In some ways it feels like it’s taken both forever and no time at all to reach this point. You know how you felt as a kid leading up to Christmas where every day seemed to take twice as long as it should and the time just dragged and then suddenly Christmas is there and you can’t believe how quickly the time passed? It feels like that. Or maybe that’s an adult thing when you’ve got kids who moan about how time drags while you’re watching the days and years tick over fast enough to make your head spin?
In case you’re curious how I know that feeling: our oldest just turned 18, he’s a senior, and will be graduating this year. Only yesterday it felt like we had forever until he “grew up”, but we blinked and now this… Its an array of conflicting emotions for sure!
Anyway, back to the point before I get too emotional…
Yours, Mine, & Forever is going to be on tour with CelebrateLit starting this week. I’ve been looking forward to this day for what feels like forever, and now that it’s almost here it feels like it was only yesterday that we first started talking about it. Which is exciting and terrifying all at the same time, but that’s a whole nuther story that I’m not going to go into here. (What if they don’t like it? What if…)
In the lead up to the tour, I thought about revisiting the background behind this book… what led me to write it, what influenced the direction the story took, so on and so forth. In thinking about that, I started trying to remember what I wrote about leading up to its release and that’s when I remembered the very underwhelming release.
Because Buddy. The hospital. Type one diabetes. The fact I published a book one or two days before kind of faded into the realm of unimportant things to forget when we landed in hospital with news that changed our lives.
Yeah, my poor book that I worked my butt off to get finished and published kind of got brushed aside. Oh, I still talked about it some, and I posted a bunch of fun little graphics over on my FB page, but in the grand scheme of things I sort of did as little as I possibly could.
Instead, my head was full to overflowing with other things as we focused as much of our attention on figuring out this T1D stuff as we could. Life saving stuff. Like calculating insulin. Counting every single carb the kid eats. Adjusting for highs and lows. And bunches and bunches of things that are becoming part of everyday life. We’re not there yet—to the point it’s no longer overwhelming—but every day brings us one step closer to that goal.
I’m still writing, but I’m letting that happen at a healthy pace. I wrote Christmas Rose between Buddy’s diagnosis and Christmas, and to be honest, it was almost too much. We were still adjusting, still struggling to adapt to our new normal, and I threw a book into the mix. It all worked out, but it wasn’t pretty.
So I took a step back.
I eliminated everything I could from the writing process and went back to how I used to write when I was only writing for fun. I threw out all notes, plots, and plans, thought up an idea, and let it take me where it wanted to go. If I’m tired I skip writing. If I want to read, I read. And when I want to write, I have fun.
And The Serendipitous Adventures of Maddison Case is close to the halfway point. Each chapter takes about two days to finish so it’s slow going. But those two days are usually broken into a mad one or two hour writing spree to get it written on the first day, and the next day devoted to polishing it up.
Would I prefer to write faster? Of course! I had these great plans at the beginning of the year where I was going to churn out a new book every couple of months. But I’m also dealing with regular life, a kid with needs that require more time and thought than simply throwing food on the table, and the brink of overwhelm is still hovering way too close. So we decided to take it slow. Do what I could, but have the focus remain on our family. Because in the long run, that’s what is important.
It’s easy to look at what I haven’t done and be sad, but I’m very thankful for what we’ve achieved in these past almost six months. Most of all, Buddy has come a long, long way and has never been healthier. Family life feels like it’s getting back to normal again. And now as a tiny added bonus, Yours, Mine, & Forever is finally going to see some of the spotlight it missed out on.
I’ll try to post here each day, linking to that day’s reviews, but if you’d rather follow along yourself, CelebrateLit will have all of the links, plus the giveaway. It all starts on the 29th…