One Week!

The new Livi adventure releases one week from tomorrow! I’m doing a countdown on my Facebook page with daily facts about the new book–the writing, the mythology, and whatever else I can come up with.

You have until 10/20 to get me your address for your postcard if you preorder or buy the week of release.

I’m at the point where the book is 100% done and I am just tinkering every few hours with a word here or comma there in a scene, or rereading something for the millionth time just to reassure myself it makes sense, and it’s stupid and I will probably have to be told to leave it the fuck alone, but I’m terrified I’ve missed something and everyone’s going to then tell me about it and tell me how much it sucks and I suck and and and–

I feel doubly stupid because this is a lesson I tell other writers all the time: yes, you will miss something. Yes, someone might tell you about it. Yes, someone somewhere will be right offended about a couple of typos in a 132K-word book (dear god, I hope at this point it’s only a couple). Yes, it’s entirely possibly everyone’s going to absolutely hate it (although the odds of that are admittedly fairly slim).

So?

This beast of a book was a hell of an achievement for me, nothing is ever 100% perfect, and the fact that I did 7.5 drafts and two other sets of eyes went over everything–sometimes multiple times–indicates I have thrown everything I possibly have into the novel. If everyone’s gonna hate it, changing a word or two now isn’t going to fix that.

If these sorts of anxieties get the best of you too, just remember I’ve written like forty-something novels, dozens of novellas and shorts, and released, I dunno, like thirty or forty(?) things over the years. It happens to everyone. There’s no excuse for sloppy work, but if you can look and see how much you’ve put into a project, and YOU know, personally, it’s the best you can make it…be afraid, but do it anyway. At this point, the only thing fretting over it is accomplishing is making me lose time on other projects, and fuck THAT.