For me, this holiday season was more exhausting and stressful than usual, for reasons that are ultimately positive.

I was busy with work, which is great. I love my new(ish) job at Testosterone Muscle, a magazine I admired for 10 years before I finally joined the team this summer.

Kimberly and I were driven like parental sled dogs this December, but I can't complain about that either. I love the fact our children do things that weren't available to us when we were growing up. When I was a kid, I got a few karate lessons and could only play sports if my parents didn't have to drive me back and forth. Kimberly got to do even less. Yeah, it's a pain to shuttle Harrison to karate twice a week, and Annie to ballet, and Meredith to all the things she's involved in, and it's unfortunate that everything culminates in concerts and recitals at the exact same time of year. But if the alternative is not having busy, active, engaged kids, I'll take this.

Another level of complication, which was only occasionally stressful in the second half of the year, is the fact I had four books released between November 20 and December 26.

First was Built for Show, a book I wrote with Nate Green. (You can read an excerpt here.)

Next was Huge in a Hurry, which I wrote with Chad Waterbury. That one came out December 9. (Chad talked about it in this interview.)

Today, two of my books -- The New Rules of Lifting and The New Rules of Lifting for Women -- come out in paperback for the first time.

I know the last two don't count as new books, and the first two are only "my" books in the contractual sense -- I wrote the foreword to Nate's book, and my name only appears in the acknowledgements of Chad's. So I didn't have the duties that come with introducing a new product with my name on it, a process that can dominate your life for weeks, if not months. And the work on all four projects was mostly finished by the time I started with Testosterone in July.

But I still feel some of the same jitters, wondering if the books are going to find an audience and help readers in their quest to transform their physiques. I may not be checking the books' Amazon rankings every hour, as I do when I'm the primary author of a new release, but I confess I've been doing it at least twice a day.

There's also a little sadness in seeing NROL and NROL for Women come out in paperback. For the past year, I've had an odd little distinction: I'm pretty sure I'm the only fitness-book author with three titles in hardcover at the same time -- those two plus The Book of Muscle. When stores sell out of their stock of NROL hardcovers, I'll have just one book that isn't a paperback.

I know, it's stupid to be nostalgic for an insignificant distinction. And it's even more stupid to mention it when, on my last trip to the local Borders, I not only had three books in hardcover on the shelves, but also the NROL paperbacks, plus Built for Show and Huge in a Hurry, plus two earlier titles: Home Workout Bible and Testosterone Advantage Plan. Who can complain about having nine books for sale at the same time?

Tags: books , media , publishing , personal