My second book, Life Between Moments: New York Stories, published in August 2022, a week before my 26th birthday. Within days, it became an Amazon #1 bestseller across multiple categories and reviewers lauded the work.
After chipping away at night and on weekends for a year, often when I’d rather do anything but write, I finally had my book in the world.
Three months after the fact, though, my life remains largely unchanged.
It’s rare that any single success can suddenly allow you to decamp from your previous lot. My second book, for example, did not change my life, even though I had expected it to in some way. Beyond conversations around the water cooler and a few extra bucks in my pocket, Life Between Moments has held little sway in my day to day activity.
I write often about how great creative work comes not from daydreaming but from showing up everyday. On reflection, however, those lessons I aim to act out deprived me of the very normal, expected enjoyment of this milestone.
To be sure, I’m proud of the book. It took a lot of work. But my own relatively muted reaction to it stands as a reminder that an obsession with forward momentum can keep you from pausing to celebrate or appreciate.
Readers continue to order the book and reviews still roll in at a steady clip, but I missed the initial splash and excitement of its release by staying laser-focused on what comes next.
The upside of steadfast diligence, I still believe, outweighs any negative. But the shortcomings sting still. In my tendency to focus only on new and fresh work, when the book came out it seemed everyone but me wanted to give it a moment in the spotlight. My fear of stagnating blinded me from enjoying what sat in my lap on the book’s launch day, which I had prepared so long for.
The book itself is a collection of fiction. Short stories about everyday people in and about New York. One theme that emerges is the brevity and slipperiness of moments. How difficult it is to hold on to them before they dissolve like sugar cubes in coffee.
The characters that populate the pages confront the same troubles that’ve always plagued people — the straightforwardness yet uncertainty of relationships, the tragedy of wasted potential, and lost and found love.
What I tried to illustrate, too, is how readily people can and do move on. In fiction and life, it can be jarring to witness. Life continues whether you’re game or not, and it doesn’t feel good when you’re the one left behind.
Some of the characters behave as if moving forward is the best option, while others let their past weigh on them and slow their pace like a heavy rucksack.
Obsessing on either is unproductive, but most people have a bias toward one.
Forward is the place where opportunities you haven’t faced await you, where challenges you cannot yet anticipate wait in ambush. Striving into the future puts you further from prior achievements but, as I write in my book, it’s the only way to play the hand you’ve been dealt.
Three months after my second bestseller, and I feel content in how the book continues to sell and how readers and reviewers received it (every single Amazon or Goodreads review helps tremendously).
It took some time for me to realize that letting my book’s publishing come and go like any other ordinary day was an oversight. A cold reaction to something I’d been working toward for so long.
I run a self-help and productivity blog, but the lessons from it became counterproductive when it came time to enjoy the fruits of my labor.
This is the story of a book, which by many conventional metrics was a success, that went unnoticed by its author. That’s not a tale I’d ever planned to be the main character in, and I’m doing my best to rewrite the script in time for whatever happens next.
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