Pictures of Me

My novella, Bottoms in Love, will be rereleased soon with a new publisher and with some added content, but I'll blog about that with more information in a few days. My new publisher asked for all my covers to put together an author photo. I was busy with other things, so I zipped them over to her without thinking much about it. Then I got a file back and opened it. Her designer had arranged the covers of my three novels and the new cover for Bottoms in Love and put them over a few different backgrounds and asked me which one I liked. I was completely overwhelmed. I wrote her back that I loved them all, and she agreed and said her designer did a fabulous job, which she definitely had, but what overwhelmed me was seeing what I might look like to someone else. I looked like someone who writes books. If that were anyone else, I might even call him an author.

This immediately led to critical reflection. What the hell is wrong with me? Do I have deep rooted self esteem issues, that it took someone else neatly arranging my covers for me to admit that I'm succeeding in my dream of being a writer? Who knows? Maybe. I tend to think no, though. Anything created, anything built, anything learned loses some of its magic after completion. When you contemplate it, humans walking on two feet and so easily maintaining their balance will fucking blow your mind. Yet most of us walk without ever thinking about it. There's no real mystery in writing a book. You do a little every day and eventually you're done. The possibility feels amazing but as you go you discover it's fun, it's work, and it's fulfilling. There's some mystery in a finished book, but when you wrote it that mystery is replaced by the wonderful memories from a string of writing sessions. As the author it's clear how you got from A to Z because you were there for every letter.

Satisfaction and fulfillment are different from amazement. I love writing and I love writing books. The intrinsic rewards are so incredible they easily make up for the almost complete lack of extrinsic rewards, but feeling fulfilled and satisfied and even proud aren't the same as feeling amazed. And for just a moment the other night I saw all my books in one picture and I was amazed. Then the feeling evaporated. I remembered that I simply wrote those books a page or two or three at a time, and I sat down to write a page for my WIP.