Tag Archives: Launch Party

Things That Make You Go Argh!

1 Reply

Let’s talk about mistakes today. We all make them. No matter how we might try to convince ourselves, or those around us, of the contrary, every single man, woman, and child on this blessed planet has made, is possibly making at this moment, and will continue to make, mistakes. Some are big; some are small. Some are stupid; some are careless. Some arise from haste; some arise from a surplus of trust. But we all make them. The difference in how a mistake affects us, however, is determined largely by how we handle it.

One of my favorite mistake-handling moments comes from The Lion King’s Rafiki, bludgeoning Simba with his staff to illustrate his personal take on mistakes (the clip talks about the past, but you get the point): We can either run from mistakes—wham!—or we can learn from them. Lesson: Get hit hard enough, you learn how to duck.

I’ll repeat that, in case you missed it:

Don’t run from your mistakes; learn from them.

Owning up to making a mistake is a tough thing to do. That’s why so many of us tend to run away instead, try to hide the fact that we goofed up, did something wrong. We blame others—any available scapegoat we can find to avoid shouldering that blame ourselves. All too often, the only thing all that responsibility-dodging does is make matters exponentially worse than they would’ve been if we would’ve just admitted to having screwed up, right from the start.

Don’t believe me? Think about the last five or six political scandals—how much more would you have respected those individuals if they would’ve just come clean at the start, said, “Hey, I really messed up. I don’t know what I was thinking, but whatever it was, it was stupid. I am sorry I did it, and I will take the full consequences of my actions.” Wow, politicians behaving honorably in the face of a jumbo, career-destroying screw-up? Yeah, I know—you can tell I write fiction, can’t you?

Well, I’m not a politician. I’m a human being, just like everybody else on the planet, prone to mistakes and missteps. I do try to learn from them, though, to take setbacks and turn them into learning opportunities. Even if the learning took place too late to help me, at least I can use that knowledge to help other people avoid making the same mistakes.

The roughly two weeks since the launch party for Widow Woman have been full of excitement, revelations, and, to be frank, mistakes. There aren’t many things I feel I would do differently, but there are a few. Publishing a book is a crazy, tough journey, and I know that the days and months ahead are going to bring more revelations and probably uncover more mistakes I made. But I’m only human, I’m learning as I go along, and I will happily share those lessons with others out there hoping for a smoother ride.

In the meantime, let me pass along something my wonderful husband shared with me when I bumped face-to-face into one of those mistakes (Errors in my book; fixes on the horizon, but not there yet. Ouch, ouch, ouch. Mine to catch and I missed them.). Without skipping a beat, he reminded me that one of the identifying features that makes a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby so priceless is the presence of mistakes that were corrected in subsequent editions.

Yeah, that’s right. Those first editions are valuable because the mistakes are there.

Now, I would never, ever, ever, put myself in the same class as Fitzgerald, but I have to admit, I found the notion that we had first-edition mistakes in common extraordinarily comforting.

After all, we’re all first editions, aren’t we?

The Trip Is Almost Over

Leave a reply

Wow–hope you’ve got time for a longer read, because I’ve got a lot to say today. First, I should find out today how my expert is doing with the conversion and upload; sounds as though the Go-Day may be approaching. With that in mind, I’ve been engaging in a flurry of promotion preparations, many of which came out of a fantastic writers’ retreat this weekend.

My head is spinning so fast, it’s a wonder I haven’t been stopped for a DWI–yet. Since Monday, I’ve revised my website; updated my Twitter background with my book cover; fleshed out my Goodreads profile; signed up for ifttt.com/ and adopted a handful of recipes (holy crap, that site is cool!); arranged a publicity consult with a contact through the writers’ retreat; set up a launch party discussion with a local force of nature who expressed an interest in helping me with it–I can’t even remember all the platform-building steps I’ve taken this week!

Hopefully, it will all help, because Widow Woman is on its way, and soon.

So. Continuing my interest-building efforts, one of the tips shared at the retreat was to share with readers the stories behind the story. Of course, I know that’s true–I’m a reader myself and I love to hear how a writer’s work came into being. So in that vein, as the release date for Widow Woman draws near, I want to share with you some of what went on behind the scenes as I wrote this book.

Often, one of the first things readers want to know is “How did you come up with the idea for this book?” Well, in this case, my book is a work of fiction. Having said that, however, it’s also true that there are some things in it that, while fiction at their core, were inspired by things that happened in my own life.

One of the early scenes of my book involves the death of the main character’s mother. The following excerpt was very much inspired by my memories of scattering my own mother’s ashes back in the spring of 1997, in the lovely, rolling hills near my uncle’s cabin in Virginia:

For long moments, only the hum of the swaying birch trees broke the silence, whispering a dirge for my mother. Eventually, Peter gave another little cough: the time had come.

Stepping back from Catherine, I opened the urn, startled by the sight of a silken, drawstring pouch. When I wrapped my fingers around it, it felt full of coarse sand or cement. That’s what I thought, at first: The funeral parlor had played a cruel trick. No wonder the urn felt so heavy. Then I realized with a grim start that it was no joke: that bag of sand or cement or ashes was all that was left of my mother.

It took me several attempts to widen the pouch’s mouth. As I fumbled with the strings, I realized how much I’d romanticized the concept of scattering Mom’s ashes: I’d envisioned her floating off into the sapphire sky, dissipating on the breeze, like a dandelion gone to seed. The awful reality entailed upending the pouch a little at a time, shaking her remains unceremoniously into the brittle, brown grass at my feet. When I’d emptied the pouch, I couldn’t stop staring at the chunky, grey dust clumped on top of the dead weeds and wildflowers.

Suddenly I wondered what to do. Shove the pouch in my coat pocket? Crumple it up and throw it in the garbage back at Mom’s house? My stomach jolted. What if a few flecks of Mom still clung inside it? What parts of her would they be? Her hand? Her smile?
In my interview for “It’s A Woman’s World,” I spoke of how cathartic much of my early writing was, and this scene, though part of a larger work of fiction, was, also–it allowed me to release some very difficult and somewhat surreal memories in a way that allowed me to make sense of them.

Anyway, I hope that that whets your appetite a little. If you’d like to know more about the book, its back story, my inspiration, secrets behind my character development, drop me a line.