A box of books arrived today – my author copies of a new children’s book that will be officially published in June.

There’s a moment of such strangeness when you see your story in print as a book, a real book, not this vision that was in your head, but something you can hold and read and place on a book shelf. An actual object.

What was previously just an idea, so flakey that you were embarrassed for anyone to see the first few scribbled pages (anybody reading those early notes would know for sure you were crazy). Now here it is, complete with its little book jacket, carrying its own ISBN number, listed on Amazon, finally respectable, not at all crazy. Like an outlaw that’s gone straight. That’s what happens when you’re published. And it feels very strange.