I'm sitting in my living room right now, taking a break from editing a book of essays I have slated to release next spring. We bought some candles on a recent trip to Portland, Oregon. Each scent comes with it's own special QR code that directs you to a playlist created by the candle maker—something he recommends as a pairing for the aroma.

The candle is lit, and the playlist his humming. It's nearly 100 degrees outside and I'm sitting on my living room couch, the shutters blocking out the afternoon sun, trying to get some writing done. Trying to catch up on emails and messages. Juggling my schedule that never seemed nearly as complicated before a toddler started living with me.

My novel, Stitched, releases in about six weeks. Since announcing it on social media six weeks or so ago, I've spent my days scheduling events, corresponding with people interested in future opportunities for the book, and juggling on top of that my usual professional and community responsibilities. Also stay-at-home parenthood and the fact that I haven't looked down once in the last year without noticing a brand new stain on my shirt.

Last Wednesday, West walked up to me in the living room and placed his right hand on my knee. I took note of a brown stain the moment he pulled it away and I played Russian Roulette by wiping it with my finger for a quick sniff.

Chocolate.

I still don't know where he got chocolate.

Stitched releases on September 8, a date I've anticipated for over a year.

It feels wrong to say it that way. I've anticipated September 8 as a specific date for just over a year, because it was just over a year ago that I first learned that would be the release date.

In reality, I've anticipated what this date represents for much longer. At least since 2022 when I started writing the novel. But in a way, long before that as well.

I remember one evening around March, 2013, sitting on the balcony of my dark apartment on a weeknight in Palau. Daniel was there as well. We had set up a card table and he was working on a watercolor—he was getting into watercolors at the time. The soundtrack from Garden State (a film I don't recommend revisiting) was humming, competing with the jungle sounds of buzzes, squawks, and hisses we couldn't identify.

Our apartment building sat on top of a tall hill on a tiny island overlooking a bay below, as well as a few other islands connected to ours by breezeways.

It's hard to explain how dark it was in Palau the moment the sun set around 6:00 PM every night. The total population of the country, spread out over many islands, was only 17,000 people. There just wasn't much of a critical mass of community anywhere to produce measurable light.

On this particular evening, a full or nearly-full moon lit the bay, reflecting off of the calm water that appeared to be at high tide.

I sat in a folding chair with my laptop that at that time weighed around 15 pounds. Our apartment technically had an internet connection—a cable tethered to a wall in the living room. But we didn't use it much because it was slow and expensive and we were charged by the minute. The speed fluctuated based on how gummed up the signal was from the islands, which depended on the country's use volume at any given moment. It was slowest in the evenings.

Disconnected and unable to communicate with anyone who wasn't physically present was, in hindsight, freeing. I never really saw it that way at the time. Instead, I felt isolated and lonely. I wrote about that some on this website.

I worked on an essay—I wanted to write a book of them. I was certain I could punch out two hundred pages of stories and begin my life as a creative writer.

The problem I didn't understand at the time was I was in my twenties and had really only begun to experience life. I did end up writing a few hundred pages of stories that year, but I didn't understand until much later that was only an exercise—a practice—something of a stepping stone that would lead to another, that would then lead to a small opportunity, that would lead to more practice. Rinse, repeat.

I was so anxious to "make it" back at that time. Like each moment I wasn't a famous author of this or that was another finite grain of sand trickling through my fingers and propelling me toward a future of disappointment.

Is that just the folly of youth? Is that what that phrase means?

It's funny, now that I'm in my early 40s, I don't feel that same anxious rush of urgency. Instead, just a peace that if I simply continue plucking away at what lies ahead, I'll get somewhere. But also, the plucking is fun. So in a way, who cares where I'm getting.

I think that attitude is hard-earned by age. It seems for me to have come from two different directions—one was forged in failures that have taught me it's actually fine to not always achieve what you want when you want it. The other came from proof in pudding—learning that if you put interest in your passions, interesting things will return to you at some point, even if they weren't what you intended.

Eventually I was asked to become a humor columnist for a newspaper, and I spent the next few years preserving my family's stories in a publication that taught me how to be more concise as a storyteller. Those columns also made me view my own upbringing and the people around me in a much softer light, and for that, I'll forever be grateful.

Those newspaper essays turned into a book, and also made me a better writer, which ultimately allowed me to do justice to the story I wanted to tell in Stitched, my first novel.

In recent interviews I've been asked repeatedly why I wrote the novel. I keep saying it is, in a way, a love letter to my mom and her friends. It's fiction, but it's also about what I've observed growing up under a quilting frame and watching women age together and become all the better for it.

In the six weeks since I started talking about Stitched, we've seen it consistently stay on national best-seller lists, receive praise from book reviewers and trade magazines, and drum up interest from producers interested in further development. I don't know where this will go, and I'm at peace with whatever happens to it, I think mostly because I'm already proud of the journey itself and confident enough the next journey will be worth pursuing no matter what.

I sort of wish I could visit my old anxious self who was convinced opportunity was ticking away on that Palauan balcony. I think I'd say some variation of, keep typing away. No one will ever read it, but type anyway. It's good for you. And one day, when you are an age that right now would seem to you to be very very old, you'll be sitting in your living room scheduling a book tour for a novel and hoping your toddler's nap lasts just a bit longer so you can get back to writing, because that part is the true joy.

And maybe there's a sixty-something-year-old version of myself that would like to give the today me a similar speech. Tweaked, of course. I actually hope so.

Anyway, back to the writing, and editing, before the candle burns out.

~It Just Gets Stranger