Letting Go

I’m having a hard time.

My book, The Well’s End, comes out on Tuesday the 25th.  I’m feeling all the things you should be feeling.  Excited, nervous, anticlimactic climax.  But there’s a problem: I’m also a literary agent.

I want to let go, to say to myself hey, relax, everything’s a go now and all you have to do is sit back and smile.  But I know too much.  I know that there’s always more I can do.  I even know how to do much of it. I realize that there are reviews to be had that are hard to get and fun ideas to be explored and mini facebook/goodread campaigns to be created.  I know that my book launch seems to be going amazingly but I wonder what will happen a week from now, when it’s wed and I check bookscan for my clients.  I know the grim reality of probability in the book world.  I dread the walk on Tuesday to my local Barnes & Noble because they are often slow at shelving books. I wonder idly if there will be any notable surprises.

I know from experience that my marketing and publicity team is killing it, that they genuinely love the book, that they are discovering new ways to do what they do just for me - and it’s amazing. But it’s scary too, right?

I practice reading for my reading and then read queries.  I love that I get to be more aggressive with my clients than with my own book. I hate that I think about my own book this way at all.

I’ve wanted to be a writer forever, and it’s finally happening, and I’m sure I’m going to ruin it myself. I’m trying to let it go. Let it go.