In any case, I’ve been looking for things to keep my post-holiday spirits up, and a new year is always a deliciously optimistic proposition to me. Because anything can happen.

It’s here! The first proof copy of my new book! Auntie was a definite labor of love, and I was so excited to be sent the first copy this week in preparation for the January launch.

It might look like I’m celebrating the annual Food & Wine Festival at California Adventure Park, which I was. I was also celebrating a birthday, spring in general, and a few much-needed days off work. I’ve been celebrating UConn’s journey to another March Madness championship game (I picked them winning in my bracket), today’s eclipse, and a new delicious lemon recipe to make with all my tree’s lemons.

Do you ever consider where you were when you read a certain book? Or who gave you the book? Who recommended it?

I participated in Oceanside’s “Write On” event yesterday, a wonderful day that celebrates writing, books, and authors.

I've done many an author event in my day, various festivals or community nights where markets or bookstores feature a group of authors for an afternoon, an evening, a couple hours here or there. These events see the authors setting up tables with flyers, bookmarks, and, of course, books to sell. I immediately loved them when I started 10 years ago, because they made me feel so official. Like a real author. Over time they got harder, mostly because I started to learn how difficult it is to sell books. Picture readers perusing a parking lot full of author tables, where they mull over everything from poetry to mystery to romance to self-help to literary novel to historical non-fiction to delightful everyman memoir. With such selection (and with every reader coming into such events with his or her own specific genre preferences), I can tell you that the odds of these readers selecting YOUR book to purchase are low. So I got used to ending these events having sold almost no books. (In some cases, selling actually no books.) In short, it started to feel discouraging.

I'm of course still reeling from yesterday's news of Betty White--it's safe to say it put a damper on the entire country's NYE festivities--but while on my Christmas vacation, I was quite sad to learn about the passing of Joan Didion.

It's been a while! But I wanted to report on how the launch of Yuppie is going, mostly because this was the first "virtual" launch I've done. And by virtual, I don't even mean that I organized some sort of Zoom-esque book reading, because that sounded awful. And complicated. So my traditional book signing invites that get mailed out were replaced by general announcements, giving readers the chance to order autographed copies of Yuppie that would ship directly to them.

It's no secret that I'm a non-fiction girl. Memoir, specifically. I get annoyed by good, fascinating novels when I think about the fact that it's all made up and didn't actually happen. For me, it's much more satisfying to read about something that actually happened. More than that, something written by the person it happened to (as opposed to a biographer or historian). There's just no comparison to real life, and the fascinating, heartbreaking, and triumphant situations we get ourselves into.

I love this little sculpture, that it's of a female and that she appears to be in thought. I've also enjoyed decorating my house with stacks of my favorite books--books being such a big part of what I myself think about. Whether writing them or reading them, one might argue the best thing about books is that they make you think, and usually about things outside your comfort zone, things you know nothing about, or things you never had a reason to even contemplate prior to reading about them. So I really couldn't think of a better spot for this little sculpture.

In the week leading up to Thanksgiving, I participated in the #givethanks challenge, the goal of which was to flood social media with a wave of gratitude. In many ways, it's harder to be grateful these days, especially now that we're into the holiday season and so many people's plans (mine included) to see family are having to be cancelled.

Somehow I managed to go the entire month of September without blogging, so I'll just catch you up by saying it included a resort getaway in 120 degree weather, an attempt at golfing, an expansion of my super amazing herb garden (pesto on the menu this week!), an almost full return to my pre-injury running distance, and, of course, about a million read-throughs of the new manuscript. And by a million I mean like 4. But still. It does become rather easy to become so fatigued with your own writing that you're pretty convinced that it's terrible.

Sometimes it's hard to know whether you like something so much because you get used to it the way it is or because it's actually good. It's a quandary I find myself in after finishing a manuscript, because there's usually an initial order in which I write and organize my stories. And I do get used to them being in this order, to the point that it can be hard for me to tell if they would be better if I changed some of them up, switch their orders, etc. Or more specifically, it's hard for me to actually move them, even if I do think they would be better in a different chapter.

I recently did an interesting thing. I read through all my books. Since I've only recently become a Kindle user, I'd never before read them on Kindle. So I decided it might be interesting thing to see what they all look like, what the experience is like reading them electronically. There are small annoyances, like having to either click forward to see footnotes and then click back, or waiting until the end of the chapter to see them, at which point you forget what they were supposed to apply to in the first place. But, as I've previously mentioned, reading books on Kindle is, well, kinda nice.

Honestly, I never wanted one. I've never had any interest in giving up the reading of actual books. Holding them in my hands and turning the pages and hefting them with me on planes and keeping them stacked on my bedside table. I also never wanted to give up the library, and having reason to go there and select my next book. I've really never even considered getting a Kindle.

I always give myself a nice long writing break after a book comes out. It's relaxing. So much so that when I start thinking about starting the next book, it makes me feel a bit stressed. Like, am I ready for that? Do I want to do that? Do I really want to do that? And so I stall. Until I can talk myself into putting my big girl writer pants back on and getting on with it.

There's something about having your book(s) in the library that makes an author feel legitimate. I confess that due to my status an unknown to the majority of the literary world, most libraries probably do not carry my books. Which makes it extra special when they do. Call numbers. Shelf space. Holds. Simply having your name in the library catalog as a searchable author is delight enough.

Aftermath is probably the wrong word, but it's always interesting as an author to go through the first couple of months after a book launch. Of course, my circle of readers and fans is quite small, so take anything I say with a grain of reality salt, but it's nice to hear tidbits of feedback as they come in from readers.