How is Suzanne Collins feeling right now? With the midnight madness parties, media scrutiny, interviews, and Twitter-craze, one would assume that she's thrilled that there is so much excitement for her book and extremely grateful for all the support she has received from her fans.
I wonder because this is exactly how I feel, one week out from my ROMEO & JULIET & VAMPIRES release date--and I'm not even a big deal!
Sure, it's only natural to be nervous, and I bet all writers--even smash bestsellers like Ms. Collins--must go through a bout of anxiety before their books hit the shelves. But much like I did with my IN OR OUT series launch, I'm in danger of letting my pre-pub day agita color the whole experience, which would be such a shame, because I am proud of what I've accomplished and very happy with how the novel turned out. I mean, I went from writing about teenage girls in Poughkeepsie to classic Shakespearean love stories with a huge supernatural twist. That's quite a leap!
God, I hate to admit it, but I'm probably still as concerned about what people think of me as I was when I was a teenager. Okay, that might be an overstatement, but what I'm trying to get at is: I've never liked the idea of disappointing anyone, and the thought of a reader not liking what I've done can be kind of terrifying. In the case of Ms. Collins, any similar type of angst would be magnified by a billion, because she has a gargantuan following that has been counting down the minutes until Mockingjay arrived.
So in light of that, I should just CHILL THE EFF OUT, and GET OVER MYSELF, right?
Yes, absolutely, I should. And I think the best way to accomplish that is to close my eyes and remember the large chest filled with notebooks that sits in my old bedroom at my mother's house--notebooks filled with stories that I wrote when I was twelve-years-old. Some of them are good, and some of them are horrid.
But regardless of what anyone might say, all of them are a collective preamble to a dream come true.
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