Word Forge Books will celebrate its five-year anniversary in June. Our parent company, The Word Forge, will celebrate its tenth anniversary. And I, the publisher and principal, will celebrate my 50th birthday. What a momentous month!
There must be a math formula in here somewhere: 5 x 10 = 50. But since math has never been my long suit, we’ll leave that for others to contemplate.
The main message, though, is as the title of this post says: It’s all about time.
Time to be born, time to grow up and be educated, time to find your passion and your calling, and to realize that if the two collide, there’s no better luck and few greater blessings. Then there’s time to work and to learn some more, time to launch and to build.
And then there’s this time in the middle of it all, when you stop and look back, and you wonder how on earth you came this far and how you got it all done. You look around at the present time and wonder where the world’s headed and what part you’ll play in that whole drama. And you look ahead and wonder what the future holds, what things will look like in a time far from now.
But then you return to the present and realize that the most important time — in fact, the only one you are absolutely sure you can do something about — is right now.
Right. Now.
Right now, you can work hard to be the best you can be. To do the most with as much or as little as you have. To be thankful for whatever that is, and aware that things might be better, but could always be worse. Right now, you can realize that whatever happened yesterday already had its day, and whatever happens tomorrow is largely out of your control. Ah, but right now…right now you can sit up straight, look around at what is, and dream of what might be, if only you leverage the power of Right Now.
So, I’m looking back at three hard years of a bad economy and some tough breaks in publishing. But I’m looking at right now, when I have a load of new ideas, increasing energy as we emerge from the long winter into the season of rebirth, and time is still on my side. I’m feeling deeply thankful for all these blessings. I’m looking ahead at a future full of promise, with significant gains being made by small independent publishers every day, and much exciting potential for growth in my knowledge and expertise through my involvement in MBPA, a professional trade association of independent publishers in the MidAtlantic region.
Yeah, I’d say this June’s going to be pretty special in more ways than one. I’m really looking forward to it. Yeah, even to turning 50. Because really…it’s about time.
