The Irony of Success

You know, this week has been a bit of a blur. I’m ass-deep in edits again, which is fine, and then I had the added bonus of finding out my book is on Amazon.

Which is brilliant.

And terribly scary.

My dad bought 10 copies. His girlfriend bought 5. My mother-in-law bought 6. Many of my co-workers pre-ordered, as did some my lovely P&T members, and some of my fellow David Garrett fangirl friends.  And this is pretty damn awesome.

But I can’t help but worry now if people will like it or not. And it’s not that I’ll mind if they don’t – after all, you can’t please everyone, and I doubt everyone’s taste is similiar.

It’s more a sense of expectation, I think. Getting published is like this golden bell hanging in the sky. People think it’s hard to get published (and it is), so when you do manage it, they expect what you produce to be good. So for me there’s a bit of pressure that I’m not used to having. I trust my beta readers and my CPs and my editor, of course – they’ll tell me what works and what doesn’t. But knowing that my dad is probably just going to hand out copies of the thing to his employees or that the boss of my boss bought copies for his wife *and* his niece?

It’s a little nerve-racking.

What if people think it sucks? I’m sure my family members have been building this sense of excitement up among their friends, because, yes – it is pretty damn cool. But the tiny voice of doubt niggles at me anyway – what if I’m just a fraud? A hack? What if my coworkers suddenly think I’m a freak because I write about weird shit like daemons and unicorns and smutty sex with said daemons?  All of a sudden I’m in a meeting and talking about mail servers – but are they going to be listening to that? Or thinking about the fact that I wrote about preternational erections and bacon in the same sentence?

I just don’t want to let anyone down, I guess. And part of this is brought on because I’m reading and rereading my edits to such an extreme right now. After a while, everything on the page looks like crap so it’s hard to keep things in perspective.

This seems a bit rambly and I apologize for that. I’m just feeling a little disconcerted by the prospect of potentially having a colossal failure in public.

But that is part of the business as well, so excuse me for a few moment while I grow a few extra layers of skin. 😉

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