Two more days before Depth of Return is released! I can’t believe the summer of waiting for it is almost over. My blog tour is underway and I’m getting many wonderful comments on my posts. It’s so much fun hearing from new readers and old fans.
Two posts are up: click HERE and HERE
Three more posts to come — two next week and one the week after. Then I’m probably going to go into a serious let down, especially since we’ll be thinking about moving home from camp and I’ll have to admit that the cold white stuff that falls out of the sky that I won’t name right now is on the way.
I’m anxious as I always am before a release — will people like it? Will it get horrible reviews? Will people get what I was trying to do? Will anybody even buy it? Should I have done this, that, or the other? I have the eBook version, but I can’t even look at it because I get a sick feeling that I should have gone over it one last time before I sent it back to my editor. I know I’ll see things I NEED to change. But it’s too late. My print copies should be arriving shortly. (Though I expect that might be delayed — my publisher just got hit by a hurricane. They’re okay, but caution us that things are running slowly.)
It’s a tough thing to throw characters I’ve been nurturing for over a year out to the world to be picked apart by reviewers. I try to remind myself that it’s my book that’s being reviewed, not me. But the bottom line is that the two are one and the same.
And the strangest part is that since I write under a pen name, I can’t even talk about the fact that I’ve just published a novel with most of the people I know. (I work in a school and need to keep my other life private for obvious reasons.) I’ll have to pretend that nothing much happened over the long weekend, that I didn’t just do something that most people don’t do. I have published young adult fiction under another name, so my students know I’m a writer and my work is in the school library, but still, it’s hard.
But what I try to remember is that I’m doing what I love and I’m having success at it, and I’m have a new novel coming out on Monday and I AM SO EXCITED!
