Three weeks (well, technically nineteen days) until Twin Blades is released to the world.
If you’re reading this, thank you so much for checking out my lil website! It’s still a work in progress (I’m self-publishing so all of this is me fumbling my way and learning as I go), but I wanted a more official place to house my book and my thoughts.
As I now have the paperback proofs in my hands, I can’t help but think back to second grade (?), wherein we were assigned to write a “book” a month. My memory is hazy, but I do recall that this project was not the “thing” that made me want to be an author, but rather, the validation that said to eight-year-old-me, “Yes, you knew that this is what you wanted to do.”
Fast forward some twenty-odd years later, and my love for reading was reinvigorated by the tidal wave many of us got caught up in—ACOTAR. As a child and teen, I loved to read all things fantasy, romance, and ooky spooky. Somehow, though, I forgot this once I went off to college.
I took a few creative writing courses during my undergraduate studies, and I dabbled in writing a few short stories afterward. But on some random night in April of this year, I decided that I would sit down with a google doc and write about the characters that have been in my head since… a long, long time.
And… the writing turned into a fixation. One where I camped out at coffee shops, stayed up late, and treated writing this story like it was a third job. All of a sudden, I was 80k words deep.
And all the while, I was gobbling up as many books as I could read, and I discovered the world of self-publishing. Throwing a piece of work out to the masses and retaining creative control. I researched, I had hiccups, but eventually, on another random day (this time in August), I finished Twin Blades.
Now, as I face nineteen days before release, it still doesn’t quite feel real. I’ve never created something with the sole purpose of sharing with the world. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared shitless. But! I have enough of some self-delusion to think that I wrote a damn good book, and I hope that (at least most) people think so, too!
Not sure how much I’ll keep up this blog feature, but I wanted to share these thoughts and mark this occasion. I would say that eight-year-old me would be in disbelief to see this dream come to fruition, but that would be a lie. While this feels surreal, it also feels right.
