๐ถ They say it's your (book) birthday ๐ถ
On the day after book launch feels + Beneath the Flood in the wild.
Hereโs how yesterday went:
omg my book is out today!
Work Zoom and some coworker congratulations / encouragement to post about it on our shameless plug Slack channel.
Malika loudly yelling at us as Chris tries to go to work.
Take Malika to the park. We walk a lot. My phone notifies me I have a meeting in 10 minutes that I completely forgot about. I download Google Meet and talk about cash flow on a park bench.
Back home. More work. Eventually remember to post the shameless plug. Eventually remember I should post about launch day on Instagram and fleetingly consider sending something on Substack.
Go to the grocery store to buy produce. Go to Starbucks because I need to buy a gift card / deserve a little book birthday treat. Go home and make dinner.
Ignore the massive pile of dishes in the sink. Join a zoom launch party. Stay up until 10:30 drinking beers and reading poems and admiring your friendsโ light sabers.
All in all, a pretty good launch day.
Iโve always heard writers say that launch day isโฆ sorta anticlimactic? At the end of the day, youโve been living in this book release mode for over a year doing edits and cover art and promotion and all that jazz. And then the day comes and itโs like, oh hey, cool, a book. (Plus Iโd already had it for a week, soooooโฆ.) But still, it feels really good to see it out there in real life, in other peoplesโ hands. And itโs fun to know my words are landing in mailboxes and to share virtual high fives with friends. Hopefully the right words will land with the right people, as they need them. Itโs the most a poet can hope for, I think.
And so I can finally say itโฆ Beneath the Flood is NOW AVAILABLE!
Of course, I recommend getting a copy directly from Bandersnatch Books. If Kindle is more your jam, you can get that on Amazon. (and I suppose you could get a paperback on Amazon too, if you need something to push you over the free shipping threshold. No shame.)
If you have read it, would you consider leaving a little review on Goodreads or Amazon? I promise, Iโm not going to spend the next few weeks hustling and promoting and stuff. But a review might help encourage someone to check it out and see if itโs for them.
As for the future of this Substackโฆ well, a couple of busy weeks means I inadvertently took a couple weeks off from The Sunday Poem series. Maybe Iโll get back to that again? But Iโm also wondering about other things I can explore and write in this space. (The Ask a Spiritual Director series is still hanging out on the back burnerโฆ) We shall see.
I donโt really have a good way to end this other than thanks! For reading and subscribing and supporting this little book. ๐
Yay! Congratulations friend!
Happy day after book birthday! So proud of you!!