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

[onlyemarie]

WAIL to the rescue! Donning my reassuring sunglasses to say

[stephanieburgis]

Oh, thank you so much for this, Erin! It felt so good to read your comment, and it really helped. *hugs*

Good luck with your own WIP! (Which sounds AWESOME, btw!!!!!)

[onlyemarie]

Aw, thank you. I feel like I'm white-knuckling my way through the shittastic first draft, but I already know what I want to do to it in revisions and am getting SUPER excited about the possibilities...

[ecmyers]

I hope you won't mind if I order your book from Amazon UK in 97 days! I'll probably at least buy a copy as a gift when it finally hits the US :)

[stephanieburgis]

I can't imagine ever being offended by anyone buying any copies of my book! ;)

[1crowdedhour]

Add me to the chorus of those who are glad you posted this, rather than hit delete.

My two cents:

We torture ourselves in such ingenious ways. I trust you will eventually return to the dragon novel -- lord, I hope so -- and figure out what was going on in your backbrain during this intermission.

Be prepared, though. Down the road it will happen again, maybe over something even harder to identify. I believe we all have these insecurities, and alas, we always will.

Fortunately, we are all also ridiculously stubborn, so it all balances out.

[stephanieburgis]

It's oddly reassuring to hear that the insecurities don't go away, although I'm not sure why. (Maybe because it makes it so clear that they are essentially irrational?) Thank you for this!

[merriehaskell]

It's always--well, not nice, but relieving, to realize other people who seem to be doing well, who seem to have no cause to complain, are flipping out secretly, too.

Me, I'm diving into my edit letter for my first book. I've put it off as long as I could for the sake of this workshop I'm running, but I have to put aside the book I was writing for it--unfinished, I might add, which creates its own host of anxieties--and now it's just me and the old book. And of course, it is what it is. I'm not going to be able to turn it into Graceling in this final draft. Nor does it want to be Graceling, really, but--you know what I mean?

[stephanieburgis]

Good luck with the edits! And yes, I know exactly what you mean. I'm never going to be able to write Pride & Prejudice no matter how much work I do on my revisions! And in the end, it's okay for us to just write the best books that WE can write, without comparing them to anybody else's...but that's awfully hard to remember as we're staring down the tunnel of a revision.

[hierath]

Write the book you want to write. If you love it, so will your readers. If you don't love it, you might be writing the wrong book. Took me a long time to realise that, and even longer to accept it, abandon the book that was wrong, and move on to the novel I should be writing.

[stephanieburgis]

I think that's really, really smart advice. Thank you!