Okay, technically it was yesterday.

But whatever! My first-ever book has been released by Samhain!

It was an amazing, exciting, overwhelming day, marred only slightly by my conviction that no one would actually buy the book.  That the world's collective gaze would slide past it with the same determined unwillingness to connect that waitresses reserve for me when I knock my Diet Coke into my lap and need about a thousand more napkins right NOW.

That my editor at Samhain, unfailingly nice and friendly as she has always been, would email me in all caps, wailing that I had wasted the best months of her life and serving me with the publishing equivalent of divorce papers.

But to my shock, some people actually ordered THE TRAP yesterday!  Oh, happy day!  Happy dance!  Worry gone!  Joy embraced!  Birds singing! I am a published author!  People actually bought my book and they are actually going to … going to …

Oh, God. 

They are going to read it.

What if they hate it?  What if they hate David?  What if they hate Ethan?  What if they hate me?

Deep breath.

Okay, so some people might hate it.  Some probably will hate it.  But others will like it.  And maybe someone will even love it.   After all, this is the effect art, in all its guises, has on people: With some, it resonates.  Others, it leaves cold.

And it's not just art, either.  Everything has champions and critics.   

Take my beautiful, smart, funny goddaughter, for example.  She's a nice kid.  Does well in school.  Kind to people and animals.  

But she hates cheese. 

It's not a lactose thing.  She didn't suffer some traumatic cheese-related mishap as a child.  She's never been pinned beneath a runaway wheel of cheddar.  Her father didn't run out to the store for some pepper-jack and never come back.  She just … hates cheese.  All kinds.  Nice sharp cheddars … melt-in-your-mouth bries … even bland, unoffending mozarella. 

Now, if she disliked celery, I could understand.  I could relate.  But as it is, I watch that kid rolling back the top off her pizza or easing an unsullied chip out from under a stack of nachos with the surgical precision of a tournament Jenga champion, and I think, but how?  How is it possible for anyone to hate something I like as much as cheese?  How is she not more like me?

And of course, this inevitably leads to the thought that maybe it is I who should be more like her.  After all, if only I hated cheese, perhaps I, too, could be a size 0.  If I, too, embraced a lifestyle of celery-bacy and complete cheese avoidance, not only might I achieve a more exalted state of personal artery uncloggedness, but I could also help to reduce the number of dairy cows in the world and reduce global warming!

For a moment, I tremble with the possibilities.

Then I shrug and eat my goddaughter's discarded cheese.

Because I am helpless in the grip of my cheese love … just as she is powerless to change whatever internal programming causes her to draw back from a precious wedge of Maytag Blue as if it were the mutant offspring of a tarantula and a rattlesnake.

Somehow, watching that kid struggle to build a taco out of nothing but lettuce and shredded chicken (she hates sour cream, too, and don't even get me started on that) always makes me ponder the little differences between people.  The ones that make it just a tiny bit more challenging to connect, or to relate, or to share perspective.  

Maybe it's good that we have these little differences.  Maybe learning to accept that someone can hate something you like, or like something you hate, is good practice when it comes to connecting past the bigger differences.   The ones that lead to the less gentle arguments on the bigger stage, where the voices are louder, and the exchanges are angrier, and some people seem inclined to make their point with sharp bits of metal instead of words.

Wow.  Looking at it this way, I guess it isn't such a bad thing that not everyone will love my book!  Not if it's going to help prevent war, and all! 

I feel so much better.

But still … I really hope you like my book.

Indie