So Starling comes out on Wednesday. Which means that, naturally, today has been an exercise in Murphy’s Law. Everything’s been sorted out now, and better today than tomorrow, at least (knocks on all the wood). But Starling has been a part of our creative lives for just over a year now, and in less than 48 hours it’s going to stop being just a Thing We Made and become a Thing Other People Get To Read.
That’s exciting. It’s also really fucking terrifying.
Part of it is the natural terror that comes with the experience of sharing content on the Internet, or you know at all — what if people are trolls, what if they hate it, etc.
But a bigger fear, at least for me, is the one that keeps catching me off-guard and sending Racheline emails at five in the morning in all-caps: OH MY GOD PEOPLE ARE GONNA READ OUR BOOK.
Which, well, duh. That’s why we wrote the story, to share it. But the experience of writing it has been so intense, and there’s so much of both of us in it, that opening it up for the world at large to get its hands on leaves me feeling really very vulnerable.
It’s an inevitable part of doing all sorts of Things, really, the moment when the work stops being a Thing You Did and starts also being a Thing That Simply Is. There’s a moment of letting go, if not of the story, then of this precise phase of our lives. It’s bittersweet, and not easy, and there have been some really scary moments.
But we’re here now, taking some time in the midst of everything else we’re getting done before the release, including our half-dozen other current projects, to savor that moment just before the Thing. And we want to hear about your moments, when all you could do was just take a breath, let it go, and then ask, “What’s next?”
erincmcrae
Racheline Maltese
Avian30 
Oh yes. In my job, I’m responsible for creating the product as well as creating the strategy for how to implement the product, and while there’s some oversight (and final decisions are never mine to make, but also rarely go against my advice), this arrangement means that I’m creating the product and evaluating its readiness for prime time at the same time. It’s hard to get a critical perspective when I’m also intimately involved in the details. Which means that, inevitably, after I decide something is “done”, I have at least one moment of panic where I am convinced that I’m wrong, wrong, wrong and disaster will befall us all if the product sees the light of day. But you can’t refine forever; eventually, you have to declare a project finished. So I spend the time between finishing the product and announcing the product as a big ball of anxiety; I won’t know if I was right about the product being ready until it goes public, but once it’s public, there’s no turning back.
It’s a hard phase to survive with your sanity intact.