Galleys!

This week I received my galleys from the press. It was a smallish envelope with two perfect bound galleys -- a little taste of what the book will feel like in my hands. It's all so exciting really.

A conversation went like this:

me: look what I got in the mail!
friend: wow! it's like giving birth to a baby, your very own book baby
me: yeh
friend: how does it feel?
me: I've decided I'm going to let it live in the world a few more hours bit before I start judging it
friend: I think you and it deserve more than a few hours
friend: congrats!

I carried one copy in my bag every where I went. It was a bit sad, to think, really. Then, a friend who is at AWP called me -- I missed her call -- and left a message saying that she was in the bookfair and had just walked past the South Carolina Poetry Initiative (the group that sponsored the prize) table and saw the poster and fliers about my book. Hopefully it will generate interest and people will buy the book.

I know that when I received the galleys, something felt different. It's something totally different to hold your poems in your hands and they're on something other than an 8x11 sheet of paper. It's an interesting feeling when you see a poem and it's split between two pages, and - because the galley looks almost exactly howt he book will look - you find yourself physically turning the page in order to finish reading a poem. It's interesting. I can't wait until people can hold all of this in their hands.