Coming Back To Life

I'm sure you all recall that last fall Gyldendal Undervisning renewed our agreement to use some material from Saving the Planet & Stuff in one of its textbooks for teaching English. Last week they notified me that they've decided to increase the first-print run of the edition. More books!

And then just a couple of days ago I learned that my flash creative nonfiction, Heroes, has been included in The Bending Genres Anthology 2018-2019. The piece was published at Bending Genres in 2018.

Writing can be a discouraging slog. But one of the neat things that can happen in publishing is that sometimes something you've published in the past suddenly gets a little new life, as was the case for me this past week.

I can remember back in the day suddenly hearing from my editor that foreign publishers wanted to do editions of my books.  My Life Among the Aliens was published in Japan. Japan! (And Italy and Germany, which also did editions of two of my other books.) And then there was that time I was notified four times that states had included A Year With Butch And Spike on their student readers' choice award lists. When Happy Kid! went on to one of its two award lists, it resulted in a second printing for the book, because those lists generate sales and the book was right at the point where it needed a new printing to meet demand. Another year I got an e-mail from my editor to let me know that The Hero of Ticonderoga was being talked about at that year's ALA conference. And the next thing I knew (seriously, it was within a day or two) I found out that the ALA was naming it a Notable Book for that year.

Now, yes, I am using my recent news as an opportunity to relive past glories. But I have a point apart from that. The point is: I was through with those books. I may have still been promoting them at school visits or where and when I could, but the writing, the editing, the publishing was all done. I wasn't working on those books any more. And, yet, things continued to happen for them. 

That these kinds of things happen is one of the many things I didn't know about writing and publishing when I was getting started. Yes, it was one of the better things.