Vanilla cake with chocolate frosting and birthing a book

I crawl into bed with Gargantubaby at 4:30 p.m. on a Sunday to join the tail end of his nap. We cuddle. When he wakes up, he puts his head on my shoulder.

"I love you," I say with my eyes closed.

"I love you, too," he says. I keep my eyes closed.

"Look at me," he says. I turn my head. He makes a smile. He looks deep into my eyes.

"I'm proud of you," he says.

*

SJ and I have dinner with the kids, then have family time. Generally our options are duck duck goose, charades, Twister, or "wrecking ball," wherein my 11-year-old stepdaughter swings through the living room on the swing installed in our ceiling, and Gargantubaby and SJ run up and down the hall past her, shrieking and pretending to barely make it past her legs.

I suggest a chicken fight. SJ demures, but doesn't laugh.

I'm kidding, I say.

I suggest we blindfold one person and play Marco Polo.

SJ narrows his eyes at me. Are you kidding?

No, this time I'm serious, I say.

Have you seen our house? SJ gestures around the living room. Someone's going to knock over the lomp.

The LOMP. Stepdaughter and I look at each other.

SJ KEEPS TALKING. He gestures toward the other wall. Someone's going to run into the piano bench, he says.

Stepdaughter says, "What's a 'lomp'?" at the same time I say, "Someone's going to knock over a what?"

We can't stop laughing. Tears are coming out of my eyes.

It's the fancy way to say it, SJ defends himself.

That's not the funny thing, I say. The funny thing is you thought you were going to get away with it.

A family joke is born.

*

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Having a toddler = What is that doing there?

I haven't written at all about the process of writing a book and, now, the daily self-flagellation that is marketing and publicity. Every time I write the word "self-flagellation" (because in my life I have written that word a lot), I think about monks, and then I think about the duomo in Assisi, Italy, and the little room within it that has (they say) St. Francis's real hair shirt. I saw this duomo, and this shirt, in 2010 after I had hiked, quite tipsy at the beginning, from Spello, the next town to the south, through the Parco del Monte Subasio, thinking it was a half hour jaunt but realizing after I'd encountered quite a few other hikers who eyed my American sandals and American messenger bag and happy, carefree, unintelligent American attitude with disbelief and condescension that it was, in fact, five hours away. Thank god I always carry water. As too many of my stories end: I could have died. 

I didn't write about writing a book because it was a marketing strategy not to announce the book publicly until it was available to buy. I will never know whether the strategy worked (one cannot easily measure success against a hypothetical failure), but when I see other writers posting about their listings on Publishers Marketplace (about the sales of their books, right at the beginning of the process), I think SHOULD I HAVE DONE THAT. I read that another writer has planned a "launch event" and think OH SHIT I SHOULD DO THAT (I did! It's here). I am advised not to schedule too many events in the same market too close together but see that another writer has done so and think SHOULD I DO THAT. My mom suggests I plan a national tour of bookstores since they're all online anyway and I think SHOULD I DO THAT. I see other writers publicizing their books by writing original pieces and "placing" them in various publications and I think I SHOULD DO THAT BUT HOW I STILL HAVE A JOB A COLUMN A BLOG AND A CHILD.

I don't hate this part exactly. I'm just pretty sure I'll be relieved when it's over. It's not just the inverse ratio of pitches to responses, although that is part of it. It's not just the daily mercenary posting on social media, although that is part of it. It's not just laying myself open every week by making lists upon lists of friends, family members, and co-workers and emailing them directly multiple times asking them to do just one more thing for me, although that is part of it.

Mostly, it's that this part fucks with your head.

I already accomplished the things I wanted to: I got a book deal, and I wrote a book I'm proud of (it's really funny! I make myself laugh!). As of Wednesday, the finished copies are sitting in a box in my front room. It's in my hands.

But the work is not over. It's kind of like having a kid: all this ceremony and energy directed toward the birth, the "big event," and then it happens and you're like … ohhh, that was just the beginning.

I remember talking to a writer friend when we were still in our twenties, my first real friend who published a real book.

"You think it's going to be enough," she said. "But then you keep raising the bar."

When I was 27, after years of writing and submitting my stories, the editor of Boulevard magazine — a Really Good Literary Journal — called me at home to tell me he had accepted a story. I cried. It was the pinnacle of my dreams for myself. I'd begun to believe it would never happen, and then this phone call. He was very nice and encouraged me to submit more stories to be considered for their annual prize.

Immediately, my dreams changed. I thought it was the beginning of my career: that my next submission would win their prize, then all my stories would be collected and sold, then I would sell a novel, then I would get a tenured teaching position at a Good School.

That didn't happen. Still, I did have some successes, including a collection of my stories winning a prize and being published by a small press, and every one of those successes involved leaping and stumbling toward a bar I set higher and higher. It involved an increasingly high inverse ratio of submissions, or pitches, to rejections. The whole time, I wondered, Why am I doing this? Why can't I just have a job and go jogging after work and meet friends at a bar WHICH I ALSO DID BECAUSE WHEN YOU DON'T HAVE KIDS YOU HAVE TIME TO DO EVERYTHING.

Five years ago, I stopped beating my head against the wall of literary fiction. I'd worked on the same novel for ten years (not the only novel I worked on during that time!). I stopped submitting it to agents who asked for "exclusives" and then went MIA (this happened FOUR TIMES in the same year and included Michael Ondaatje's agent writing personally to ask me to submit to her and her only, and after receiving my novel she forgot how email, professional behavior, and basic human decency work. Or maybe she died). I said fuck it, this isn't working, I'm tired of trying, and it's leeching the joy for me out of literary fiction.

But I couldn't stop writing. So I started a blog, which is barely literary, contains a lot of swear words, and is just me writing about me rather than about children dying, my go-to literary device. It was much more gratifying, and definitely easier.

Now, that has reached the pinnacle of its success, as far as I can tell. But when I got the book deal, I didn't feel how I felt at age 27. I knew I was expected to feel that way. I expected to feel that way. But I didn't. I felt happy, for sure, but more of a contentment, or a satisfaction that, finally, some pieces had fit into place. After all, it had been 17 years since that first story, and my expectations had been ground to a fine powder.

I had gotten used to my life. I was happy — truly happy — with other things turning out well: my relationship, my job, my nascent family. At the beginning of publishing my blog, when I would see that 13 people — THIRTEEN PEOPLE — had read a post, I felt chuffed. Over time, that number rose, and I felt more and more chuffed. But this little engine kept turning, that engine that says YOU CAN DO MORE and THIS IS YOUR MOMENT. So now I have done more, and this is my moment, and when people ask what I want to do next, first I say, I want to write a funny book about menopause, and then I say I'm looking forward to getting back to writing my funny blog about my funny kid and my funny partner and not thinking about doing more. I'm looking forward to the part where the back and forth with a few dedicated readers makes my day, and away from wondering whether my self-worth is measured in preorder numbers, Amazon rankings, sales numbers, media hits, and reviews.

I had postcards made. They're really cute. I made a list of local bookstores and, one recent Saturday, set off for a local boutique that caters to pregnant people and new parents, and carries books. I was still going to go for it, advertise myself the old-school way, pound the pavement and meet some booksellers and buyers and ask them to carry my book (and get my car smogged).

Right as I turned onto Cesar Chavez, I turned on my comfort station, 90.3 Classical KDFC, and guess what started up and played for the entire ride to the Mission: the march from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Dun duh dun dunnnnn, dun duh dunnnnnn. Dun duh dun DUNNNNNN, dun duh dun! Dun! DUN!

I laughed so hard I cried. That was me. Jen-ny. On a mission to peddle my little book about the indignities of pregnancy and new parenthood in my economy Ford Focus with the cracker crumbs on the seats, made up in my middle-aged chic, including a long skirt and clogs and an interesting coronavirus mask. I felt proud of myself, the way I should have felt at 21, 27, so many other ages when I felt so much less than but actually was doing enough for the time. I parked in the Mission and called SJ to tell him about this strange, wonderful coincidence. He laughed with me.

Then we hung up, I put my postcards in my purse, and I went into the store. (No, I have not heard back from them.)

*

SJ and I almost get in a fight because he will not agree that objectively, Gargantubaby is the cutest baby who ever lived. I still kind of don't trust him.

Gargantubaby and Stepdaughter share a bedroom; GB sleeps in his bed on the floor and SD sleeps on a mattress above him in the loft. I learn that for days, GB has been driving his sister nuts because, when he wakes up around 6:30 a.m., he climbs into his sister's loft and screams, "Five-minute warning!" before stomping back down and carrying on with his day.

He wants to "see the funny faces" on my phone. I think he wants to make a video of himself making funny faces so I turn the camera on him.

No! He thinks hard how to explain it to me.

I want to see allllll the funny faces, he says. He holds both arms out. The yellow faces.

Ah! The emojis.

We're making a tic-tac-toe game out of an old egg carton, following the instructions in High Five magazine. I do the big cuts and assign him the piecework. At first it's hard for him, but he quickly gets the hang of it.

Hey! he says happily. These scissors aren't useless!

I catch him saying seriously to himself as he marches naked across the back of the futon, I come in peace. Because I'm fancy aaand naked.

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My stepdaughter, with some help from her father and her brother, made a two-layer yellow vanilla cake with chocolate frosting and sprinkles to celebrate my book launch. Have I mentioned what a sweet little badass she is? I am proud to say I have no idea how she made this, and it was delicious.