My wife was reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit last week. She finished it and she picked up The Mountain School. I had a surreal moment when I looked over to see her face buried in the open book, my book — She’s reading my book! Like it’s any other book. It’s just a book that she’s reading right now, and it happens to be one that I wrote.
I was in the kitchen, and she was in a chair in the other room. She laughed shortly, “Hah.”
“What is it? You think something’s funny? What?”
I wanted so badly to know, but I couldn’t ask. How annoying it would be for her to have me asking about every reaction she had. It had to be enough that she was reacting to the book at all. The scariest thing for a writer is to put something out there and then for people to read it calmly and finish it and then never think of it again. That’s the scariest thing to me anyway.
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