Book Launch: Fantasy vs. Reality

Well, here I am. I wrote my first book, it was a wild success, and now I'm kicked back in my easy chair, sipping on rose champagne and walking on air clouds all day. I can finally say that I am a published author and it feels SO GOOD!

I used to imagine this moment and wonder how it would feel to be a legit writer person, you know like Ann Lamott or Glennon Doyle or any of those nauseatingly inspirational women who seem to create fairy dust from the words they speak. You know? Those wildly successful authors who post a sentence about their dog and they instantly get ten million likes because their lives are now just THAT interesting?

Whenever I would think about this moment, I couldn't quite imagine what it would feel like, but I knew for sure that I would be so happy to have arrived and find myself in the same category as those cats.

So naturally, when launch day arrived, I was over the moon. My team and I had worked out all the kinks with kindle and my Author account was finally set up and ready to go in the final hours before launch time. We had walked through a million setbacks to get here and this was going to be my moment.

I was so excited.

But instead of my girl Ann sitting on my bed and word fairies dancing in my head that morning, I woke up with a burning in my throat like I had never felt before and what felt like a boat full of water in my head. Not just any water either. This was like a boat had capsized in the murky waters of Lousiana, and my head was so flooded, I couldn't make sense of what was happening. All I knew is I was going to be a published author that day, so I was going to do THIS THING, despite how I felt.

Meanwhile, the kids woke up and needed breakfast and my husband and I had failed to make a getaway plan. You know, for me to "get away" to that magical land where published authors go and where I wouldn't need to do dishes or laundry that day. I would simply sit back on my "easy" chair (aka my broken lawn chair) and watch my book sales go up.

So I stumbled into the kitchen with my nightshirt and my swampy head and looked for some protein I could eat. It just so happened that we were fresh out of all the protein in our house.

Eggs, milk, crablegs. Nothing. There wasn't even protein powder so I could make my usual shake. Nope.

About that time, my marketer, Meg sent over some stats and to my surprise, my book had already climbed to no.1 in new releases and it was steadily lurching forward. Along with that, she also sent me a list of places that had listed my book and I was more pleased than I should have been to see my book on Walmart.com. My 15-year-old self was full-on fangirling when I whirled around from loading the dishes and proudly coughed out that my book was now in Walmart!

My teenager rolled her eyes at me and burst out laughing, but I couldn't stop coughing. I staggered over to the medicine cabinet and reached for the vitamin C and whatever else that would stop the dam in my head and wished to God I could GET AWAY from all of this, but unfortunately "all of this" was attached to my head!

It WAS, in fact, my own body revolting against me, and what I thought would be the beginning of my "author career" turned out to be the beginning of the worst head cold and migraine I've had in decades. It's been seven days and I am just now able to speak without coughing or my head exploding

It's been a week since my book "baby" first entered the world and what a week it’s been! I could never have anticipated the things that have happened this week, or that Amazon would sell out of my books within a few hours of launching, and that no one would have their books for me to sign when they came to my launch party. I could never have predicted how tired and exhausted I would be or how I would be awakened that same night by someone trying to steal our truck out of our driveway. In a million years I could not have imagined sitting on the edge of my bed praying for my husband's safety as he chased after the robber in his new diesel truck. But that's a story for another day.

There's been more joy and more obstacles in these seven days than I could have ever imagined, but I am grateful.

Grateful that I had people in my life who could carry me. Grateful that I am healthy and that I no longer have pain in my body all the time. Being sick reminded me of how I used to feel on a regular basis and I am so deeply thankful for the healing I have experienced. Thanks to the hardships of this week, I've gained a new level of compassion for my former self and for anyone who has chronic pain in their mind/body. I have a new level of respect for what my body went through during those years of chronic pain and depression.

And isn't that what this book is all about? Isn't that what my story was meant for? To bring healing and understanding to the suffering we feel as humans? Wasn't it so that we could find some empathy in each other's experiences and know that we're not alone?

Here in the real world, we get sick on important days and our neck hurts and our bodies ache and we feel too broken to even feel like celebrating.

At the end of the day, it might not have been the most magical launch of my first book, but I wouldn't have had it any other way. Because I know that someone out there is feeling the same way I did and wondering if anyone cares or sees them? Someone is laying in their bed right now and can't even lift their head off their pillow, much less lift a pen to write a thank you note to all the people that have helped them.

I understand, because I was one of those people this past week.

P.s.We never did find any protein in our house that day but I'm happy to report that I eventually made it out of my nightshirt in time to go get some celebratory ice cream at about 8 pm.