the inimitable Ietje Dolman, passed away. My thanks to everyone who has expressed their congratulations and/or condolences to me in recent weeks. I hope many of you can make it to my launch for Lost Enough, at Ottawa's Black Squirrel Books Sunday, April 30, at 7:30 p.m., so I can thank you in person, and read for you, too.
As I slowly start to work on the first few items on the ambitious marketing plan list I made for the book when I thought I'd be much happier at this point, some things are beginning to falling into place. The more readings I line up, the more local bookstores (such as Ottawa's Stonewall Wilde's, and Perfect Books) that graciously and happily agree to carry Lost Enough, the more event listings that list my events (such as the stellar Ottawa resource, Bywords Calendar), and even the more publishers and writers retweet my shameless promotional tweets, the more I see that what will always be most valuable to me as a writer (not to mention as a reader) is the sense of community this life has already given me.
Barring my winning the long shot lottery of writing and becoming one of the true rarities of the Canadian book world--an author who can afford to write full-time--I will likely never get rich doing this. Much to my 84-year-old father's chagrin, I will likely never even be able to make enough net profit from my writing to buy more than an occasional bottle of cheap red wine and tub of frozen yogurts in which to drown my financial despair, or a few more books to keep me going.
Here, though, in this writing community, which stretches across all boundaries and borders, and introduces me to people I would never have otherwise met, living different lives with different insights, and all driven by the need to share, is the beauty of a writer's life: to connect. Writers are often a riddle, us introverts who also desperately want to share with others, to be known and to know. I'm starting to crawl back out from under the safety of my mourning blanket, and to look up from the stack of books I've been hiding with under here. Soon, I'll start to go back out into the world and start exploring again.
I've already learned how much support there is out there. As I continue to nudge my small book forth into the wild and scary world of reviewers and readers and sales, I know I already have one of the best things the writing world has to offer--a community of people searching for not just one truth, but all of them.
----
Read a review of Lost Enough.
As I slowly start to work on the first few items on the ambitious marketing plan list I made for the book when I thought I'd be much happier at this point, some things are beginning to falling into place. The more readings I line up, the more local bookstores (such as Ottawa's Stonewall Wilde's, and Perfect Books) that graciously and happily agree to carry Lost Enough, the more event listings that list my events (such as the stellar Ottawa resource, Bywords Calendar), and even the more publishers and writers retweet my shameless promotional tweets, the more I see that what will always be most valuable to me as a writer (not to mention as a reader) is the sense of community this life has already given me.
Barring my winning the long shot lottery of writing and becoming one of the true rarities of the Canadian book world--an author who can afford to write full-time--I will likely never get rich doing this. Much to my 84-year-old father's chagrin, I will likely never even be able to make enough net profit from my writing to buy more than an occasional bottle of cheap red wine and tub of frozen yogurts in which to drown my financial despair, or a few more books to keep me going.
Here, though, in this writing community, which stretches across all boundaries and borders, and introduces me to people I would never have otherwise met, living different lives with different insights, and all driven by the need to share, is the beauty of a writer's life: to connect. Writers are often a riddle, us introverts who also desperately want to share with others, to be known and to know. I'm starting to crawl back out from under the safety of my mourning blanket, and to look up from the stack of books I've been hiding with under here. Soon, I'll start to go back out into the world and start exploring again.
I've already learned how much support there is out there. As I continue to nudge my small book forth into the wild and scary world of reviewers and readers and sales, I know I already have one of the best things the writing world has to offer--a community of people searching for not just one truth, but all of them.
----
Read a review of Lost Enough.
No comments:
Post a Comment