During the whirligig ride that’s been the publication of The Monsters of Templeton, one of the scariest and most exhilarating parts was the selection of the novel for the Barnes and Noble First Look Book Club. Exhilarating because I’m tickled that my book was the inaugural selection; scary because suddenly a large group of people was going to read my work. I always thought I was pretty tough—dang, folks, I have an MFA in fiction, after all—but from the beginning I was too wimpy to read all of the commentary about the book, making my dear husband filter things for me. “Hey,” he would say: “Felicia from Cincinnati is really bonding with Willie,” and “Fifi from Brooklyn thinks the cover looks like a Rorschach Test. (see 1)” In this way, he told me the gist of what most people were saying. Apart from whooping it up for Felicia and sighing about poor Fifi, he protected me from being overwhelmed.

But on October 15th, I’m going online to actually meet these lovely people who have already read the book, and I’m going to have to bone up on what they’ve been saying while they’ve been reading. Although I won’t agree with everything they say, it’ll surely be fascinating and educational to hear from them. I do hope they’ll all come online and chat with me—I can’t wait to hear the questions they’re going to ask—and this time with no filter, at all.

1: Which it absolutely does not look like! It’s gorgeous, and when I saw it for the first time, I actually cried like a wee baby.