It hit me earlier today that I have a book coming out in April. I’m publishing a second book. If you’d told eight-year-old me that, she’d have thought you were a liar. Hang on folks, because this is a thread...

From the outside, I thought that having a second book coming out into the world would be easier. Reader: it is not.

It hit me today, two days after my editor and I worked on a blurb list, that people are going to actually be reading this book. I wrote this book in a lot of solitude. This book was supposed to have been published in November 2019. It’s now coming out in April 2021.

This book was a year and a half of writing and rewriting and shredding the whole thing to bits and starting again. And again. At one point I cut 70,000 words from my book. Yes. You read that right. Why was left? Not much. I started again. Then again.

And I don’t think it occurred to me at any point that anyone other than my editor would ever read this. I was trying to please her. To get to the finish line. It was a test I had to pass. The hardest test I’d ever taken. I had to know I could actually do this, write a second book

I wrestled a lot of demons writing this book. And it never occurred to me until today that anyone would actually read it. What was important was that I passed. And I passed! I crossed the finish line!

And today, it hit me. Wait. People are actually going to READ this thing I wrote?? Oh. Oh no. Oh no no no. And I burst into tears this morning. I put a piece of my soul in this book and now I’m just going to let people read it? I don’t know if I’m ready.

This book was me raging against the dying of the light that told me I was a one hit wonder. This book tested me in ways I didn’t know I could be tested.

This book said to me, again and again and again: You thought you were a writer?? Hahahahahah. You’re not. You put words together into the shape of one book. That’s all you have in you. One book.

But I was determined. It took me ten years to get published the first time. I know this was only a year and a half, but sometimes the demons of ten tears can be called back in an instant, and 1.5 years feels worse than the ten years that came before it.

If you’re another published writer I can feel the chorus of you beside me shaking your head yes with everything I’m saying. And if not, I am envious of you. But I never knew there’d be this much doubt on the side of actually having published something. Never.

So, for those of you who may be about to read my second book, THE LIGHT OF THE MIDNIGHT STARS, which comes out on April 13, 2021 - know that you hold a piece of my soul in your hands. I hope you like it.