716

There is something particular about going back.

Not nostalgic, exactly. Not a longing for what was. More like…returning to the soil where something first took root, and seeing what grew from it, and feeling the full distance between then and now in a way that isn’t available anywhere else.

That’s what the 716 gave me this weekend.

Coming back

Three stops across two nights and a day. The Lockport Public Library on Thursday. The Velvet Bookmark in North Tonawanda on Friday. Dragonfly Art & Soul in Williamsville on Saturday.

Three completely different rooms, three completely different audiences, three expressions of what this series is and who it finds. And threaded through all of it, my daughter, watching. Observing the way she does. Taking it all in quietly and completely, the way she has watched every part of this journey unfold.

There is something about having her witness this that I don’t have words for yet. She has seen the late nights and the self-doubt and the box of author copies arriving at the door. This weekend she saw the rooms. The people. The moment when a book finds a reader and something passes between them that didn’t exist before.

I hope she carries that.

The rooms

The author talk at the library went better than I dared to hope. The people who were supposed to be there were there, and a few who surprised me were too. Faces from chapters of my life I hadn’t seen in years. People who have known me since I was small enough to stand at the library desk and watch the librarian stamp the lending card, transfixed.

They came. That means something I’m still processing.

There was a moment…before the talk, in the seeing of someone I hadn’t seen in far too long, where everything I had been holding burst through all at once. A bubble. Gone in an instant. The kind of moment that reminds you why you came home in the first place.

The Latin landed. The stories landed. And then someone asked if I would read from Book 2 - unplanned, unrehearsed - and I said yes, and read the prologue of The Enigma to a room that went quiet, in the way rooms go quiet when something is working.

Afterwards I was told I should do more readings. That the writing is compelling enough to stop people when they hear it out loud.

I have been sitting with that ever since.

The Velvet Bookmark on Friday was intimate in the best possible way with even more surprise visitors. Dragonfly on Saturday felt like coming home to the reader the series was always written for. The spiritually curious woman who picks up a book and feels recognized in it.

After I left, more copies of Book 1 sold to people who stayed. The shop is using it for their book club next. The story finding its people without me in the room. That’s what this series keeps doing.

What came home with me

New connections; people in the industry who now feel they need to make a pilgrimage to Medina. Books circulating in the wild, finding homes in the 716, being read by people who will tell other people.

The knowledge that the writing itself is worth hearing out loud. That when I read the words I wrote in silence, alone, not entirely sure anyone would care…a room goes quiet.

My daughter’s eyes taking it all in. My family witnessing this growth.

…and the full, quiet certainty that coming back to where it all began, with two published books and a third already pulling at me, was exactly the right thing to do.

The 716 gave me a lot this weekend.

I gave it a few books in return.