Reviews, the Sweetest Tip

I am so delighted with the first Goodreads reviews to come in for Lost Enough.

Reviews on author sales sites like Amazon, and book review sites like Goodreads, have become so important these days in promoting authors' work. Although I've known this for several years, the release of Lost Enough has, selfishly, brought the need for such reviews home.

Not only do I deeply appreciate readers taking the time to post their thoughts about my own book, but I am trying to do my part to review, or at the very least rate, the books I read.

I've reviewed books, and still do, for Arc Poetry Magazine, where there is more room to delve down into the essence and details of a book's construction, targeted to readers and authors already engaged with the genre, author or book.

Goodreads and bookseller sites, though, offer access to a different, and often much broader, set of potential readers, and the reader-driven reviews there have become increasingly essential for authors.

Leaving a review, even something as brief as "Great book," is a great way to engage with and support the writing community, and to help the writing and the authors you love get noticed by other potential readers. If you love something, say something.

What Comes Next

All the pivotal moments now behind me, both good and bad, revolving around launching Lost Enough, and losing my mom around the same time, the question keeps coming up: What now?

Some nexts have tumbled or slid into place, like they do, with the general getting-on-with of life: going back to work, hauling our kid off to summer camps, getting all the things done that I had neglected (I'm looking at you, garden), reconnecting with friends, and trying not to panic in the face of the daily morning news.

Plus, of course, life didn't stop while I was ricocheting around inside my bubble, even if my blogging about it stopped more than once.

Books keep being published all around me and somehow showing up on my shelves (often roughly around the same time the cost of a book disappears from my wallet); Arc Poetry Magazine keeps getting submissions; and my own submissions to journals and anthologies keep coming back or, even, thankfully being accepted.

Some of the books to come my way recently include (but, oy, are definitely not limited to) Christine McNair's Charm, Daniel Zomparelli's Everything is Awful and You're a Terrible Person, and Jen Sookfong Lee's Gentlemen of the Shade: My Own Private Idaho, as well as a few by Tanya Huff, whom I have had the enormous pleasure of chatting with at the last couple of Limestone Genre Expos.

Aside from diving through this amazing stack of new books, though, most of my current what-nows feel like a wrapping-up rather than a starting, as I set up readings from Lost Enough for later this summer and in the fall across Canada (more on that once more details are confirmed, but I can already promise I'll be reading in Calgary and Edmonton in October!).

I'm also finishing up edits on an anthology of essays and poetry on motherhood in precarious times, due out next year from Demeter Press. Again, more details to come, but I am delighted with the collection, which I've been fortunate enough to co-edit with two fabulous and insightful U.S. professors, Dannielle Joy Davis and Barbara Schwartz-Bechet.

In addition to letting me read through amazing proposals, essays and poems from a diverse range of authors, the project has also brought me back in touch with MLA style, which, for an editor who has worked mostly in fiction, poetry, journalism and corporate text, is like running into, twenty years later, the narcissistic, fur-wearing exchange student you sat next to in Kinship Studies. Sure, you understand them better than you used to, but you still don't want to date them.

So, what is next after all the what next of finishing up old projects? I'm not actually sure. I have some things started. I have ideas. And, of course, I have a lot of weeds waiting for me in the garden out back.

But, I don't know what I'm going to tackle first. And that, surprising, feels more liberating to me right now than scary.