My book is here!

And it’s my second essay collection.

My first essay collection, Even the Cemeteries Have Space Here, is sold out and I don’t talk much about it anymore. I’m glad I made it, I was so joyful designing it and getting it printed and connecting with people about it—and now it’s done. Not every book needs to be around forever, not every book needs to be permanently in the foreground of my story of self.

I wrote the essays in that first book when I envisioned a very different life for myself, and I had the time then to carefully lay out each page, to match artwork from shea✨ in the catskills to my words, to carefully think about choice of paper stock.

This essay collection, I put together in about two months. Christa Orth and Dusty Bryndal reached out to see if I wanted to be in a reading, and I told them my old book was sold out but I’d try to make a new one.

I had the essays. All I had to do was revise them, choose an order, and figure out interior and exterior book design.

I told myself I didn’t have to worry too much about it.

I told myself I could just print up a few copies and do the event and share with friends and family.

I told myself not to overthink it.

But now the book’s up on my site and something was broken about the checkout process all day, which annoys me because I definitely lost a few sales, but also, part of the point was that I had decided not to overthink it, so maybe trying out the unusual (for me) experience of not having checked something about 10 million times before making it public was an important new experience to try out.

Part of me wants to just sell or give away this short print run and have it be the end of this second collection too.

But part of me wants it to be bigger. I’ve gotten software to help me lay out an e-book and signed up for an account on IngramSpark for distribution (although it pains me that they have fewer paper options than the printer I’ve been using so far.)

But I ask myself—is this the version of this book I want to go big with? Is there still another version hidden within this one? Something about this book feels compressed to me, as though the essays may want more interstitial matter, or just a bit more room to breathe.

But these are the essays I wrote at the time, and I’m wary of adding material from a later time. As a trans person, I’m wary of adding explanatory material, or material that would turn this work from an exploration of constructions of self and story to some sort of teaching tool about trans pregnancy.

I’m trying not to let this dilemma stall me. This is the book I have right now, and I believe in it.

Maybe later, the book will show me what else it wants to become. Or maybe it doesn’t want to become anything else at all.

Either way, I still have to learn the e-book software and learn to release this book through channels other than my own living room. I’ll have to learn to do that regardless of what I think about this book, because there will be another book before long—this I believe for sure.

When I look at my books as moments in my life, or as waves in an ocean of creative work, I feel less worried about what they’ll become, or about wringing every sale and every eyeball out of this one.

Later on, I’ll be a different person, and there will be another book. And this book, and the first book, will be woven into it.

Right now, it’s one thing at a time. Fixing the orders page. Making the e-book. Maybe an event? Maybe not.

Just one next thing at a time.