Every new author has two fantasies when they publish their first book. The first fantasy is that it will be a runaway best-seller. I imagined being interviewed by Oprah, or Scott Simon on NPR. “So tell me, Ms. Ingram, how does it feel to have such surprising success with your first book?” You really believe this might happen … for a while.

Four years ago, I began writing a book.* I had something close to a first draft when I took it to a writer’s group. That first day, one of the members arrived late; she looked as if she had just been spit out of a terrible tornado and plopped, disheveled and wide-eyed, into a corn field. The cause of her distress? She had just published her first book.

The life of a writer is not as glamourous as you might think; it’s not all sweatpants and eating dry cereal out of the box and royalty payments stuffing the mailbox. This morning, for instance, I awoke from a spicy little dream and stared into the dark thinking about the dream and what it meant and trying to drag out the good feeling for as long as I could.