Preemptive Retaliation

A year ago today I answered the door to a bemused postman who had just lugged my package up three flights of stairs. It was no modest parcel, and when he handed me the box he also seemed to hand over the Ooft that came with it, the surprise of receiving something so heavy that didn’t look it. My Ooft was welcomed with a big, bright smile though. I had kept myself awake half the night thinking about that box.

My book. I fell so sappy every time I write this. I’m like a mother who has sacrificed a chunk of her life to have a child, and so pepper their facebook with endless pictures of a child looking drooly and glaikit . Here is my book. Here is something that I have created, and that I am proud of. At christmas I will dress it up in a wooly hat and let it play in the snow, and isn’t it adorable in its wee booties? Yes it is! Yes it is! My perfect little book.

Of course it wasn’t until later, much later, when I had sold most of the copies to friends and family, that I found out about the format errors and punctuation issues and horrible spelling that riddled those pages. And so my not so perfect book turned into a second edition, with more fonts and proper paragraph breaks, and only a few spelling mistakes that I’ve noticed so far.

My wee book, a year old today. Och, I’m gonna cry.