The prospects for my first book looked so promising. I had a tour planned that included New York’s BookCon, the Baltimore Book Festival and signings everywhere from Miami to New Orleans and even Baltimore’s Poe House.

I booked appearances for my memoir, “Black Widow: A Sad/Funny Journey Through Grief For People Who Normally Avoid Books With Words Like ‘Journey’ In The Title,” on top podcasts, planned a guest post on Katie Couric’s blog, and even scheduled a chat with Hoda and Jenna on the “Today” show. My launch was a live Q&A with literal bestselling author James Patterson! It was official: Your girl was going places — that is, until suddenly nobody was going anywhere at all.

Did I mention that my book was released on March 10, 2020? That sad trombone sound you hear was the same one I heard when I realized that, amid the rapid shutdown of society due to COVID, my tour and all the fun stuff associated with it was shutting down, too. One by one, all my appearances were canceled. Some were moved online, so when I sat on the couch to talk to Hoda and Jenna, it was the one in my West Palm Beach bedroom rather than at Rockefeller Plaza. It was still cool, but not the same.

The book reached a lot of people but did not sell like expected, and I was gutted. I tried not to be a jerk about it — there were more important things to focus my energy on, like staying healthy, quitting my longtime job, packing up my life and family to move to Baltimore and buying a house. It took me a while to be OK with admitting that I’d written a book about grief, whose would-be success I was grieving.

I just hoped that the next time I wrote a book, I’d get the chance to meet readers in person, shake their hands and thank them for wanting to enter worlds that I’d created, which is the trippiest, most humbling honor. And that time is now … more specifically, Sunday.

“Family & Other Calamities,” my first novel and work of fiction, will be released June 1 from Lake Union Publishing. It’s about a woman, not unlike me, who returns home to Baltimore and confronts scary things from her past. Once again, I’m scheduled for a book tour with stops here at home and up and down the East Coast, hoping people show up.

For me, the scary thing is being on this precipice of success in a new industry at the tender age of 54 in a way that’s so vulnerable and out there. Writing a book is like putting your heart on a page, closing your eyes and tossing it into the void with hopes that someone else wants to read it. What if they don’t? If I fail this time, I can’t blame it on a pandemic.

Funnily enough, my book is a testament to what happens when you face your fears, whether or not you want to. It’s about a Baltimore-born journalist named Dawn Roberts who flees her first job at a ’90s-era paper in York, Pennsylvania, under cover of darkness, possible scandal and the reality that her best friend stole a big story from her. Thirty years later, she comes back to bury her husband’s ashes and finds that her former friend, who became famous on the back of that stolen story, is planning a movie about it. And Dawn’s the villain.

Dun dun dunnnnnn!

Though it’s a hectic, funny dash trying to navigate the truth of Dawn’s past both professionally and with the family she kind of left holding the bag, it’s also a love letter to two of my true loves: Baltimore and journalism. You‘ll read about Northwood, the neighborhood I grew up in, Morgan State University and two of my favorite places to be fancy, the Ivy Hotel and the Sagamore Pendry hotel .

The journalism part is also close to my heart, because it’s about professionals whose goal is to get to the truth of things (well, all of them except Joe, the story thief). It draws from my own origins as a baby reporter who truly believed that the right words, written by the right person, could save the world. I still believe that.

Belief is also where I land on this book launch, which is public and frightening and unsure. I’ve been listening a lot to my personal hype song, “Theme from ‘The Greatest American Hero, (Believe It Or Not)” by Joey Scarbury. The 1980s show followed a teacher named Ralph (William Katt) who finds a mysterious super suit in a desert and becomes an unlikely crimefighter. His attempts start out rough — he‘s unsure, but he decides he’s meant to do it. “Who could it be?” the song goes. “Believe it or not, it’s just me.”

That song has been my anthem since I was a kid whenever I felt awkward or scared, whether it was my move to a new town in my 20s to kickstart my career, starting a new life as a widowed mom or completing my first formal race in five years at the Baltimore Running Festival this past fall. There I was, flying away on a wing, a prayer and the hopes that all of my preparation and heart was leading me to the right place.

So here I am, launching my ego and my words into the air, hoping not to crash. I hope it goes smoothly, but if it doesn’t, I know that I am so proud of this book and the places and concepts it represents.

I can’t wait for you to read it.