I popped into Borders last weekend and saw a book called A Christmas Wonderland (published by Regal Books) on one of their front tables. Then I remembered that I wrote a short non-fiction Christmas story for that book about a year ago. My copy hadn’t arrived in the mail yet (still hasn’t), so I enjoyed flipping through it to find the story I wrote. It’s called “Turkey, Coffee, and Transformation.” It’s a story about a Christmas tradition that a couple of my friends and I started a few years ago.I visited Barnes & Noble last night and they had the same book available on one of their front tables as well. How cool is that? Ironically, I haven’t seen my own Christmas book, The Experience of Christmas, on too many front tables in bookstores, but I did get a neat e-mail from a friend yesterday saying that she saw the book close to the checkout aisle of a Price Chopper grocery story in Kansas City. For all of these reasons and more, I find the entire publishing process to be both fascinating and nerve-wracking.
When you sit down to write something for publication, you have no idea where it is going to end up or who might pick it up and read it. I still get nice e-mails once in a while from people who have read my singles book, Single Servings. I’m always touched when I receive such e-mails. In fact, I print them and put them in something I call my “encouragement file”—something I turn to when I’m having a bad day.
