My book is NOT perfect.

 I picked up the hard copy proof of my first novel today. Yes. After almost two years of hard work, I now hold this glorious, glossy piece of work in my hands. I’ll try not to stroke it too much, but I can’t promise anything.

I did try to make it perfect. For a while. Until one day my husband said to me, “You know you’re book won’t be perfect.” He knows me and my obsessive ways all too well. He was trying to save me from myself and my tendency to nit pick at something until I’m bleeding from the inside out.

He also pointed out that my book shouldn’t be perfect. He asked me what it is that I love so much about the screaming vocals and guitar solos of the music that I insist on listening to over and over. Why am I so infatuated with the tight panted, long haired, rough around the edges metal Gods that inspired the theme of my novel? I admitted it was their raw, emotional imperfections. Hmmm. Maybe my husband was onto something.

He was right. Why do we gravitate to a piece of art, whether it be a song, a painting or a story? Because there is a piece of the artist in it. Because it is a window into the way that that a unique individual sees and feels. Because it is infused with personal experience. And life is not perfect. Neither am I.

I realized that if I was to be in my art then it needed to have some little gidget quirks in it,  and it needed to be infused with the emotion that drove me to create it in the first place.

Scary creepy tree on nightmare forest

Crime scene on a rainy night with selective focus / high contrast image

Thus, the weird things that I find fascinating are infused in my book. Beautiful nature tainted by bloody corpses posed in elaborate displays. Broken, tortured characters haunted by pasts that scream with blood red lips into their brains. And, of course, hard core 80s heavy metal. Yes. It’s all there.

So now that I have stepped away from trying to make my book perfect and allowed it to breathe and morph….I’m excited to unleash this creepy little imperfection.

Stay tuned for many 80s montages, corpse poems and a trip back in time. Get out that Walkman, play that track, and get ready for a wild ride…