With more than a month passed since I completed my book, I’ve come face to face with a bracing reality. Getting a book into the market is embarrassingly easy thanks to self-publishing sites –living with my work at large is very difficult.
     I never quite grasped the tortured artist syndrome. You know the stereotype to which I refer, the painter who keeps adding a tiny brushstroke here and there over months to what seems to be a finished piece, or the book writer who cannot say one dang good thing about his or her writing. Well, I understand it quite well now. It’s humbling to put something as final as book out there because a story is often a matter of taste and produces a quite subjective experience. When someone mentions my book to others while I’m standing there, I simply want to run. I seem to get a case of the aw-shucks too if they speak well of it. I almost insist they need to say something negative about it before I can walk away.
     The good news is that, on the whole, I’m learning to take what comes or doesn’t come from it.  I’m content because I’ve received some nice feedback from those who have read the work. Thank you, thank you, and thank you to those who read and replied. Another dash of satisfaction has come from seeing visitation to the website increase in the last month. Apparently there’s some outlying interest. Finally, on this day and at this moment at least, there’s the promise of reaching my target audience in the near future. I have one oral commitment from a published author who intends to use my book at Finger Lakes Community College in the Fall. I also managed, somehow, to interest a professor of Literature at Michigan State University to read my book.
     If The Monkey’s Paw Trilogy finds its way into the hands of young adult students in high school and college classes, I will spend a week, possibly two, strutting everyplace I go. I just have to hope no one actually wants me to speak before them about the book. Not sure I could pull that off.