On Expectations

My book comes out next week and how should I feel?

The very first story I ever published in National Geographic magazine ran at the “back of the book,” in a short-lived section called ZipUSA, or something like that—this was almost 20 years ago, so please forgive the blur. The stories in this section were short, two or three pages, maybe, and each one focused on a specific zip code somewhere in the U.S. …