A somewhat battered box arrived on the Brown Truck of Happiness (TM) earlier this week. It contained author’s copies of a non-fiction book. This is my first solo monograph. I’ve done articles and contributed chapters, illustrations, and sections to edited volumes, but this one is all mine, for good or ill.
I opened the lid, cut the tape on the protective wrapper around the stack-o-books and lifted out a rather slim volume. It’s amazing how small the page-count gets once all is set and done. But there’s the correct picture on the cover, and my name on it and *gulp* my non-fiction writing has been loosed upon the world once more.
It’s strange. After so much fiction, all electronic, to have a “real” book, a history book, with my name as the only one on the cover is a shivery feeling. I can stand in a bookstore, or look on the library shelves, and say “mine.” I’m now up there on the row with authors I admire, use as sources, or despise.
I’ve made it another step up the academic ladder, except the ladder goes . . . nowhere, not really, not for me at the moment. I have academic “street creds” while standing on the sidewalk watching things go by. Which is not entirely a bad place to be, given the uncertainty of adjunct life these days.
So I sit here, book in hand and a goofy grin on my face, petting my author’s copy and working on three fiction projects, another non-fiction work, and getting ready to teach next week. For this moment, life is good.
Cat Rotator's Quarterly 
Congratulations
Thank you. Now if they would just ship the retail copies, so I can stop fielding questions about “Why hasn’t my copy arrived yet? I preordered it and it’s supposed to be out!”