I can bearly believe it

Here I am, staring at my book on display at online stores, and I can still barely believe it is real. I think it hasn't hit me yet. But, slowly, I am realising that I wrote and published a book. And please forgive me for this moment of self indulgence, but what a fucking amazing achievement!

I write since forever. It is my way of dealing with and organising my thoughts and feelings. I had several blogs since I became an adult, some of them public, some of them secret. I put things in writing to make sense of them, and sometimes to vent all my emotions in order to stop me from hurting someone in real life.

And then one day I started writing fiction as well. The first stories were not related to my life, and that took me some places. Then I decided to write things that actually happened to me, which I thought were funny and would make people laugh. I put those stories in a blog and told my friends to read them, and they loved them. From there it came the idea of putting it in a book.

But, at that stage I never really considered making an actual book. It was one of those things that I wanted to do at some point, but never had any real deadline.

A couple of months ago I decided to sit down and finish the book, write some final stories and get it ready for a possible publication. I thought, back then, this was the hardest step. I took the blog offline and gathered the stories I had already, wrote some more, and I finally had a final manuscript. Then came the actual hard part: choose a title, design a cover, find out how to publish it... All that without spending any money, because I didn't actually have any money to spend. 

Now, seeing it for sale, I feel a big sense of accomplishment and pride. I did it. I wrote a book. And this is what I wanted from it - to tick the box, to achieve this goal in my life. I don't mind if the book will sell, if people will like it... I mean, I hope it will sell, I hope people like it. But if it doesn't, there is not much I can do about it. My part is done. I wrote it, prepared it and put it on sale. From now on, it's on the readers.

Here is some fun fact: the first title was "(sh)it happens!" and it was suggested by a friend. I then decided to change it to "Bearly believable", and I had everything ready for sale, until I found out that this was already the name of a child's book, that also had a colouring version. I could not have my book about gay sex have the same name of a child's book, so I finally arrived at "You can bearly believe it".