I’ll give you a moment to recover from the shocking news . . . Better? good. As you know, I have recently published my first novel, which much to my surprise has not blazed across the literary sky crashed to earth and changed our very history.

However, it has been a major catalyst of growth. Not only putting myself out to the world to be judged(ACK!), but learning to let go, trust and face my biggest fear. People have found mistakes. *GASP* I wanted to melt like Elphaba in Oz when Dorothy threw water on her.

But nothing happened.

This was huge for me, because grammar and such is my weakest point, although I must point out the mistakes are things I should have caught, a word that should be plural that wasn’t, an ‘a’ that needed to be in the sentence. Stuff like that.

One problem with being self- published is I’m the only one to blame. At first I tried to be cool about it. It was a friend who gently mentioned it to me. Kind of a whispered, hey your zipper is down comment, one of love and not wanting me to show the world my undies.

So I’m pretending to be cool, then I didn’t get enough sleep, which means my brain starts to spiral down into depression while listing every mistake I have ever made in the past twenty years. This can go on for hours.

So, I forced myself to go to yoga and hated most of the class. I have never hated yoga before, but the teacher was challenging us, and my arms began to burn during the first down dog. See why sleep is important? Then she kept doing high lunge, which is not my pose. I almost cried several times. Had I been at a yoga studio I might have but this is a yoga class at the gym and so I sucked it up.
The teacher says something about going at your own pace, and how challenging these poses are, and that she’s proud of how well we’re doing. And it clicks. It’s more important that I show up, try, and work to improve then being perfect.

I will admit, because we’re all such close friends, that I did wrestle with myself over continuing to wallow in self-pity and pouting for the rest of the day or really accepting this new found grow-up wisdom and moving on. Before class was over I was feeling good again.

Writing, revising, and publishing a book is hard work, and I have learned a lot and will continue to learn a lot. I now have a new plan for editing so hopefully I’ll find these before my book gets to the reader. I am not selling perfection I am selling, I hope, a great story. Now I have read my book out loud (again) and corrected the mistakes I found, because while perfection isn’t the goal, improving is. To keep my fears of failure at bay I remind myself that I wrote 98,000 words, so even if 10% of them are wrong that’s still an ‘A’ 🙂

So if any of you enjoyed my story but felt you couldn’t give it a good review because of the mistakes email me, I’d love to give you a copy of the new improved Phoenix Child for your enjoyment. I don’t promise perfection, but improvement. And for those of you who enjoyed my story and were able to overlook my mistakes, thank you.

How do you deal with failure? Have you ever been afraid of something and then had it happen?

And to lighten our Monday some fun music, these women from Russia are too cute!