Only three days left until the big day, and I’m not freaking out at all! I’m totally calm here. Who’s panicking? You’re panicking! Everything is perfectly fine!
I kid. I’m far more excited than I can describe, even with all the heavy pressure of an immanent book launch hanging over my head every second of the day. Even though we’ve been waiting for six long years for this day, it still feels like there’s so much left to do before it gets here. Granted, that’s my perfectionism talking. You only get one chance to make a first impression after all, and in the publishing world that matters even more than you’d think.
On the one hand, I’ve already done better than a lot of authors ever do even though the book hasn’t come out yet. I’ve personally presold close to a thousand copies during the preorder campaign and the following years, and that’s not counting any of the copies sold to book retailers this year. I have an absolutely perfect audiobook adaptation coming out on the most listened-to audiobook platform in the world, and I have a spot saved for me at the biggest science fiction convention in Ohio later this year. If that’s all I get out of this, it’s still pretty darn impressive.
But I’m hard to satisfy. I want it all. I want Tantalus Depths to be a number one seller. I want it to be the kind of book people discuss when they talk about modern science fiction classics. I want to be able to make writing a full-time job so I can explore the galaxies inside my mind and tell every story that’s been struggling to burst free for so long. I’ll still be content if I don’t achieve these things, but I want them, and I’m not going to be passive about it.
We’ll see soon enough, though. In the meanwhile, let’s continue with the introductions, shall we?
You’ve met the muscle of the Tantalus 13 survey mission, now meet the brains. Dr. Rebecca Traviss and Dr. William Hertz are two of the smartest people you could want on your team, and they both have an absolutely ravenous enthusiasm for learning and discovery. As a geologist and a computer scientist, they may be well out of their depth when it comes to exploring an ancient alien megastructure the size of a planet, but they’re eager to meet the challenge head on.
Read more about Becky and Hertz in their Explore articles here, and get ready to follow their adventure in Tantalus Depths on September 27th!