let it go

I just broke my favorite plate and dropped my dinner on the floor. I don’t keep the kind of kitchen floor you can eat off of, but I scooped up my chickenless tenders and ate them anyway! This week has taught me to let a lot of things go. Up until 7pm last night, I didn’t have ANY books for tomorrow’s launch. Then the UPS guy arrived with 9 boxes for me, and the 10th box arrived a few hours ago. So now I have books. The cover for Crossroads isn’t perfect, even after we made a last-minute fix, but it’ll have to do. The Kindle version that I did myself was apparently hard to read on some devices, so I pulled it and will repost on Amazon once the conversion has been done by a professional. I couldn’t find a plain black top to wear with the lovely skirt I bought expressly for the launch party, so I’m going to wear a less festive dress instead. I don’t have any jewelry to match the dress, but oh well. No one’s coming out tomorrow to inspect my jewelry. My skin has broken out—again. My hormones are as unpredictable as the weather, but what’s a girl middle-aged woman to do? The universe is definitely keeping me humble. Yesterday I had a full day and left the house feeling stressed. It was raining and our host librarian at the high school was absent, but our small group still met and those young people made me forget all about the zillion other things on my To Do list. I had 4 back-to-back appointments and at each one, I found myself laughing and hugging people and receiving assurances that everything would be okay. When I was in graduate school, a professor delicately pointed out that my excessive expressions of gratitude proved that I came from a dysfunctional family where kindness was rare. She was right—when you’re accustomed to being mocked and diminished, sometimes it’s hard to believe that people can be caring and considerate without expecting anything in return. So as I prepare my remarks for tomorrow night, I’m thinking about kindness, and gratitude, and how it’s okay to be imperfect. And how showing up and owning up to your mistakes is sometimes just the kind of example young people need to see.

My last guest post about The Door at the Crossroads, “A Girl Like Me,” is up over at Diversity in YA. April is National Poetry Month so I ended with a poem by Lucille Clifton, and I think I’m going to read it aloud tomorrow night. Maybe twenty people will show up—maybe a lot more since the event was covered in The Brooklyn Reader. But either way, I know *I* am going to have a cupcake and celebrate the fact that this novel didn’t destroy me and all the years of rejection by publishers didn’t stop me from getting it into the world. There’s always another novel waiting in the wings but for at least one night, I’m going to celebrate myself and my book and all the people who are part of this wonderful community of readers and writers.