Something beautiful happened here the other week. And I’m going to tell you about it now. But first, some background.
I am writing, among other things, a children’s picture book. This process is about a year old now, maybe a bit more actually, and there is no end in sight. I assure you the whole of the experience is WAY more exciting than that sentence might otherwise have you believe.
To get fully caught up to speed on me and my 1st book, listen to my chat with Stefan Shepherd of Zooglobble on the debut episode of his podcast My Other Other Gig. There, I go on and on about this book, probably revealing too much about the characters and the story arc. But it was a super fun chat and not the worst way to spend 45 minutes of your time.
Over the past month or so I have been sloooooooowly getting up the nerve to make edits to my original manuscript after receiving some cold, tactical recommendations from an editor. I’d been sitting on those suggestions for a while because I have no experience in returning to a piece of written work and, frankly, had no idea how to go about climbing back into that particular headspace, where I was and who I was when I first wrote it, to begin the process of changing it. As a blogger and writer of articles, when I press publish those stories are gone, and after I share ’em around the internet, as is done nowadays, they are, with few exceptions, purged from my feeble mind. To that end, it is simply amazing that I don’t end up repeating myself here. You know, being redundant…saying the same things again and again?
Okay, enough story set-up and lame attempts at something resembling humor, here’s the beautiful thing:
The Mouse read my revised manuscript back to me.
Why is this significant, you might wonder? I’ll explain real quick: Mouse reading my words back to me out loud is beautiful because 1) when I first wrote the book she couldn’t yet read and 2) because she, with her crazy/wonderful mind, is the genesis of this book. Without her random brilliant nonsense, it doesn’t exist at all. If pausing on the edits yielded anything positive it was that the delay afforded Mouse the opportunity to learn to read and then read the story she inspired. Yeah, I cried a bit. But then again, that always happens. For parents/grandparents/involved adults, it’s a slight tearjerker of a picture book.
I honestly have no clue if this book of mine will ever be published, but regardless of what happens tomorrow, the story has already given me so damn much today. Gravy, from here forward.
