It’s official: A Precarious Magic is loose in the world.

I even finished uploading the paperback covers this morning. I had a serious mental debate about those — did it actually make sense to spend money to make the back covers of those books pretty? Since it’s only really sold online, no one sees the back cover before buying the book and I could have made my own back cover using Amazon’s cover creator. Spending money for a pretty back cover is just… well, it’s just what I did. Quixotic? Is that the word I was looking for?

Today is the 8th anniversary of the release day of A Gift of Ghosts, which inspired me to go back and read my blog from December of 2011. I have my memories of where I was at and how I was feeling, of course, but I wanted to know how they matched up with what I wrote back then.

It was unexpectedly grueling, although it shouldn’t have been. Unexpected, that is, not grueling. The grueling part should have been obvious: it was a hard time in my life, and re-reading my words brought those emotions right back to me. It was my first Christmas without my mom — she died of pancreatic cancer in five brutal weeks that summer — and my best friend was dying. I lost her in February 2012. I’d quit my job to go to grad school, so had also lost the structure, community and connection of 9-5 work, and was within five months of dropping out of school. My anxiety was sky-high — I can see it in the energy of every word I wrote.

But this is my single favorite part of my words from December 2011:

I’d love to make lots of money from my writing and be really successful, but that’s not why I started writing and that’s not why I want to continue writing. A Gift of Ghosts is out in the universe now and I need to let it go and let it find its own way and let the process work. Because I didn’t publish it to reach it a goal. I published it because I thought it was fun, and I wanted other people to have fun with me.

And that’s why I’m writing: for fun, and so that other people will have fun with me.  

Over the past eight years, my life has changed dramatically, and the publishing world has changed pretty dramatically, too. But that goal was always the right goal for me — to have fun, and to hope that other people would have fun with me.

I hope you find Fen’s continuing adventures as fun as I did!