This morning, the buzzer rang at our apartment. Hm, I wondered: more running shoes for my husband? Perhaps a completely unnecessary toy for my son from his super-indulgent grandma? No, it was the first copy of A Singular Lady, my first book that comes out October First (well, actually it comes out Oct. 4, but it reads better the other way, don’t you think?).
Wow.
I’m an author! With a book in print and everything! I started to read the first few pages, not even remembering having written those words. And so many of them! If you’re an author, how did you feel having your first book in your hands (Cara, you’ll have to wait to comment on this one)? If you’re a Regency reader, which was the first Regency title you held that you were totally excited by, where you felt a new world had opened to you?
Me, I’m just plain thrilled.
Since my first time is pretty recent (a couple of weeks ago), I certainly do! I haven’t taken my book (“Dedication”) to bed (in the sense that one takes a teddy bear to bed, I should add), but I like to keep it around and look at it. My first thought was, “Oh my god, it’s real,” and then, “Have I created a monster?”
I don’t think I’ll ever read it tho I do occasionally pick it up and flip thru it. I’m afraid I’ll find some horrendous typo or mistake (other than the deliberate mistake put in to fool the Regency Nazis–just kidding–I think).
I received two, and had to send one off to my agent, and that felt odd, but I don’t know why. I kept telling myself it was ballast to protect the CD-rom, nothing personal.
My daughter phoned me to tell me she found it my book for sale at Borders, and her friend bought a copy. She added a caustic comment about how I’d have to be physically restrained from signing it. You bet. Now, seeing it on the shelves will be exciting. I fully expect to embarrass myself in some way.
Janet
mazel tov to you both.
Megan, with my first book it was a lot like that, except I think I had to stare at it and handle it for a while before it even sank in!
But then I flipped it open at random, and (yikes!) started line-editing the darn thing. As if I hadn’t already gone over and over it, through critique, revisions, copy edits, galleys, etc…
And then panic set in. This was going out. Everyone was going to read it. And my name was on it!
But OK, even the panic is part of the fun. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy!
Elena
http://www.elenagreene.com
Congratulations, you two!
Laurie
I cried when I saw my first book. Yep, sat down on the floor and bawled like a baby. 🙂 But I also learned an important lesson, and that is not to read them when they are in real, solid book form. That’s because it’s far too late to change anything at that point, and I’m terrible about fault-finding at this late stage (and also discovering errors that somehow made it through my proofreading, my critique partners, my editor, and the copy editor). I just stick it on the shelf and look at my name on the cover.
Big congrats, you two!
As a follow-up: I just re-read my book (in rather large bits), and I actually liked it! That was not what I had expected–I thought I’d be cringing throughout. I didn’t find any mistakes, either, except for the whopper I already knew I made with the title. So I guess I weathered the first book thing pretty well.