Facing my fears

One day I will be published (see how I'm being positive here?) and when I am, and my book will be loved by many (still being positive...), somebody is going to ask me where the inspiration came from and all that jazz (or at the very least there's some universal disclaimer that everything in the book is fictitious and non of the characters are real). I'm going to have a problem at that point because Dawson, Cris and Casey are my three kids, and that's just the way it is. Okay, so the dragons aren't real, but the kids are, and though most of the dialogue in the book is not actual quotes, some of it is (though can they be quotes if they were written first and then Kaes said them years later?). Nobody is going to want to listen to me talk about my kids in these future interviews, and yet the characters really do represent what I live with at home. (Okay, that is not precisely true either, especially considering some of the things my daughter has done recently, but since she isn't going to be six forever, I will not go into detail here, a show of restraint on my part which should win me the Best Mom Ever award. But I digress.) In the book, Casey is fearless, that's her Thing. In my all-too-real life, Kaes is also fearless, or at least fear-impaired. I offer this as an example.

Recently my family went on vaction to Moab, Utah, with my sister's family. At one of our stops in Arches, my daughter went off with her uncle and climbed a rather large rock. The rock was about the size of a house and right next to the parking lot (we were filling water bottles and such before taking off down the trail). When they came back down, my brother-in-law told us about the conversation he had had up on the rock with my daughter. Kaes wanted to climb higher (there were levels to the rock and they had stopped at the first, single-story-house level). Aaron, bless him, suggested that maybe they shouldn't, to which my daughter replied, "Uncle Aaron, you have to face your fears. That's what I do." Aaron, bless him EVEN MORE, tried to explain that sometimes you should listen to your fears because they're trying to tell you that something is dangerous and not a good idea. I doubt his advice will have any bearing on Kaes's future decisions, but the words are in her brain somewhere, spoken by somebody other than her parents (and she really loves Uncle Aaron) and he was able to convince her to come back down and not go any higher. That was a very Casey thing to do, and I'm going to have a hard time talking about Casey (someday) and not relating that story about Kaes. How frustrating.

However, that is not the whole reason for this post. In honor of my daughter's exhortation to 'face your fears', I want to announce that I have officially sent off my first actual query letter to an actual agent of an actual agency that I did not make up in my head. I am actually (yes, I'm using that word a lot, leave me alone) in a happy place right now where it is not really real yet. Once it becomes real I will have to stress, because that is what I do. But my husband gave me a very 'you are wonderful, and a coward' pep talk this afternoon and told me to send it out. And my six-year-old climbs rocks that are way too freaking big for her. So I did it.