In which I am overwhelmed

Y’all.

Seriously.

I woke up yesterday morning and checked the email. And then I checked the Twitter. Then I began to read your incredibly sweet comments and cried about forty-six different times. I don’t know when I’ve ever experienced such a complete outpouring of love and kindness and it made me want to write Al Gore a letter and thank him for inventing the internet.

By mid-morning the blog actually crashed. That’s unprecedented. At least for those reasons. It’s crashed because I’ve done something stupid in my WordPress dashboard, but it’s never crashed from sheer volume.

So, yes, I spent most of the morning reading comments and wiping my tears and thinking about Ephesians 3:20. And then I did what Ernest Hemingway most likely did after he announced his first book deal and scrubbed the toilets in both of our bathrooms and cleaned bird poop off our back door. Clearly it was day one of my glamorous new life.

Okay, so here are a few more quick details and then I’m going to quit talking about it. Basically I have discovered that writing a book is similar to giving birth to an elephant. Not that I’ve ever given birth to an elephant but I think I read somewhere that they gestate for like two years. I am very likely wrong about the specifics. But the bottom line is that elephants are pregnant for a very long time and by the time they deliver their bouncing baby elephant they can’t even remember how the whole thing happened in the first place except that it involved wine and romantic music.

Which doesn’t sound all that different from humans.

Anyway, I don’t know much right now except that my final manuscript (the official word for the whole book that I’m supposed to write) is due on April 1, 2012. And then I think it goes through a bunch of editing and typesetting and other -ings that I don’t know about yet. Finally, I will deliver a healthy baby book sometime in early 2013. I think.

I could be wrong about that. Just like I’m wrong about the elephant pregnancy.

Did I mention I scrubbed my toilets today and may be suffering ill effects from the fumes?

So what I’m saying is it won’t be available to give to your friends and loved ones for Christmas. But I promise I will keep you posted on all the critical dates and you’ll be the first to know when you can pre-order it and all that business.

I just hope real bookstores are still in business by the time it comes out because I’d really like to see it on actual shelves. Plus, Gulley has promised me she’ll go to every store in town and make sure it’s positioned front and center on the tables right inside the front door. After all, what are best friends for if not willing to get thrown out of Barnes and Nobles by security?

And I just have to say thank you again for yesterday. In between all the tears, I couldn’t quit smiling. It will go down as one of my favorite days.

Y’all are the best.