But let me tell you about Wednesday. Wednesday was one of those pinch-me days. Wednesday I was on cloud surreal.
I am still on cloud surreal. . .
So, Wednesday I was up at my dad's mountain house, which is smack between Challis and Mackay, Idaho. It's the middle of nowhere, high desert with a gorgeous view of Mt. Borah, the tallest mountain in Idaho, and a lot of snow. It's so quiet up there I swear I can hear my thoughts rattle when they bounce around in my head. It's also a wonderland for my son, who gets to ride the tractor and ATVs and sled down the perfectly-pitched-for-sledding driveway and play with my dad's four Labrador retrievers. Heaven is Pop-Pop's house!
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| View from my dad's front porch |
I had been up all night coughing with a nasty cold, and the baby had been up all night because I kept waking her up with my coughing, so we were slow to get moving that day. I was deliriously tired. We lazed around in the morning and then, around noonish, decided to go sledding. I bundled up the kids and outside we went. Fun times were had by all. Even the baby got in on the action.
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| It's all fun and games until you crash into some sagebrush. . . |
Yep, you heard me right.
Now, I've never had any interest in guns. Like, ever. My dad is a bit of a gun fanatic, truth be told, and I grew up watching him clean his rifles and fill shells at the kitchen table and head off into the wilderness intent on killing a poor defenseless deer every fall, so I'm comfortable around guns, to an extent, but I never had the desire to shoot one. I like Bambi.
But this year I have a novel simmering on the back burner (which I have not allowed myself to write a single word of because I need to finish Book 3 of the Unearthly series first, but I have taken copious notes) where my main character is quite the sharpshooter with a six-shooter. And she needs to be. And that's about all I can tell you at this point.
So I decided I needed to know how it felt to shoot a pistol.
My dad was all too happy to oblige. He set up the target and cleaned the gun and taught me how to load it. We marched out into his backyard (remember that we are out in the middle of nowhere) and he taught me how to hold the gun, how to position my feet, how to aim.
Six bullets.
The first shot I hit the paper with the target on it. Barely. I was pleased that I hit it at all. My heart was going pretty steady just holding the loaded gun.
Second shot I missed. Not sure what I hit. Bah.
Third shot I hit the paper again.
Fourth shot I actually hit the target. I was feeling pretty spiffy about myself.
Fifth shot I missed the target completely. Double bah.
"Squeeze the trigger slowly," my dad advised.
I cocked the gun. Steadied my hand. Squinted at the target. And slowly, slowly, squeezed the trigger.
And hit the bull's eye.
Up to that point I wasn't sure if I liked this gun-shooting thing, but I'll tell you, it was quite the thrill to hit the bull's eye. I was channeling my sharpshooter character. I couldn't wait to get inside and write some notes about how the gun bucked in my hand, the way it smelled, how it felt to aim at something and hit it, and hit it perfectly.
I was all aglow when we came inside.
And then: there was a barrage of texts from my agent waiting on my cell. Texts like, Have you read your email yet? and I will call you as soon as I'm off the subway.
Oh boy. My heart really started going then. I turned immediately to the computer with the tar-slow-satellite-internet and waited for my email account to load.
It was a long wait. A nail-biting wait.
And lo and behold, an email from my editor at HarperCollins. Hallowed is #10 on the Children's Chapter Books bestseller list of the NEW YORK TIMES.
Congrats, my editor wrote. You are now a New York Times Bestselling Author.
Good thing I was sitting down.
Right then my phone rang, my agent off the subway, and we laughed and I may have even cried a little and my dad brought me a glass of champagne.
I've never been one to put too much stock in labels, but what I kept coming back to in those first few moments, again and again, was that this makes it so much more likely than I will be able to continue to write, beyond the Unearthly series, beyond this year or next year, beyond one book or two, but for my lifetime. I can be a writer, I thought. For good.
I made a bunch of calls, one of the first to my best friend, Lindsey.
She said, "Well, I hope I can still be your friend. . ."
Me: "Huh? What?"
Lindsey: "You're an all-important writer now. You're going to need new friends, of course. Important friends."
Lindsey: "You see?"
Me: "But I think I can still squeeze you into my top five friends. If you're nice to me. . ."
We laughed and she said she was proud of me. Everyone kept saying how proud they were of me, and I felt proud of myself, too. Proud for being able to write Hallowed even though it was crazy-hard and maybe the most stressed I'd ever been in my life. Proud that I'd made it through. Proud that I'd written some pretty good stuff there. And also grateful and humbled and amazed and knocked over.
It felt pretty amazing.
Like hitting the bull's eye.