If there’s one thing I firmly believe in in this life, is that you should take any opportunity you get to celebrate. Birthdays, educational milestones, accomplishments, every important relationship you have in your life (I once had a friendship where we celebrated our Friendship Anniversary every year by going out for hamburgers) and any other reason you can think of. The more whimsical or flimsier the better.

I’ve dreamt about being a published author all my life, and I can still remember the first time I held a printed copy of my very first novel in my hand. The first thing I did was to smell it and inhale the magical scent of my own book. And then I waited. More or less patiently for two months, until finally, the publication day came around, and I lept out of bed, ready to capture it all, only to discover … that nothing really happened. Publication day is both incredibly momentous and rather uneventful at the same time, and nowadays (ten years and some six or seven books later) there is an added nervousness or pressure about how the book will do that makes it even more of a mixed occasion.

But not when your book is translated into English and published in the US and Canada. Everything is happening (or not happening, as the case or cases may be) an ocean away, and it’s such a huge adventure that the only thing you can really do is celebrate the hell out of it all. So today I began the day with American pancakes (obviously), proceeded to google my book approximately ten times (nothing new yet, not surprising, it being four o’clock at night over there), and will spend the next couple of hours writing (because I rather do like spending time with Berit on this important occasion), before going to a French bistro in Stockholm to celebrate my American book about a Swedish-English author at a writer retreat in France. I will drink champagne and eat oysters and give a toast to Berit and myself and dream about all the other adventures still to come.