There Are Enough Stories

Mama, when are you going to stop writing...?

I received the loveliest email the other day. It wasn't what was in the message that pleased so much as what the subject said: Author Questionnaire.
Sara Jewell, author. Finally, as my mother keeps saying.
Soon. Less than four months. Pub day is September 30. I will be out standing in my field on that day.
Answering that questionnaire helped because speaking of questionnaires...lately I've been questioning the content of my Field Notes book. I keep thinking I missed a couple of essays that should have been included.
I know, I know: the curse of the Should Haves.

In order to answer a couple of questions on the questionnaire, however, I needed to refresh my memory on the content of my essays and as I scrolled through the Table of Contents, I realized, "This is okay. These are good essays." Most importantly, I said, "These are enough."
Sure, perhaps, the one about the green bins should be in this collection but that's about it; and I could have added it during the last editing go-round but I ran out of time and energy, to be honest.

The good news is I have already started the file for Field Notes 2: Further Afield. And in thinking about this again today, I know that the essays about the green bin and the pet chickens and those first few dates with a Nova Scotia country boy will fit in the second book just as nicely because there won't be any "back story" essays in book two. Those are the ones that describe what it was like to leave Vancouver and end up on a dead-end road with no streetlights or sidewalks in rural Nova Scotia; that subject is sufficiently covered in book one. Book two will be the continuing adventures... and my country boy now has a deadline for teaching me to shoot a gun.
So check another line off on the To Do list: Stop worrying about the book! You will never run out of stories to tell.