It’s a weekday morning. You wake up. You head to your desk job. Your subway train is stalled in the tunnel for five extra minutes, which causes you to run to the office to make it on time and you narrowly avoid skidding on the slippery sidewalk and you step on your own scarf in the elevator, but no one sees so it’s okay. You sit at your desk and do your work and send your emails and enter dates into the system and check twice to make sure you entered the correct dates into the system and fix typos and hold pages close up against your face to hopefully catch more typos. Pretend this is your usual life and nothing special. Your shoes don’t fit, one heel is splitting. Your pants are too tight. You have another paper cut and forgot again to get Band-Aids. Also, you are parched. You get a drink of water. You come back to your desk. You open your email to find—

YOUR BOOK COVER!

You blink. You take another look.

YOUR EDITOR HAS JUST SENT YOU YOUR BOOK COVER!

She says everyone at the covers meeting loved it.

IT’S YOUR COVER!

You are floored. You stare. You think:

THE BOOK I WROTE HAS A COVER!

And it’s beautiful and it’s moody and the title of your book is in dark purple letters and you adore dark purple and how did they know that? and you

LOVE IT

and yet you must contain yourself because you are at work and cannot go running down the serious halls squealing

I LOVE MY COVER

and you tell your editor how much you love it and you tell your husband how much you love it and you change your Facebook status to announce that you love it and you send vibes out into the universe to hope the artist knows how much you love it and then you pause, and just look at it and think, quietly, to yourself

I have a cover

And everything feels different, for a few minutes, like you’re a real writer or something, with a book coming out, like this is really, really real.

* * *

That’s what happened on Thursday. As soon as I get permission I’ll post it so you can see!