My book is out tomorrow.
My book. Is out. Tomorrow.
That is a weird thing to say. A weird thing to type. A weird thing to think.
Just two years ago, I was writing The Perfect Assassin. I was carefully setting goals and timelines and getting up early and writing during naps and writing in the middle of the night – forget about sleeping when baby sleeps: write when baby sleeps.
The story behind this book is a meandering one. Although it’s Book One in the trilogy, I wrote it second. I’d originally written a standalone, but Tor wanted three books and I insisted on a prequel and, well. Here we are.
Which means I wrote my debut under a deadline, in eight months, with all the fun pressure of Oh God What If I Can’t Write a Second Book. Thankfully, I knew the world already, if not the plot. And I knew that it was going to be published, which, even though I did a pretty decent job of forgetting that fact while actually writing it (disassociation is a great skill, kids), does change things. It gave me equal amounts confidence and pure terror. Because, well: deadline.
I started writing it within a month of my daughter’s birth. I turned it into my editor when she was eight months old. That meant a lot of my life looked like these pictures. 3am writing sessions, a baby monitor if not a baby always nearby, long plot!walks with someone sleeping on my chest.
Honestly, it was pretty great if you just ignore the lack of sleep.
I can’t really remember a time that I didn’t want to be a For-Real Legit Published Author. I mean, there was certainly a time I didn’t know what an author was, but it seemed as soon as I’d figured that out I was like “yes okay, I will do that.”
It’s never that simple, of course. I knew the chances of making a living with writing were abysmal, so I was also trying to find a Career or a dayjob or something, anything, that would pay for my lavish lifestyle where I had enough time to write. And so I built bikes and answered phones and wrote property descriptions and wrote and dreamed and wrote.
In all my years of dreaming of what it’d be like to be finally, finally published, I never once thought it’d include a small human and yet, here we are.
Which is why I dedicated this book to her:
Throughout this whole, two and a half year process, she’s kept me grounded. Anytime my head got too big, there was a baby to take care of. Anytime things felt pointless, there was a baby to take care of. You think a starred review is cool? It’s nothing compared to a Toddler headbutting you and whispering “i luvu mama.”
She’s already pointed to my author photo and happily proclaimed “mama!” I’m looking forward to when she’ll be old enough to understand what being an author means, and I’m equally looking forward to all the ways she’ll continue to show me what’s important: love, life, laughter, and family.
