Slightly scared.
It's always a slightly nervous moment when a new work goes out to test readers for the first time. A couple of evenings ago I typed in the final scene to fill the last gap on "Child of the Portal" and then I popped it onto my new kindle (love that thing). A quick sense skim and then it was time.
Like ripping off a plaster I just emailed it out to my small handful of trusted test readers, and now I'm going to hide…..But this is an important stage in the journey of any book, the moment when a writer shares it for the first time. This is the moment where I hold my breath and hope that other people love what I've created as much as I do. This is when I dread someone coming back and saying it's rubbish, that they hate it.
This is when I wait for the phone to ring, for that knock on the door (one of the readers is very local!) and for the emails to come back….. I wait with twitching nerves and I hope. After all Child of the Portal is the last in the Portal books, it draws everything to a natural close and there's not really much potential left there for more, certainly not with Kate, Lily and Sam anyway.
These are the times I work on my websites, write business plans and catch up with my accounts. This is time for housework and baking. Anything but writing for a week or two, or three.
After this initial reaction and read through we'll start on the editing and I hope to have it ready for release around Autumn Equinox 20111, Friday Sept 23rd. So, now the search for a cover image will begin too. To stay in the style of the other two books it needs to be a photograph and it needs to have trees in it. I think some walks in the countryside, or local parks, might be in order.
Now, once I have a writing break (and catch up the accounts) I'll need to find someone new to play with. I have Sage waiting in the wings, and then there's Dawn in the wasteland, or Susan and Carol living through catastrophe… I'm not sure if any of them will come through yet, only time will tell.
