Our editor for The Queen of the Sky Who Rules Over All the Gods, Rebecca Buchanan sent out the manuscript for the book tonight. It took me a good ten minutes to open the email, and another twenty to start going through the manuscript on my Kindle. It’s impressive. I looked through the table of contents and beamed when I saw that my story was listed under ‘Modern Myths’. I read through the poetry and other stories in the book, and found myself floored by how amazing these other writers were. I thought I would be more interested in seeing my own work in the book, but I was more curious about the other writers and artists that were featured. I felt like we had all blindly worked together to create this beautiful body of work, and I wanted to see what else existed there. I felt honored to have been included.
I finally flipped over to the page with my story, and began to read through it. I’d worked on the story long enough, that I felt like I had it memorized. I read it critically for changes that I wanted to make- this is in fact, the point of sending out a manuscript. You get to see what your piece will look like, and you decide whether or not you want to make any changes before it goes into print.
As I’m reading the work, I begin to think about how this is going to be in print. In an actual book. A book that people will purchase, and I almost dropped the Kindle. I can only explain the feeling as being close to stage fright. This moment of panic during rehearsals when you’re reminded that the next time you perform this particular piece will be to an auditorium filled to the brim with people. Watching you. I’d never made that connection to writing before. But once you’ve created something, and put it out there, it stops being just yours. It starts to belong to the people who read it, who love it, who interpret it through their lens of lived experience. You get the sense that you’ve released something intensely intimate out into the world, you feel like you showed up to school naked, and everyone is ogling you.
This is one of those moments of fear where I have to take myself to the side, and talk myself through it. I wanted to do this. I was born to be a writer, simply put. I have spent the better part of my creative life hemming and hawing allowing my fears to derail me. I’m already in it, there’s no going back now. I keep writing about fear here, and I want to say that the adage “If your dreams don’t scare you, they aren’t big enough” is very true. You should be terrified of your dreams, of realizing them, of the process. It makes everything more worthwhile when you scale each goal.
The manuscript that I started a few months ago, is almost nearly completed. I see it being done by the end of summer if not before then. I try not to think about that too much either. The novel’s manuscript took me three long years to complete, but that in itself was a learning process, and I’m producing work much quicker now. You really do learn by stumbling and tripping over your inexperience. By learning what process worked best for me, I’ve been able to work in a way that helps me not be such a slow writer, which is great because I have a lot of ideas, and often I’m not moving fast enough to get them down.
So, if you’re reading this, and you’re lagging. Get back to work. ❤
Spells and Hexes 