Stoked but delusional...
Sometimes my imagination just goes crazy and leads me right up that garden path. Even though I KNOW it's insane to fantasize about whatever it is, I can't seem to stop myself and take the prudent "wait and see, lower your expectations" course of action. (Oh, like you've never had a conversation with Oprah in your head.)
(You HAVE, haven't you? If I'm the only one, I'm going to be really embarrassed.)
Like right now, for instance.
Kelly, the girl who lives next door, who is also our babysitter, is at BEA right now. BEA is the BookExpo of America and it's in New York City this year. Kelly and her mother go every year and bring back hundreds of books. They always shop for my girls--Kelly is a reader like Ana is a reader. (Picture the way fish relate to water and you'll understand how these girls relate to books.)
This year, I asked Kelly to take one of MY books (The Mermaid's Purse) to the Yarn Harlot, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. I sent a little note and thanked her for inspiring me with both her writing and her knitting.
Kelly just called from NYC to tell me that she'd dropped off my book and gotten a signed copy of "Stephanie Pearl-McPhee Casts Off," which I already own but this is a personalized copy to ME! I'm psyched.
See, I have this little fantasy working that Stephanie will actually READ my book and that she'll like it. (A lot of people really DO like it, I promise. No. Really. Honest.) So, she e-mails me and we strike up a friendship and I get to thank her for giving me back my writing voice. Seriously, I started really writing again after I started reading her site. I think we'd be good friends -- as, I'm sure, every other one of her readers thinks. (But this is MY fantasy so I can justify it. Those other readers will just have to get their own fantasies.) I've been reading her archives and we've actually had some of the same sort of spastic adventures... not that THAT is always necessary for a good friendship because, in all honesty, most of the world is not as goofy and earnest and tightly-wound as I am on a daily basis.
So, then, in my fantasy, she's just dying to tell me how to go about marketing my work and getting a book deal. Because I hear that happens all the time--people seek you out to offer you the use of their agents. Yeah. Right.
But I do think I'm ready for that --at long last. (Not for The Harlot to offer me help but to finally start to go after my own dream.) I've never done any marketing of my own work --it just seemed wrong and sort of inorganic and really against my innate personality. I can build other people up but I never could seem to do it for myself, if that makes sense. But after spending the better part of the last year in therapy talking about why it's so hard for me to recognize that I have this gift to share with people, that some people could really BENEFIT from reading my work, I think I'm ready. Scared out of my mind, but ready.
But back to my fantasy: so, Stephanie will love my book so much that she'll talk about it on her blog and link to my web site. (I mean, if she likes it. Which could happen. If she reads it. Which could also maybe happen.)
(Maybe.)
I don't have any more of my books to sell (except the Navajo Quilt Edition) but maybe if enough people want them, I could find a publisher to take me on. I want to NOT self publish again. I'm so terrible at the business side of things. Like, I applied for a tax ID number and collected sales tax but I didn't actually get that I had to file a report every quarter to declare my sale tax. The government really, really HATES it when you forget to give them money. So it starts making up amounts that you might owe and then you have to prove that they are wrong. Which is hard to do if you're not that strong at the accounting/business part of things.
Even in your own fantasy.
(You HAVE, haven't you? If I'm the only one, I'm going to be really embarrassed.)
Like right now, for instance.
Kelly, the girl who lives next door, who is also our babysitter, is at BEA right now. BEA is the BookExpo of America and it's in New York City this year. Kelly and her mother go every year and bring back hundreds of books. They always shop for my girls--Kelly is a reader like Ana is a reader. (Picture the way fish relate to water and you'll understand how these girls relate to books.)
This year, I asked Kelly to take one of MY books (The Mermaid's Purse) to the Yarn Harlot, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. I sent a little note and thanked her for inspiring me with both her writing and her knitting.
Kelly just called from NYC to tell me that she'd dropped off my book and gotten a signed copy of "Stephanie Pearl-McPhee Casts Off," which I already own but this is a personalized copy to ME! I'm psyched.
See, I have this little fantasy working that Stephanie will actually READ my book and that she'll like it. (A lot of people really DO like it, I promise. No. Really. Honest.) So, she e-mails me and we strike up a friendship and I get to thank her for giving me back my writing voice. Seriously, I started really writing again after I started reading her site. I think we'd be good friends -- as, I'm sure, every other one of her readers thinks. (But this is MY fantasy so I can justify it. Those other readers will just have to get their own fantasies.) I've been reading her archives and we've actually had some of the same sort of spastic adventures... not that THAT is always necessary for a good friendship because, in all honesty, most of the world is not as goofy and earnest and tightly-wound as I am on a daily basis.
So, then, in my fantasy, she's just dying to tell me how to go about marketing my work and getting a book deal. Because I hear that happens all the time--people seek you out to offer you the use of their agents. Yeah. Right.
But I do think I'm ready for that --at long last. (Not for The Harlot to offer me help but to finally start to go after my own dream.) I've never done any marketing of my own work --it just seemed wrong and sort of inorganic and really against my innate personality. I can build other people up but I never could seem to do it for myself, if that makes sense. But after spending the better part of the last year in therapy talking about why it's so hard for me to recognize that I have this gift to share with people, that some people could really BENEFIT from reading my work, I think I'm ready. Scared out of my mind, but ready.
But back to my fantasy: so, Stephanie will love my book so much that she'll talk about it on her blog and link to my web site. (I mean, if she likes it. Which could happen. If she reads it. Which could also maybe happen.)
(Maybe.)
I don't have any more of my books to sell (except the Navajo Quilt Edition) but maybe if enough people want them, I could find a publisher to take me on. I want to NOT self publish again. I'm so terrible at the business side of things. Like, I applied for a tax ID number and collected sales tax but I didn't actually get that I had to file a report every quarter to declare my sale tax. The government really, really HATES it when you forget to give them money. So it starts making up amounts that you might owe and then you have to prove that they are wrong. Which is hard to do if you're not that strong at the accounting/business part of things.
Even in your own fantasy.
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