An Unexpected Celebration by Stacy Nockowitz

I sit on my back porch, my laptop open but idle in front of me. I’m watching birds peck at the feeder in the yard. My phone pings. It’s my daughter texting me from her bedroom upstairs.

“The writer’s block today is real!”

“TOTALLY!” I text back. “I looked at my manuscript and realized I don’t know where the story is going. If I don’t know where it’s going, how is the reader going to feel?”

My daughter is 20, home from college for the summer. And she’s writing a book.

I’m a school librarian, on summer break. And I’m writing a book.

I feel like I’ve been given such an unexpected gift this summer. Writing our books at the same time has wrapped Margot and me in our own little cocoon. We bounce ideas off of one another. We help each other through rough patches, when it feels like we just can’t find another word to put on the page. We cheer for one another when we reach milestones.

“I’m at 80,000 words, Mom!” she tells me, and I tell her how amazing she is. I’m well behind, but she doesn’t let me give up.

We’re teaching one another, too. Margot is teaching me about poetry, which she writes on the side and very well, I might add. I’m teaching her about query letters and obscure points of grammar that only an English teacher cares about. And there’s a peace between us that I can’t remember feeling before. We’ve always been close, but now we have this shared struggle, this common experience that will always bind us. It doesn’t matter if either of us is ever published. We’ve laughed and commiserated and discussed a hundred different books and authors. It’s like the tightest writing group that’s ever met.

Yesterday, Margot texted me at 3:03 in the afternoon: “im done.”

We celebrated with high fives, and then she went to work on her revisions. I’m so proud of her I may burst. I can’t imagine I’ll be any happier when I text her those words myself.


Stacy Nockowitz is a former English teacher turned school librarian. She holds Master’s degrees from Columbia University (M.A.) and Kent State University (M.L.I.S.). Stacy speaks at educational conferences across the country on such topics as information literacy and educational technology. She is currently writing her third novel, and this time, she may actually try to get it published. Stacy has been married for 27 years to her husband, Richard, and they are exceptionally proud of their two grown children. Reading is Stacy’s superpower. Follow her on Twitter @snockowitz, and read her blog at www.MrsNReads.com.