The Wednesday evening before I left for San Fransisco, I received from the UPS delivery guy a package from Bethany House containing my hot off the press copy of Return of the Guardian King.It's always a little amazing to hold the first copy of your new book in your hands, but especially this one. I can't help remembering how it was at the beginning -- the warnings that the series might never actually be completed and the stories of others which hadn't. Of course at the back of your mind, you always hope the book will be a break out blockbuster success, but that's not been the case. Still, here it is, a real book sitting in my hands. Soon all those people who have written or told me in person how much they are looking forward to reading it, will at last read it.
Already a couple of reviews have come out... I read the first with trepidation, fearing the reviewer might have found the book incomprehensible. Or boring. Neither seemed to be the case, so that was a relief. Or maybe I should say a confirmation that once again the Lord came through, filling in the gaps my weakness left.
I probably won't read it myself for some time. Oh, I'll go through my author's copies (they arrived yesterday) to make sure there aren't any more disasters of signatures being omitted or doubled as with The Shadow Within... but I will wait to sit down and read it until I can get some decent distance on it. Until I can largely forget all the options I wrestled with, the false starts, the actual choices and see what it is that I have done. That will take months at least. And by then I'll be deep into Black Box.
Which I've not worked on much now for two weeks -- ever since the computer crashed. Next week, though I plan to dig in.
For now, I will revel in the Lord's faithfulness. It's amazing that after all the years of writing without apparent success, to realize that I have had five books published. And another in the works.
Grace,
Karen
