I am ecstatic, thrilled, satisfied……because I gave away my stuff. My stuff, in this case, is my book.  I didn’t know much about Goodreads but somehow I heard about the giveaway program.  It was the simplest thing to put up five signed copies of my book, delivered to the home address of the winners as a prize. I must complement Goodreads on the ease of the whole process.  More important, there was a wonderful thrill in thinking that my book could go out all over the world.

It amazed me that 632  people wanted this book…well, they wanted a free copy of it.  The cynical side of me said that probably some people had an automatic alert set up for free book, that novels would be requested by thousands, not hundreds, that…..oh, shit, why rain on your own parade!

The very day I got the names and addresses of the “lucky winners” I rushed to get special padded envelopes and to mail out the copies.  I enclosed a little note begging them to write a riview on Amazon.  One lives in hopes,  after all.  Four of the five live in the United States and one, a young man of 22 lives in a small city ( 200,000 pop.) in India.  So somebody there, somebody in Alabama and Ohio, will read poems about Montreal and love and water and whatever else, good or bad is in there.

So this is an unexpected surprise that has come out of this adventure.  Thank you everyone who entered.  Thank you whoever reads this.  Readers are the air that fills the lungs of writers.