Six Copies Is a Beginning
Six Copies Is a Beginning
On Thursday night, I discovered that I am apparently very good at blending into wallpaper.
I was performing in a murder mystery dinner theater, where I successfully “killed” three people without attracting much suspicion for most of the evening. I quietly slipped in and out of the room while everyone else argued, investigated, and accused one another.
Eventually, though, people began to notice a pattern.
I kept leaving and coming back.
My victims also kept leaving and coming back, although they generally returned stumbling through the door with knives protruding from them.
In retrospect, the connection may have been slightly more obvious than I thought.
Still, I remained beneath suspicion for a respectable portion of the evening, which I am counting as a successful performance. Apparently, one of my theatrical strengths is looking as though I could not possibly be responsible for anything while quietly adding to the body count.
Two days later, I was doing the opposite at the Baton Rouge Art Market. Instead of trying to disappear into the scenery, I was hoping people would stop, notice my work, and perhaps take some of it home.
The summer heat has been brutal. It is the kind of heat that makes walking across a parking lot feel like an endurance event. Even early in the morning, the air is already heavy, and everyone involved in an outdoor market knows exactly how much water they brought and how quickly they are drinking it.
But people still came out.
They walked through the market, talked with artists, looked through our work, and supported local creators despite weather that was doing its best to send everyone back indoors.
That support matters more than people may realize. Every conversation, every purchase, and every person who pauses long enough to really look at something helps remind artists that our work is finding its way into the world.
I sold six copies of The Ninth Herb.
Six copies is not an enormous number. No one is calling the bestseller lists, and I am not retiring to a mysterious seaside manor on the proceeds.
But an art market is not a bookstore. Books are competing for attention with paintings, jewelry, pottery, food, plants, and tables filled with beautiful handmade things. People do not necessarily arrive planning to buy a novel.
And six people still chose to take my story home.
The Ninth Herb follows Fern into a strange New Orleans shop where remedies, rumors, and old magic gather in the corners. When a ghostly Victorian gentleman begins appearing where he does not belong, she is drawn into a mystery of old bargains, hidden histories, and dangerous thresholds. Darkly whimsical, haunted, and tender, it is a Southern gothic fairy tale about grief, survival, memory, and the courage it takes to begin again.
Six new readers will meet Fern, step through the doors of The Ninth Herb, and enter the hidden world I spent so much time creating.
Creative work is often built from moments that look small from the outside. A few books sold. A performance that goes well. A conversation with someone who connects with something you made. None of these moments arrives with fireworks, but together they become momentum.
Six copies is not the finish line.
It is a beginning.
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