I'm an Okra Pick!
The Southern Independent Booksellers Association just named The Hidden Light of Northern Fires as an Summer Okra Pick.
When you sit alone staring at a mish-mash of paragraphs, trying to figure out how to make some scene work, convinced the whole damned book is going to unravel if you can't manage it, you wonder if it will ever see the light of day. Then you get it workable, and some patient agent takes it under her wing, but she tells you how hard it is to sell a first novel. And you wonder if it will ever see the light of day. Then a publisher takes a risk on you, but there's a million other titles out there, and you are a very little fish in a big pond. And you wonder if it will ever see the light of day.
You know who makes all the difference? Booksellers. They read books. They fall in love with books. They put those books in the hands of readers, and the readers take those books and walk out the door, and then they sit in a park by a pond, eat their lunch and read. And then, finally, your work sees the light of day.
I can't tell you what it means to have Indie Bookstores champion this book for me. It reminds me that impossible things happen.
