Author Copies

Yesterday I sent The Buccaneer’s Apprentice off to my editor. Usually by this point in the creative process I’m sick of the book. Not so with the tale of Nic and his friends. That book was a joy to write.

And yesterday, by some kind of weird, fluky chance, I got my author copies of The Glass Maker’s Daughter. It’s a beautiful-looking edition. The cover’s gorgeous. The map is amazing, on the page. It’s a pleasure to hold and to look at.

When I wrote the acknowledgements to The Glass Maker’s Daughter, I dedicated the book to one of my former college professors. I studied playwriting with Dr. Louis Catron at the College of William and Mary for a solid year. His classes were rigidly structured; we wrote a couple of one-act plays per semester, and revised each play three times. Many of the best hours I spent in college were in Dr. Catron’s warm and airless little office, listening to other students read their plays, or reading mine while they closed their eyes and tried to imagine my words on the stage. My belief in the revision process comes almost entirely from the things he taught me. There were times, for example, that the third draft of a play was almost entirely unrecognizable from its original conception—and that can be a good thing. From him I learned that it’s possible and sometimes even desirable to lose entire chunks of text, or even pages and pages, in order to get to the important parts.

Naturally, after my handsome acknowledgements, I wanted to give him a copy of the book. But it’s been twenty-five years, and his website hasn’t been updated in a dog’s age, and I’d known he’d retired a long time ago. I knew I should call and try to find out his current address. In my head, though, I feared doing it. I could’ve made the call months ago, but dragged my feet. What I dreaded, actually, was that I’d ring up the department and have them say, “What kind of former student are you? Didn’t you know he died back in 1993?”

This morning I finally forced myself to call. And luckily, the scenario didn’t play out that way. The fellow who answered the Theatre Department’s phone was very helpful, and offered to forward on the book. Problem solved.

I need to fret less, and do more.