I have a book publishing in three weeks and my brain has decided this is an excellent time to question every decision I’ve made since approximately 2017.
It’s about a horse.
Which feels dramatic considering the book is, fundamentally, about a runaway princess who burns her mother’s notes, a half-fae thief with selectively applied principles, and a horse who has very strong opinions and absolutely no respect for authority.
And yet here I am, lying awake at 3 am thinking:
Did I pick the right title? Is the blurb lying? Is the cover secretly terrible and no one told me? Did I accidentally write something that only makes sense to me?
Publishing a book is weird because people think the hard part is writing it.
It’s not.
Writing is hard, sure. But writing feels private in a way nothing else does. Even when it’s messy, it’s yours. It can be fixed. It can be hidden in a folder labeled something like “FINAL_FINAL2_DO_NOT_SHARE_WITH_ANYONE_YET.”
Publishing is different.
Publishing is when the story stops being something you’re shaping alone and becomes something other people can look at and form opinions about. Real ones. Sometimes kind ones. Sometimes… less kind ones. And your brain, if it’s anything like mine, treats that like a threat-level situation.
I tend to overthink everything. Not a little. A lot.
Every editing pass I make follows the same pattern:
I fix one thing, feel briefly victorious, and then accidentally break something three chapters later without noticing until it’s too late. So I’ve learned to stop micromanaging my books into the ground. I do fewer passes now. I trust things more.
Which is good.
And also deeply uncomfortable.
Because “done” doesn’t feel like peace. It feels like uncertainty with paperwork.
And then comes the next phase: telling people about it.
The posting. The talking. The newsletters. The blog posts like this one where I’m essentially saying, “Hello, please look at this thing I made,” while trying very hard not to sound like I’m yelling.
I want to communicate. I really do. But there’s always this low-level fear that I’m being too much. Or not enough. Or annoying. Or invisible. Or somehow all of those things at the same time.
Here’s the part I don’t talk about much:
Six years ago, something shifted. The feedback got loud. The expectations piled up. The feeling of being seen and judged at the same time started to outweigh the reason I was writing in the first place.
So I stopped.
Two full years of nothing. Not a word shared with anyone. There was relief in it, honestly. No reviews to read. No waiting for reactions. No wondering if people were quietly disappointed in something I’d cared about deeply.
Silence felt safer than the alternative.
After two years I started dabbling again. Writing things I never showed anyone. Poking at stories like they might bite. For another four years I had series full novels sitting on my hard drive doing absolutely nothing for anyone, including me.
Last September I started publishing again.
Not because the anxiety went away. But because stories on a hard drive don’t go anywhere. They don’t find the reader who needed them at 7pm on a Monday after a hard day at work. They just sit there while you convince yourself they’re not ready yet. Not good enough.
This book — The Horse and the Thief and Me — started as a small idea. The kind you think will stay small.
It didn’t stay quite as small as I wanted.
It’s a short romantasy. A runaway princess. A half-fae thief with questionable ethics. And Morrigan, who has bitten the captain of the guard, eaten what was almost certainly a marriage offer, and somehow let a total stranger put on her bridle without complaint.
That betrayal is still fresh.
I love this story. That surprised me a little. But I kept thinking:
Maybe I shouldn’t publish this yet. Maybe it needs more time. Maybe I missed something obvious.
Maybe it’s not long enough. Or short enough.
Who reads a novelette anyway?
Eventually I stopped arguing with myself long enough to send it to readers. I waited for feedback like it was a verdict instead of just information. And when it came back — people laughed in the right places. Nobody revolted against the existence of Morrigan the horse.
So now it’s almost out. Three weeks away.
And my brain is doing its favorite thing:
Are you sure this is ready? Are you sure YOU’RE ready?
The honest answer is no. I’m not sure. I don’t think I ever am.
But “being sure” is not actually a requirement for pressing publish. It just feels like it should be.
Somewhere out there, someone might read this in forty-five minutes and laugh at a princess making terrible decisions, a thief making worse ones, and a horse making all of them. Maybe that’s you. Maybe you read it on a Monday night when you needed something fun and fast and a little swoony.
That’s enough reason to hit publish.
Even with the nerves. Especially with them.
If you’re curious, here’s where to find the book.
Tell me I’m not the only one who turns “finishing something“ into a full emotional spiral. What’s your version of publishing anxiety?
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