My first book (that is ready for public consumption, that is) launches today and I have to say, my response is fairly muted. Don’t get me wrong, I’m incredibly proud of the work that I put into making this book. Writing tens of thousands of words is no joke. Reading revision after revision of a book is mind-numbing, even if you were excited about it the first ten times. Launching an indie career is quite a daunting task that I wasn’t fully prepared for. But perhaps most importantly, I’m just glad that I was able to see something through to the very end. For the longest time, I was worried that this was a fundamental flaw in my writing career: an inability to finish a project. There are a litany of unfinished, unpublished work that haunts my hard drive. Folder after folder of projects that started off well enough only to fizzle out a couple of months later. So to finally get to this point of writing something that I felt was publication-worthy, write a first draft, read it over, write a second draft, read that over, get it edited, revised, edited again, read dozens of times and then get a cover created was just a monumental effort.

I feel as though I should be more excited about launching this book but I’m not. Maybe it has to do with the equally daunting task of now having to market a book when all I want to focus on is my next project. The idea of doing social media—Instagram reels, Facebook posts, tweets (are they still called tweets now that the website is X?)—doesn’t exactly strike me with a ton of joy. Besides the fact that I’m a complete novice when it comes to social media, the idea of telling people “hey! Buy this thing I’m selling. Now!”—which is what a lot of posts in that space are about—just feels completely inauthentic to what it is that I’m about. And I know that I’m going to have to grapple with that fundamental problem sooner rather than later, but for the time being, I’m just going to do that much, MUCH later.

But Scavengers launches today. It’s been an incredible journey to get to this point in my life. I honestly feel like I should have done this ten years ago, but alas, here we are. A new chapter in my life begins. A chapter that I’ve been eager to start since I was eight years old and here it is. But it’s only the beginning. One book may be an accomplishment, but even if it somehow got to the bestseller list (crosses fingers), it still wouldn’t mark even the halfway point of the journey that I’m on.

Scavengers launches today, and with it, the daunting task of establishing a writing career begins.

But the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.