It’s probably for the better that I didn’t keep track of every little task that happened over the winter. I answered many emails from Luminare, tweaked design, set up accounts on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and IngramSparks (bookseller for bookstores), and calculated a cost for the book. I remember sending the book to a few more proofreading friends and arguing about commas. I remember having no idea how to organize my website and spending way more hours building that than I wanted. I remember writing many of these blog posts. I remember lamenting that there was no font in the world appropriate for the title of the book.

I’d love to say that I was chipper and bright-eyed through the newness of it all, but nope. I pretty much hated everything about this part. Ok, I didn’t hate writing blog posts, mostly because it allowed me to live in better times when it wasn’t -20 below, and I didn’t feel like I had a part-time job that didn’t pay me. The novelty of receiving emails with little tasks and decisions grew old fast. I wasn’t even happy when I received the first physical copy of the book in the mail. It was just a reminder that I still needed to figure out how to market the thing.

Sidenote: I don’t think anyone up north should encounter hardship of any kind during the month of February. It’s cold, it’s dark, and we’re all pretending we don’t have seasonal depression. We should all take the month off.

As promised, Candle’s Great Feast was available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble by mid-February. This made the answer to every “is your book out yet?” question “technically, yes, but I don’t have my website set up yet, I’m not emotionally ready to shove it out the door because I don’t know what I’m doing, and please just leave me alone for a month. Thanks.”

The sun did come out eventually, and I again felt more hopeful and upbeat about it all, but not for any specific reason (other than the literal sun coming out I suppose). I feel it’s important to mention that not every part of this journey was the best thing ever, because it’s just not realistic for something that’s exciting and fun as a whole to be exciting and fun every day for over a year straight. Sometimes I would rather have forgotten it existed at all and taken a nap.