The scary stuff

[stephanieburgis]

Here's the weird truth about fulfilling my dream for the past 25 years and selling my first books - oh, and finishing the trilogy, too, and being about to see the first book come out in bookstores where I live. (97 more days till the UK pub date, according to my daily Waterstones.com update

Comments

[charmingbillie]

I lived in my first house for almost 20 years. It was a great little house but had some significant drawbacks, in particular, a small yard on a corner. For two and a half years I looked for another house. I had really clear ideas what I wanted. In that time I missed out on my ideal house, made an offer on a house I'm grateful I didn't get and offered on another house that my realtor didn't like and fortuntely sold before I could buy it.

When the house I live in now came on the market and I looked at it, it had everything I wanted, was a great price, and I got it at the price I wanted. But you know what when my realtor called to tell me they accepted my offer, my reaction was 'oh my god, what have I done?' Because I knew what the present was, but the future was now all up in the air.

But if I hadn't done it, I would have had to stop kidding myself that I was ever going to have a new house (and in the end this house is even better than my ideal house). So I went forward because everything else was going backward.

And I guess that's what I'm (longwindedly) saying, that we go forward because we can't go back. Write the best books you can! And enjoy as much of that as you can. That's how you go forward. Though it doesn't necessarily make it less scary.

[jennreese]

Yes. I love this: "we go forward because we can't go back."

We can't write our first book over. Someone once called my book original, which paralyzed me with fear. Do I have to be "original" every time? ACK! What if I'm not? What if it was a fluke? It's my only good idea, and now it's gone, and everything is downhill.

But we must go forward, right? We're writing new books, and they are what they are, and all we can do is put our hearts and souls into them and enjoy the journey, because everything else is uncertain and out of our control.

Also, I *love* the dragon novel. I can't wait to see where you go with it!

[merriehaskell]

Yes. I love this: "we go forward because we can't go back."

Ditto. SOOOooooo ditto.

[stephanieburgis]

Isn't it funny how even compliments can feed into the insecurities? And OH, yeah - having sold one series of books, based on Book 1, gave me NO confidence that the rest of the books in the series would be marketable...and getting a great response from my editor to Book 2 gave me no faith that Book 3 would be good...and now I'm getting ready to revise Book 3 and getting good crits for it, I'm panicking that I'll never be able to write good books about anyone except Kat...sigh. Even knowing that it's a set of irrational fear responses doesn't make it feel any different inside!

Thank you SO much for the kind words about the dragon novel! I'm really hoping to send you more of it very soon...

[stephanieburgis]

Thank you so much for this, Deb. It really helps.