It’s launch week for Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder, which means I am feeling a certain amount of stress.
I have been having weird dreams, clenching my jaw, and have developed an eye twitch. I’ve been needy and clingy with my husband and incredibly distant with my friends. I’m futzing with my website and avoiding all other responsibilities in anticipation of this book finally being available for public consumption.
It’s good stress, but it’s stress nonetheless.
Slone loves to compare it to having a baby. “The baby’s coming,” she always says. But it’s not like the baby’s coming because then I would have this little nugget to snuggle and love.
It’s more like graduation. I’ve loved and nurtured this little nugget until they grow to be a big nugget who is ready to head out into the world. Will they soar or will they be living in my basement forever.
Either way it works out, I cannot tell that at this point and that’s an uncomfortable feeling. An excited feeling. A thrilling feeling. I’m fighting off any worrying feeling with a stick.
My people – friends and family – are a little exhausted with my feelings right now. I think they also just wish for the book to be out already, maybe with a little hope that I’ll stop having feelings about it. I almost feel bad for my husband the most because this isn’t my first book and also he suffered through my grad school experience. He only took the bar once, but I am consistently writing things that will be judged by other people.
My friends like to tell me it’s not a big deal and who cares what other people have to say about anything. So I offer this analogy.
Imagine baking a cake for a friend. You were very excited to make this cake. No box mix for you. You go to the store and get all natural ingredients. You shave in fresh chocolate, use that vanilla bean that you split and scrape out the seeds, and use the best butter from the happiest cows. It takes a few hours of your day. You get flour and chocolate all over you. You take it to your friend’s party. You have made this super cool thing that you’re proud of. You might take a few photos to post for your other friends to see. And then after everyone cuts open your cake and takes a few bites, they spend the rest of the evening picking apart their feelings about the cake.
They might say things like:
“You haven’t been doing this very long, have you? This just seems like it’s your first cake.”
“Did you run out of time and that’s why you didn’t decorate very well?”
“My friend had the cutest cake at their party. It wasn’t a cake as much as it was cake pops. You should have made cake pops. Everyone loves cake pops.”
“My mom bakes cakes and she just uses a mix and that cake is so good. This one just seems pretentious with all those fresh ingredients.”
“You know, you don’t even have to make a cake anymore. Bakeries exist. You could have just gone to a bakery.”
“I don’t like chocolate cake. Why didn’t you make a yellow cake?”
That’s stressful. And before you say that my analogy is unrealistic because “no one would say that about a cake at a party!” Obviously, you have never met the people who raised me.
But that’s what putting something out there is like. In the end, it’s just a cake. It’s just a book, right? It’s not life or death. I’ll keep making more books. But the chorus of faceless individuals picking apart something that I created with care and thoughtfulness persists. It's a chant of negative projections about how this launch is going to go.
In order to combat that and make sure this bad stress turns to good stress, I’m changing how I project what people are going to say.
In one of the self-help books that I read while developing Gabbi from Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder, the author tells the story about winning a contest to travel the world for a year and write reviews of honeymoon resorts. And to psych herself and her husband up, they would chant their names as if they had already won. And the winners are … Mark and Denise! They would repeat over and over Mark and Denise! Mark and Denise! Mark and Denise!
In the same spirit, I am chanting in my brain, It’s so good! It’s so good! It’s so good!
I no longer anticipate the collected tribunal of naysayers. Just like if I showed up at your house with a free cake, the only reasonable thing to say is, It’s so good! It’s so good! It’s so good!
And that’s definitely good stress, imagining everyone reading this book and thinking, It’s so good! It means that I am looking forward to people reading it, seeing it, checking it out at the library, buying it.
In the meantime, to distract myself from the good stress, I’m planning a little party to celebrate this new book being available. There will be tacos and tequila. And maybe a little cake.
XOXO,
B.
Pretty Girls Get Away With Murder is available on March 14! Get it here on this website as well as wherever you buy books.
If you are someone who wants to support indie writers in the way that will benefit them the most, make your book purchases from them! Buy them when you see them at book festivals, book fairs, book events, or on their websites. The writers see more of the proceeds when your purchase directly from them. But if you need to purchase from Amazon because of your rewards points or Kindle needs, then do your thing, baby.
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