20130916

A Name is But A Name; or Maybe Not

Now that my book has been released, I'd like to share a little about 'her' to continue decompressing from the hard work it took to bring the endeavor to life. I'll keep it brief and to the point. For those of us who have had to name our children, for most of us the name just breathed into our spirit, sometimes hours before the little gift of joy arrived.
For me, the title Letters to My Daughters came to me one day out of the blue while I was writing. As the words came together on the page it seemed appropriate that this memoir was becoming a conglomerate of essays about personal life-lessons that I want to be passed down generationally; thus the title Letters to My Daughters. In this knowing, probably about midways the writing of the book, I simply adopted it scribbling L2MD notes on many edits.
When the day arrived for her to be launched onto the Kindle scene, I uploaded the cover and the book, content with having given it my best. As a perfectionist in recovery, my best is never really my best, I just have to let her rip at some point or nothing would ever get done. A few days after the acknowledgment that the book had published, I signed in to take a second look.
I queried the book title in the Google search engine and did not find it there. To my initial lament, I did see other authors who had similar and same titles as my own. I saw that the President has a book with a similar title, and Maya Angelou has a singular tense of my book title. And to top it off, there are several authors who have adopted the exact book title as my own. Clearly, looking at the published dates, it's more that I adopted a title the same as theirs without a clue that this title had already been used in various ways.
I said my initial emotion was lament; that after all of my hard work, I was sharing a title. It's kind of like naming a child. I thought the name would be unique and 'catchy'. No, it turns out it's more like Jan, Mary, Sue. Of course no offense to people who own these names; simply making a point.
However, soon after that initial disappointment, I took pause and realized some very well-known people, including one of my favorite authors had launched books several years earlier with a similar mindset, and I was humbly honored; sort of like, great minds think alike.
That's it. Thanks for letting me decompress on your shoulder a bit. I genuinely appreciate it.

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