Sadness Warning

I wanted to let my blog readers know that the next "Lesson" from my essay collection is the sad one. It is also very long (15 pages in Microsoft Word!) and covers a few months' time. When I wrote it, I just "spewed" the experience and didn't want to divide it up to make it shorter. Now that I am posting the essays online,I know that posting 15 pages in one day is a bit ridiculous so I will tell you that although I will divide it, I will make sure to post the next parts each day after the one before so it's not like I'm trying to cause some kind of cliffhanger.

I have had mixed feelings about getting to this point in my posting of the essays. While it makes me terribly sad to relive it on paper, I want to share it with everyone too because I think it's yet another part of the grieving process, though a small one.

So, that's what I'll do: the first part of Lesson 15 goes up tomorrow morning.

xoxo!

Torn Between Two Emotions, Feelin' Like a Fool...

I just went to check the book's Amazon listing as I do from time to time, to see how it's ranked.

Wait.

Back up. (Beep Beep Beep Beep)

I have some information that will be helpful for you to know before I go on.

I e-mailed Amazon a couple of days ago to request that they place the book under the subheading "Books > Children's Books > Issues > Pet Death" rather than just under "Books > Children's Books > Ages 4-8" or whatever it was under before. This is obviously the right category for it. This won't be news to you unless you are a new visitor to my blog--WELCOME, by the way, if you are!--and haven't read anything else on this page before digging right in to today's entry...

Besides being the right category, having any book in a more specific "home" should help the marketing effort tremendously. After all, if I'm going to Amazon to look for a book about, let's say the comedic stylings of Ben Stiller, I'm going to look in the entertainment section rather than just non-fiction.

But I digress.

Anyway, I was overjoyed, upon checking the listing just now, to see that Amazon went with my wishes--don't you LOVE when that happens?--and that my book is number 8 in that category. Woo hoo!

Ah yes, back to the title of this post. Everytime I get excited about good news regarding the book, my inner voice pulls me back just a little bit. This IS a book partly about death after all (and yes, the living beyond it). As total strangers start to buy the book, nine times out of ten it will be because an animal has died. Yikes. That's sort of heavy, don't you think?

This has been such an emotional journey to begin with; I'm really going to have to get through this inner struggle (Julie is probably reading this, laughing right now because I have conversations with myself all the time) and keep remembering the reason I wrote this book in the first place: to help other families who are going through the same pain that my family went through.

Ahh. I feel better already. Thanks, Me!