Mission Accomplished, Now what?

Anyone who knows me, will nod in agreement when I say I'm not exactly a techno inclined person. Aside from my admitted preference for hanging my freshly washed clothes out on my mile long clothes line strung taut between house and carriage house rather then tossing them into a clothes dryer, or hand washing my dishes (because renovating the kitchen in our 130 year old house meant carting away the dishwasher in lieu of an old cast iron double sink) even my writing life is a reflection of my old-fashioned sensibilities. Although I love and cherish my lovely pink laptop computer now, it was a long time in coming. For years I was a yellow legal pad girl with a fistful of ballpoints. Not until it was time to produce a submitable copy of a finished manuscript, would I borrow a friend's electric typewriter just long enough to translate my scribbles to neat and tidy white pages. While I still compose on yellow pads at the beginning of any novel project, I welcome the transition to the computer when the time comes to fine-tune, rewrite, edit, edit, and edit.

Nevertheless, it was altogether intimidating and just a tad bit horrifying to consider putting together my own author website. But even so, I am certainly pragmatic enough to face the facts and know when the time comes to roll up my sleeves and jump in. (The facts being that I have neither hundreds nor thousands of dollars to pay someone else to design my site for me). So, imagine my shock, surprise, and eventual awe when I actually did take the leap and found myself swimming rather then sinking as I'd envisioned. My website, www.barbaraforteabate.com has been created and launched in patient wait of visitors AND my novel's release date (as yet to be determined). It's certainly exciting, wonderful, and thrilling...but something else as well. Something I hadn't expected and can only hope is temporary, which is to say I'm feeling a strange sense of "over exposure." To think that I haven't even had the experience of book selling and full-on promotion yet and already I'm questioning how long I can personally deal with so much "Barbara." Is this normal? Temporary? (As one can only hope, since this is no way to savor the joy of a dream realized.) Is it merely a normal, temporary, state of overload for someone far more accustomed to the quiet life of a working writer, as opposed to the inyourface author pushing her baby out into the world with the underlying fear that no one else will find her offspring quite as beautiful as she does?