Book Launch Day!
🤯😵💫 OK. Holy shit. My book is officially out the door today! I ONLY CRY WITH EMOTICONS with Red Hen Press. I can't believe the day has arrived. I can't tell you how many people I should thank for this. It takes a community to write a book as far as I can tell. Thank you to all the dear people. For more info about the book, check out my book page. (And the latest episode of the Neurotic Tornado 😫🌪 podcast covers stage fright, book launch nerves, and a bizarre peeing nightmare. We also invite Jackie Shannon Hollis to talk about her public speaking experience with her memoir, This Particular Happiness out with Forest Avenue Press.)
In the meantime, here are some crazy statistics about writing I ONLY CRY WITH EMOTICONS for you to ponder:
#️⃣🔢 Number of words: around 71,000
📝📝 Number of drafts: I lost count after 6 (the idea of a "draft" gets blurry for me at some point)
🌴🌴 Date when I starting writing the short story that eventually became this new novel: Dec 2014 (7.5 years ago!)
🙅♀️🙅 Number of times this short story was rejected: more than 20
🏁🏁 Date when I finished a first draft of the novel: March 2015 (7 years ago)
📚📚 Date when I had a good enough draft to submit to publishers: October 2017 (5 years ago)
🙅♂️🙅 Number of times this novel was rejected: more than 20
🕵️👀 Number of years it took to find a publisher once I thought I was "finished": 2-ish years
👍🥳 Number of years from signing the contract to the novel being out in the world: 2-ish years
🖥⌨️ Number of hours spent on this novel: at least a thousand
😭😱 Did I give up a bunch of times and then start working on it again? YES
Thank you! ❤️️❤️️❤️️