The ARC's are coming, the ARC's are coming!

It's happening folks. I can't wait to share the news so I'm blogging while I'm making spaghetti with pancetta, asparagus and shredded carrots. (Hopefully, nothing is burning!)

I spent a good part of the afternoon on the phone with the assistant editor on EDGES, (the amazing Beth Potter) going over what's known as "the second pass" loose galleys, pouring over every typo and questionable punctuation mark in the text. (After going through the "first pass" galleys, we had met in a coffee hop downtown and spent four hours going over the final revised manuscript to make sure that we were on the same page!)

Beth said casually today, at the end of squinting at misplaced quotation marks, that she had sent me a couple of bound galleys.

"What?" I cried. "Does that look like a real book?"

"Well, sort of," she said. "It looks like a paperback . . ."

"Is that the same as an ARC?" (Advanced Reader Copy.)

"Yeah, that's it."

"Wow, thanks! I can't wait!" We hung up the phone and I realized the import of our conversation, quickly updated my status on Facebook, and ran out into the snow to pick my daughter up from school . . . whoopeeee!!!!

But now I'm scared, because this means that people will actually read it, and have opinions . . . some good and some bad I suppose . . . and it's February 25th folks, but we still won't be able to get our hands on a hard copy until December 7th . . . hey wait, that's nine and a half months, a pregnancy . . . and lord knows I've had many of those and come out all right!

It's awe-inspiring, how much hard work that goes into publishing - so much so, that it truly becomes a team effort. You would think that I would know a lot about this side of the business because of my grandmother, but I didn't know anything - after all, she was already established as "Madeleine L'Engle, the author," when I was growing up, was always writing and publishing a book a year.(Sometimes two!) She made it look so easy . . . I'm glad to say now that I know that it's not easy, that it takes drive, effort, passion and discipline - qualities I am striving towards if I am able to have a quarter of the endurance that she had and still has, after her death. Thank you for sharing this journey with me!