A first book is an act of faith. You hope your imagination will bring you some place worth going and that your intuition will not fail you. You dig deeply into your imagination and create characters; you fuss with plot and structure; and you pray. A lot.

But I did not think past my first book; it was all I could handle – creating a manuscript and hoping it would turn into a real book someday. Thinking beyond that was plain hubris.

That kind of thinking. magical thinking, makes...