Cue King Harvest:
. . . It's a supernatural delight, everybody's dancing in the moonlight . . .
(Photo courtesy of MarthaStewart.com)
Hi. I’m back. And just in case you missed me shouting about it earlier this week, I’m over the moon excited to announce my first novel, “How to Live With a Ghost,” will be published by Pearl City Press. The manuscript is headed into copy editing and a designer has started working on the cover art. There are a few other odds and ends to wrap, after which it will all go into layout and then IT WILL BE A REAL LIVE BOOK!
Ahem. Sorry for yelling. I have big feels about this.
 |
Life right now is kinda like Raider and Extra Cat: wanting something really badly, then not being sure what's going to happen when you actually get it. (Photo by Melinda Wichmann) |
I’m hauling this blog out of hibernation (or back from Timbuktu or wherever the Gypsy took herself off to the last year and a half) as a way to share the journey, as well as a platform for shameless self-promotion, which is incredibly, stupidly, painfully hard for introverted writers who would like nothing more than to be left alone with their characters and a big pot of coffee. In any event, the Gypsy is back in the saddle and galloping headlong into this new adventure.
THE GYPSY AND ‘THE BOOK’
When I created The Ink-Stained Gypsy a few years back, I planned for her to write witty observations about the random craziness of life. Guess what? There was so much crazy going on there wasn’t time to write about it. There was The Job I walked away from after 35 years. No regrets. There was The Family Estate to deal with, which was not nearly as glamorous as it might sound.
 |
The Chaos Goblin in action. All gas, no brakes. (Photo by Sharla Glick/Glick Photography) |
Then there was The Chaos Goblin’s obedience career to manage. If you’ve met the Chaos Goblin, you understand the level of crazy involved there. On top of it all, there were family health crises, check-engine-soon lights, loose cows, tornadoes in the back 40, sheep running amuck (WTH, we don’t even own sheep), planting seasons, harvest seasons, several AirBNB adventures I am glad I survived, field fires and raccoons in unexpected places.
Through it all, I was writing The Book. I’ve been writing The Book for so long, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing The Book. Just ask the Farmer. About once a year, he’d ask me, “Are you still writing that book?” Yes. I was. It appeared to be a permanent condition.
 |
Writing a book is easy. You just tell a story. You have words, right? After you’ve strung about 90,000 of them together in a coherent fashion, you’re done. Then you try to publish it and discover if there was a way to do something wrong, you’ve done it to the tenth degree.
Fortunately, I have been training dogs since I was 9 so I’m master-level caliber at screwing things up and starting over. Somewhere during the initial manuscript critiques and beta readers, I encountered people who cared that I was writing The Book. They came from unexpected places: former newspaper colleagues, connections made at a writers’ conference and friends with previously unknown mad literary skills. The universe conspired to set me on a crash course with them and, after an existential crisis about the Oxford comma, here we are.
Next post: what The Book is about and why it took me so ridiculously long to write it.
