Fleeting Moments to Freeze

Posted Aug 1 2012, 7:00 am in fiction, Release Day, Send

August 1st is finally here! SEND is officially being shipped today, though Barnes & Noble stocked their shelves a few days early.

Excuse me for a moment while I bask. *sighs*

I can’t believe this day is here. This is a bucket list moment — truly. I recently found a old elementary school assignment in which I had to plot out what I wanted to do for my entire life. It was a grid that had space for my twenties, thirties, forties, all the way up to age 100. I remember my eyes popping at the final space. I completed the assignment. I’d planned to attend nursing school and work as a nurse in my twenties. Get married and have babies in my thirties. Retire from nursing and write kids’ books in my forties and die at a hundred. 

A hundred years seemed like an eternity to my thirteen-year-old self. To my *coughs* much older self, a hundred’s not that far away. Worse, this much older self knows what my thirteen-year-old self did not…  death could happen at any time. Yet, as I read that old paper, I realized my predictions weren’t too far off the mark. I did attend nursing school. Briefly. For about eighteen months before I realized I’d picked the wrong vocation. I got married and had babies in my twenties, finishing college at the same time. But here I am in my forties, my first young adult novel out in the real world.

*sniffles* I wish my mom had lived long enough to see this day. She’s the one who taught me to read, to love books, and — though she was exasperated at the time — told me to go write myself a life, after I’d whined too long about the insignificant nonsense consuming mine. I was in my thirties at the time and what she’d said hit me like a fist to the gut — I hadn’t written anything more glamorous than a shopping list in years.

Funny how easy it can be to lose the things that make us… well, us.

So, I started writing again. Little things like essays, editorials, articles for various organizations to which I’d belonged at the time. The allure of the novel… well, that eluded me. I tried. Over and over again. But I always gave up. I didn’t trust my ability — hell, sometimes I still don’t.

But one day, I finally did finish a novel. And another. And another after that. I was afraid to let anyone read them. I didn’t think they were any good. She read them all. Her favorite was Border Lines, a contemporary romance about a doctor who falls for a journalist writing the story that ends up shutting down her free clinic. The hero in this story is actor Gilles Marini, though I did not plan that. I happened to be flipping channels one day and there he was… the character I THOUGHT I’d made up… living, breathing, and dancing a mambo.

I called Mom immediately, told her what channel and said, “It’s him.” She knew immediately what I was talking about. “Oh, my God, with long hair and a British accent, that could be your Thomas!”

I kept writing even as cancer slowly killed my mother. A week before she died, she looked at us, my sister and me, and said, “I thought there’d be more time. I really thought there’d be more time. I wish I’d fallen in love again. I wish I’d had more children.”

She had so many regrets. And I couldn’t help thinking about that silly homework assignment from eighth grade and how long a hundred years felt like and how I’d wasted so many of them worrying about insignificant crap and what people thought and what they might say, I almost missed it. I almost missed this… this moment, right here. Book Birthday Day. I almost let it go.

Celebrate it with me. It’s the best day of my life, ranking right up there with the day my sons were born or the day I got married. Celebrate it with me, because so many of you reading this right now helped me reach this point.

Celebrate.

A hundred years isn’t very long at all.

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