Meeting My Publisher!

“How will I know you?” I ask my publisher, Sheryl Dunn, President of Shelfstealers.

She’s meeting me at the airport in Leon, Mexico. I’ve worked with this woman for over a year, emailing almost daily, sharing my fiction and my life. I went through Sherylizing, her grueling process of editing that leaves a writer exhausted, but proud of work polished to a high gloss.

Sheryl says, “I’ll be holding a copy of your book, Falling Women and Other Stories.” And so she is. We meet at last, and I feel as if I’ve known her all my life.

She’s launching my short story collection from the International Literary Conference in San Miguel de Allende.  At Sheryl’s place I meet Kerry Dunn, author of Joe Peace, a crime novel with bite. Adding to our menagerie of Shelfstealer authors, I meet Leslie Hall Pinder, acclaimed Canadian author of several novels including Under the House, and George Whiteman, who wrote The Perennial Freshman, a hilarious memoir.  After a session with a Dr. Kim, who helps me with delivery, I read from my collection.

Reading your work is scary, but the stories in my collection feel like old friends. Still at a reading you’re admitting to the world: I wrote this. Our listeners prove to be a wonderful bunch. Many of them follow us to the bookstore and buy our books. The conference offers us an opportunity to bond as a company much like a family and to be inspired by one another as well as by other authors.

We Shelfstealers are up early for our 8:30 readings and out late. I fly home on Tuesday. On the plane, I fall into a deep sleep, the disorienting kind in which you wake and don’t know where you are. I hear the pilot announce we’re landing in Washington, D.C., and my time in San Miguel de Allende feels like a dream.