I had sushi (yay!) with a friend and he asked me how the book launches went. The best I could muster up was, “Ok lor.”
“Really ah? Just okay lor?”
“I guess?”
I then went on to explain that I didn’t have a lot of high expectations for the launch, and that everything had gone as well as it could have gone because I am an unknown author. Like, literally no one has heard of me besides my sister, and that’s because she’s my sister.
And honestly, no one cares that my book is out. Ok, great. Another local author who writes children’s books and is probably going to keep tooting her own horn on social media. Sure, society needs more of those. I was looking on the bright side of things, because nothing really went wrong at my book launches and author meet-up things, and, honestly, those things were as good as it could get. My friends came. My family came. People who didn’t know me sat to hear me talk from a mic for a while. Some people who didn’t even know me bought books, so all in all, I had it pretty good.
(I am also pretty proud of the work and I am grateful to the gargantuan effort that my editor had put in.)
So what now, now that my book is out? I am still human, the last I checked. I still like the things I like and I still go for sushi. I have to go to work. Being a writer doesn’t mean I don’t need money, or that I have all the money, or that I don’t have to worry about paying bills more than ever. I do have to think about making the book succeed.
So is being a writer any different? Yes and no. I’m still me, but it’s just that people thought that what I wrote was worth packing into words, and that the thing I wrote, the book, is floating around somewhere.
Image taken by Poh Yong Ang