A Milestone Moment

Many of you voted for my book pitch in a competitive live publisher Zoom event in February 2024. That moment—your presence, your belief, your votes—was the first ripple.

After months of back-and-forth emails, nervous phone calls, and contract negotiations, I signed on the dotted line last August. The manuscript deadline was initially Valentine's Day—a poetic date for a book tentatively titled “Little Tokens of Love.” Then life intervened, as it often does, with my husband's unexpected surgery forcing a deadline extension to April 30.

And here we are today, April 25, 2025: 56 pages, approximately 21,500 words. Numbers that cannot possibly capture what this journey has demanded.

The evidence is visible—my once dark hair now threaded with silver, a few extra pounds from countless hours at the desk instead of moving my body, strained neck muscles, a walking pad, prescription eyeglasses, icecreams by the tub...

This physical transformation mirrors the inner one, as I've wrestled with condensing seven years of handing these tokens to thousands of people into a cohesive narrative that honors every story, every smile, every hug, every tear. Trying to tell the story of what happens when we give something away without expecting anything in return. Hoping to encourage those who hold this book to become kindness ambassadors, creating their own ripples.

You know this, because you’ve lived it with me.

Through every handmade token, every unexpected connection, every tearful email from someone who just wanted to be seen.

For those who say “you should write a book”—this is what they don't see: the doubt that visits at 3 AM, the sentence rewritten 47 times, the vulnerability and the ache of handing over your heart to be edited.

Only another writer knows that each page represents not just words but battles won against insecurity, procrastination, and that relentlessly loud inner critic.

I'm letting this manuscript breathe beside me for a few more days before sending it to my publisher next week.

Though it will be another year of edits, photoshoots, design decisions, cover approvals, and marketing plans before this book reaches shelves, holding these printed pages makes what was just an abstract a year ago suddenly, breathtakingly real.

This is far from the finish line—but today, I'm pausing to acknowledge this milestone, this tangible evidence that dreams pursued with persistence eventually take form.

This moment—this tangible manuscript—is ours as much as it is mine.

Thank you for walking beside me.

Every little token, every little ripple, led us here.