Life is like a rollercoaster… a box of chocolates… a leaky kitchen sink… So many adages, so little time; and so much truth encompassed by them all. Suffice to say: life can be brilliant, and it can be quite crappy (I used the nicer word there, I’ll have you know).
The last time I posted on my website, I was riding a high – the rollercoaster analogy seems apropos here – the highest high in the sky: publishing my first ever novel. Not only that, but it had been lauded as being a stellar fantasy by my (admittedly limited) Beta reading pair (I think ‘team’ is just too generous a term to describe two people, a.k.a., my sisters) . Yay me! I was on top of the world.
Then the wrenching crash, the obsessive checking and re-checking, and the self-doubting doldrums set in. Sadly, I do have a bit of an artist’s temperament, though perhaps not necessarily the artistic talent that accompanies it, and my enthused cheerleading for myself hit the significant speedbump the delayed gratification of reality provides in spades.
Naturally, as it behoves one’s siblings, they both purchased my ink-and-paper creature (or in this case, binary-encoded creature) tout suite, and one of my former students purchased the third. Though fairy tales really tout the rule of three, I can categorically state: three is not always the magic number. Nope.
And thus my number of successful sales remained: abysmal. So, naturally, I felt the need to constantly check my stats. Multiple times a day. Despite knowing I was being a bit… starts with cr- and the ending rhymes with ‘lazy’. Still, the spiral could not be broken, the low-point not lifted.
Though the promise of reviews on the horizon flickered, particularly the Kirkus Review submission I had dared to aim for, the light at the end of the tunnel might very well have been a train that could run my little choo-choo right off its tracks. Self-doubting fear motivated me to go and check some of the negative reviews posted on their site, and a new fear of my own literary demise was unlocked, courtesy of curiosity. My cat was thoroughly cooked (or was it ‘goose killed’?).
A watched pot never boils, and 2 weeks passed at the same rate as dog years, however, when the change came, inevitably, it felt very unexpected…
Seeing the Kirkus Review email in my inbox upon waking this morning was, sadly, not followed by a positive physical nor emotional reaction. After trying to subdue an angst-driven 20-minute psych-session, during which I imagined all manner of literary evisceration, I finally clawed enough guts together (maybe a bit of a gruesome metaphor?) to open it.
Words cannot describe the initial relief, and then jubilation, that I experienced as I skimmed through it the first time. No ‘hmming’ and ‘haawing’, no veiled criticisms; just a straightforward, (and if I may say so) glowing review. I felt as though I had stuck my tongue in the electric wall socket, leaving me abuzz with adrenaline and bonhomie. So much so, that sitting still in my German lesson – concentrating, I ask you! – was nigh on impossible.
But my fairytale ending has not yet come to its conclusion, dear readers (all three of you, probably): when I officially provided the requisite permission for Kirkus to publish the review on their website, I noticed a small star on the corner of my book’s cover!
“What’s this?” I asked myself, having forgotten all the laudible and extensive wonders inherent in a Kirkus Review, my abject fear and ricocheting excitement rendering me with the reasoning-capacity of a legume. “Maybe everyone gets a star, for aesthetic purposes?” my reasonable, controlled self suggested. And then I had to return to class, Mysterius Interruptus.
Upon my return, I channeled a detective, cross-bred with a bloodhound, and set about solving the mystery of the pretty, star-shaped corner-bauble. I’ll spare you any further lexical acrobatics (mostly because I’m tired and want to go to bed, and being a self-aggrandising numpty with the writing-equivalent of verbal diarrhoea is wearing thin): a starred Kirkus Review is very special. It elevates, say, the sad little indie author with 3 whole book sales into the stratosphere of happiness and contentment. It validates her, and makes her all warm and fuzzy inside, no longer hesitant to gift someone a copy of her book because of crippling imposter syndrome. It is as ‘happily ever after’ as it gets, methinks.
Thus, as we say in Afrikaans, “Fluit, fluit, my storie is uit.” (transl.: “Whistle, whistle, my story is out/done.” – you’re welcome.)
K.I.S.
