I don't know, honestly, whether release week trauma is a thing I'll ever fully get over. When I look at my saved email, the earliest mention of Toby Daye is from January 6th, 1998. That's officially more than twelve years ago. For a decade, Toby was just this weird girl who lived in my head, and who I sometimes claimed to be writing a novel (or novels) about. Some of my friends read those early drafts, and gave me useful critique, and I kept writing...but for a really long time, she was practically my Mr. Snuffleupagus, the protagonist of a series I kept saying existed, yet could never produce.
It is constantly strange to me that people I don't know have met Toby. She's not my secret friend anymore; she's everybody's, and they get to have their own ideas about her, about the things she does and the places that she goes. People send me letters thanking me for writing. How weird is that? Writing is that thing my friends yell at me for doing when they're having parties, not something that I get thanked for. It's bizarre. So when release day rolls around, I get a little twitchy, waiting to find out that it was all just a dream; I didn't get to kick the football, nobody went to Oz, and Jean Grey isn't dead after all.
So. Weird.
Thank you all for reading, and for being here, and I'll do my best not to rip a hole in the fabric of reality, allowing the black hounds of the unreal to pour through and devour all that lives or dreams on this plane of existence. Promise.
March 2 2010, 00:17:20 UTC 7 years ago
I remember when (and I do this because my mother has done this to me my entire life) you'd poll to get people to be beta readers. I have always been sad that my schedule has ever been full of lots of crazy stuff and never allowed for such, but I am thrilled that it's all ended in books I CAN read, even with a crappy schedule.
I plan on buying the book from the store (honestly, my favorite way to get books) as soon as my schedule allows (yeah, that again). ;)
March 2 2010, 23:16:30 UTC 7 years ago