I used the tagline, “Fathers, Daughters, and Expectations,” for my For Want of a Father Kindle Scout campaign. As my character, Lucy, let expectations color her memories, my own expectations caused me to read what wasn’t there in today’s e-mails.

This is the second week since my campaign closed, and I have been checking my e-mail compulsively every half hour of so throughout the day, hoping to hear from Kindle Scout. This morning when I got up, the first thing I did was check my e-mail. I scrolled through the overnight messages until I saw it: Kindle Scout in the sender column. I barely noticed the “Thank you” in the subject line in my eagerness to get to the message. When I did read the first line of the message, all my eyes saw were the words at the end of the sentence: “was not selected for publication.” It was not until I got to the words “The author, (name,) wanted to. . . .” that I realized that the name was not mine and the book title was not mine either. It was a notification for a book I had nominated, not my own book.

We hear all the time about how we see and hear what we expect. This experience reinforced that lesson for me in my own life, and I will remember it as I write fiction. It’s such a great conflict creator.

As for expectations, now that I have received a notice at midnight, I won’t be able to go to sleep until after that tonight, expecting that the next Kindle Scout message may come then; this time one telling me about the acceptance or rejection of my own book.