🎶 They say it's your (book) birthday 🎶

On the day after book launch feels + Beneath the Flood in the wild.

Book Model / Very Good Girl Malika, attempting to hack the Instagram algorithm with her cuteness.

Here’s 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 friends’ light sabers.

All in all, a pretty good launch day.

Launch party friennnnnnnnds. And we had an open mic, because that’s just how we roll.

I’ve always heard writers say that launch day is… sorta anticlimactic? At the end of the day, you’ve 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 it’s like, oh hey, cool, a book. (Plus I’d already had it for a week, sooooo….) But still, it feels really good to see it out there in real life, in other peoples’ hands. And it’s 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. It’s the most a poet can hope for, I think.

IT’S SO PRETTY GAH.

And so I can finally say it… 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, I’m 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 it’s for them.

As for the future of this Substack… well, a couple of busy weeks means I inadvertently took a couple weeks off from The Sunday Poem series. Maybe I’ll get back to that again? But I’m 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 burner…) We shall see.

I don’t really have a good way to end this other than thanks! For reading and subscribing and supporting this little book. 💛