Do the Thing! Pre-thing anxiety

So Starling comes out on Wednesday. Which means that, naturally, today has been an exercise in Murphy’s Law. Everything’s been sorted out now, and better today than tomorrow, at least (knocks on all the wood). But Starling has been a part of our creative lives for just over a year now, and in less than 48 hours it’s going to stop being just a Thing We Made and become a Thing Other People Get To Read.

That’s exciting. It’s also really fucking terrifying.

Part of it is the natural terror that comes with the experience of sharing content on the Internet, or you know at all — what if people are trolls, what if they hate it, etc.

But a bigger fear, at least for me, is the one that keeps catching me off-guard and sending Racheline emails at five in the morning in all-caps: OH MY GOD PEOPLE ARE GONNA READ OUR BOOK.

Which, well, duh. That’s why we wrote the story, to share it. But the experience of writing it has been so intense, and there’s so much of both of us in it, that opening it up for the world at large to get its hands on leaves me feeling really very vulnerable.

It’s an inevitable part of doing all sorts of Things, really, the moment when the work stops being a Thing You Did and starts also being a Thing That Simply Is. There’s a moment of letting go, if not of the story, then of this precise phase of our lives. It’s bittersweet, and not easy, and there have been some really scary moments.

But we’re here now, taking some time in the midst of everything else we’re getting done before the release, including our half-dozen other current projects, to savor that moment just before the Thing. And we want to hear about your moments, when all you could do was just take a breath, let it go, and then ask, “What’s next?”