Hang on a second… what just happened here?

There is something about getting thousands of words onto paper and then scrawling (and by that, I mean typing) the words “the end” at the bottom of a page that lends itself to a moment of silent reflection (or in my case reflection punctuated by the screaming of preschoolers and the refrain from “Stella and Sam”).

When I finished The Mark of the Hummingbird, I had a minor freak-out. Writing was something I had wanted to do since I was old enough to be aware that actual people wrote the words that were in the books I loved. Writing my own and sending it out into the world was completely terrifying to me. It had been a dream for so long (without really any idea if it would ever come true or not) that I was scared that I would fail miserably at it, and everything I had ever wanted would come crashing down around me in a blazing fireball of inadequacy.

Slowly, one by one, people began to read it, and love it, and a new fear set in. I’m sure it’s one many writers of serial fiction come across–I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to repeat it, that the second book would be a letdown and the whole series would be another crashing fireball (I seem to be stuck on the fireball metaphor). The last few days have been extremely satisfying to me, hearing back from my first-round-readers and discovering that they were just as engaged (in some cases more so) with “The Song of the Sisters” as with the first book.

I honestly feel like I’m walking on a cloud. To have a dream and then realize you also might be kind of good at it… well, there’s just no describing that.

I don’t know what will happen, whether I will ever achieve my goal of teaching the world how to pronounce my last name (Like “Gollum”, but with a B), but there is still something totally exhilarating about just doing it.

At the risk of sounding like a cornball…  go. NOW. Find your “thing” and do it. Succeed, fail, who cares, just do it. Don’t let the sun go down with you standing in the shadows thinking “what if?”.

Dreams don’t work unless you do. -John C. Maxwell