Today I took a big first step.
Specifically, I forced my finger to stop shaking, and pressed it down upon the Enter key, thus clicking the button that told Amazon to expose my book, The Ventifact Colossus, to the public. The moment I did that, my brain divided itself into three distinct entities:
Stupidly Optimistic Brain: “Woo hoo! Fame and fortune, here we come! By next week the Amazon servers will be melting into pools of slag due to the heat generated by our thousands of sales. Critics will gush, reviewers will petition Amazon for a “6 star” rating, and fistfights will break out in Hollywood over the movie rights.”
Bleakly Pessimistic Brain: “No one will like our book. No one will buy our book. If someone does buy it by accident, they’ll read 2 or 3 pages and decide it’s better served as a lining for the cage of their pet canary. And the canary will then demand something with more literary merit, like maybe some old “Marmaduke” strips. You’re a writer in the same way that your 8-year-old daughter is an Egyptian pyramid.”
Realistic Brain: “Come on. You wrote a solid fantasy novel. It’s well written and entertaining, and it’s fine that it’s not going to win any literary prizes. Some people will love it, others will hate it, and your life will go on. Also, your next book will be better because now you know what writing a complete novel is like.
And speaking of your next book, you should keep writing it.”
In my heart, I know that Realistic Brain is also the Smart Brain. It would be easy to view this book-publishing thing as a path either to complete validation or utter repudiation as a writer, but down that path lies madness. Realistic Brain says: enjoy the ride, learn from your mistakes, don’t stop writing, AND FOR GOD’S SAKE STOP HITTING AMAZON’S LITTLE SALES TRACKER GIZMO EVERY NINETY SECONDS. IT WILL STILL BE THERE TOMORROW.
If you want to get on my mailing list to receive (very infrequent, I promise!) updates about how the series is progressing, click here.
I also have a Heroes of Spira page with more info.
And here’s a link to where you can actually buy the book!
Thanks for reading!
Works in Progress 
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