This Is It

The moment of truth. The big and scary “holy shit” moment. The “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this” moment.

If you’ve paid attention to the past week and a half of my posts, you’ll have noticed I’ve been talking about a submission I’ve been working on for a Halloween anthology. The deadline for that submission is tomorrow.

And I’m actually ready for it.

I’ve spent the last two days working my butt off on editing and writing for this submission. My brain hurts, but now I’m finally reaching the tail end of all I need to do. And let me just say right now this feels unreal.

I don’t even have a guaranteed chance of being chosen and published in the anthology, but I feel like I’m walking in a daze. I cannot honestly believe that I am giving this a shot. I never thought I would actually do something like this, or at the very least follow all the way through with it. I’m probably one of the least known and not even remotely published authors out there submitting to this, and somehow…I feel as if I have a shot.

I’m terrified. I’m nervous. I’m going “oh my God” every five seconds. I’m staring at my screen like my world has slowed to a stop.

If this is how I feel for simply submitting to the anthology, I do not want to see what my reaction is going to be if I get an email back saying I was accepted.

(I’m getting way over my head here, aren’t I?)

Anyways, getting out of the feelings department, I finished editing this afternoon. Well, let me rephrase that: I finished editing a first round paper edit last night, and spent until 1am or so entering the changes into the Word doc before I sent it off to a friend for a second pair of eyes. (That alone was nerve-wracking to me for some reason.) This morning as I got it back I read through again and tweaked the awkward sentences — with lots of growling and swear words on my part at times — clarified things, and even ended up adding a hundred words or so based off suggestions.

I’m happy with how the story turned out. Really happy, actually. I hope that’s not a bad thing.

So after that was done, I started tackling the dreaded blurb. I. Hate. Blurbs. I swear these things are the Achilles’ Heel of every author out there. How do you put 22 pages worth of story into about eight to ten sentences? How? It never works out nicely the first time, or the second time, or the third, or…

Catch my drift?

Finally after some help in that department as well, I managed to come up with a blurb that I could live with and hopefully has the aspect of appealing. At some point within the blurb writing I finally stopped to eat since I had ignored food the entire day while I was editing.

Once those two things were done, I only had the information side of the submission left to complete. An author bio, placing the story in a genre, recording the word count, writing a dedication since I decided on one, gathering the links to my websites.

Now… Now I’m nearly done.

I’ve completed the author bio and all the other necessary information, the editing is done, the blurb is done, I’ve mostly formatted the Word doc now, the dedication is done.

I’m…done.

I can’t believe I’m saying that.

The only thing I have left to do is add the website links to the Word doc and send it in. Ho-ly crap.

That’s a half lie though. I’m not fully, fully done.

One of the links I could include was a Facebook author page. I don’t have one yet. Well, I do now, actually. I had been tossing around the idea of making one for awhile now, but thought I was going to wait for the release of the Dark Heir book. I mean, I’m not published yet so I can’t put any links up to it, no real news. But then again, I do have Wattpad and I do have this blog so I might as well start utilizing a Facebook author page now.

So, in light of this submission, I decided now was a good time to make one. That way on the off chance I am accepted, I have that link out there.

Of course, because I spent the last hour putzing around trying to create my author page, I totally forgot about this blog post. Then again, creating that page is also what reminded me I needed a blog post… Irony is a bitch.

Getting back on topic now… This is really it. By tomorrow afternoon I’ll have sent in my submission and I’ll wait with quiet nervous and a pounding heart to see if I hear back about it at all. I think the story is going to get one last read through and then that’s it.

My heart is pounding just thinking about it now.

(And should any of my followers here be interested in following my author page on Facebook, feel free to come drop me a like. I’m still in the process of setting it up, but the basics are there.)