We are home from Colorado and trying to readjust to life in a normal state that is not covered in fabulous snow. I am sitting at my desk staring out the window at a warm (for February) winter rain knowing that Crested Butte got between six and ten inches of snow last night, which is amazing, but Nashville has our house, daughter, friends, church and, as it happens, work for me.
I have spent the last two days doing something I thought I had forgotten how to do. I am working with one of my favorite writers to craft both new and existing content into a gift book. For the last week or so, we have been swapping content, and then yesterday I sat down at my computer and tried to remember how one goes about developing a book. Surprisingly, it came back pretty quickly. That she is incredibly gifted does make it a lot easier.
I love being one of the first people who get to read beautiful writing, knowing that soon thousands of people will cry at the essay that I just cried through. I used to love walking down the aisle of an airplane and see people reading books I had helped bring to market. I always wanted to chat them up and ask what they thought. I didn’t because that would have been weird, but I wanted to.
I am eternally thankful that I can Google all the things I don’t know, except how to remove a section break in a Word document. If anyone knows how to do that could you come show me? It is beyond my ability and the Google instructions don’t work. But, the word murmuration is a real word and means both a flock of starlings and the action of murmuring. Juncoes are small birds (and in the middle of a sentence does not need to be capitalized). And, if you get even close to the right spelling of a word, Google will help you out. I am able to appear much smarter and more professional than I probably am thanks to a search engine.
Even better is the back and forth, both on the phone and via email, with a fun, funny, talented writer. I miss talking to writers every day. I miss talking about writing every day. I miss losing several hours working on a document because it is just so good that half the day is gone and I have forgotten to eat. (Ok, who are we kidding. Of course, I had lunch, but it is the idea of forgetting to eat that we are talking about.)
When this book is done and ready to go to market I will interview the fabulous author and do a feature on it here. You will want one for yourself and several to share. Maybe she will let me print an excerpt.
So, instead of snow and bluebird skies, I have rain, a messy desk, an office dog, and six documents open at once on a giant monitor screen. It’s a surprisingly good trade-off.