Bruce Rutledge has a great post up at the Chin Music Press blog about the launch party for Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? I'm so thrilled that everything went to so well for the Chin Music crew down there and that so many people came out and were supportive. This book is so amazing - it's beautiful to look at and the content is equally impressive. I'm just so proud to be associated with it, and to be in print in this particular way.

It's a very big deal to me.

Oddly enough one of the main questions from several family members has been how much money I earned for my essay in the book. That would be nothing - in a major way - because I didn't want anything for this. This wasn't about money, it's about helping the city and the people within it. But if someone's going to ask that question then clearly they aren't going to get the answer. So why bother trying to explain - it's pointless.

It's just exhausting to have to even listen to it sometimes, though.

I am working this week on two different pieces, the interview with Hyder Akbar about his book on Afghanistan and the interview with Ashley Nelson on her book about the Sixth Ward in New Orleans. I seem to be in a place of great destruction and despair with the people I'm talking to - not because I wanted to be, but because those are the books that seem to be drawing me in. I don't know which is more important, which task I should be setting myself to with greater determination. (And don't think the books are depressing - they aren't, they're wondeful. But the subject matter, well, I don't have to explain how sad that is, do I?)

Honestly, I don't know which one of these kids impressed me more, or made me more aware of my own shortcomings when I was there age. Such flashes of brilliance from two young people (Ashley is still in high school!) and I don't know if the world will discover them in a large enough way to appreciate them, and help them. They could each change be changing certain corners of the world soon enough, I'm sure, and it is both exciting and daunting to be writing about their work.

And what do I write for me? I am writing about a girl and her two closest friends and a family secret that touches the larger world in ways that most of us can not imagine. I am writing about how she discovers a need for a home she has rarely experienced; family she has barely known. I am writing about how you build your own family in many ways, from much more than blood. Sometimes the folks who raised you aren't the ones you know best, or need the most. It's a journey book, an urban fantasy, an adventure, a buddy novel - mostly it is a work in progress. I hope it is good, but I can't know that right now. Other than moments where it works, I see only places where it falters and will need much rewriting.

I am so far from the light at the end of this tunnel.

But I blunder on, trying for a couple of pages, trying for 1,000 words, trying to keep moving past the parts that slow me down. And I think of how Hyder toted his tape recorder and video camera all over Afghanistan looking for the truth and how Ashley asked the toughest questions of all about who she is, who her family is, and what kind of place her neighborhood is, and I think I have it pretty easy in my imaginary world. I'm coasting along on this book in comparison to them.

And I wonder if that means I'm not taking enough chances - I wonder if it means I'm not being bold enough.

Or maybe I just think too hard sometimes and should get back to the writing. Just shut up Colleen, and write.