The corners of my mouth ached from smiling so hard at the photo of my face peering up at me from inside the book flap. "That's me," I said in a squeak. Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. I refused to let them fall or else I'd be a scary mascara mess of chaos. I didn't need that. Not before I was hurled before a thousand people where I was supposed to look "put together" and not like the hyperactive, distractible and ungraceful author that I ACTUALLY was. I didn't want to become a meme, or a boomerang on someone's Instagram page in a permanent edition of author fails.

I heard my agent, Sanders laugh from where she stood behind me. She was grinning from ear to ear, holding the rest of the copies of my book in a large box. "You DO realize that is where an author's face tends to hang out when they make a book happen," she said with an amused snort.

My hands shook as I held my writing— my mind in my fingers, pressing them harder to the book as I attempted to process the magic of the moment. "I wrote this." I blinked, half expecting the book to disappear in between my blinks.

I was afraid to look anywhere else. Afraid the book would vanish and the moment would melt away and drag me to my old room, where I would wake up in my bed in a one-bedroom apartment which I had shared with three girls, all of who had wanted to be actresses. Their tap dancing practices, monologue rehearsing, and singing scales for hours on end had lead me to invest all the change in my Batman piggy bank (yes I had one of those) into a pair of noise-canceling headphones.

Those glorious, dingy headphones gave me enough sanity to try and piece words together, wrestle them into coherent paragraphs, and left me with enough strength to pray that it would all sort itself into a coherent story that someone out in the universe would read and not hate. And when I finished... I realized that it was all total crap. I had written a pile of crap, printed it out, and then had a physical copy of said crap that had done nothing but collect dust in a shame face of... well shame.

But here I was, staring at a totally different book, and people out there didn't think it was crap. They believed in it and my face and name were on it. "This is crazy."

Sanders plucked the book from my hands and placed it at the top of the pile of books she was holding. She raised a brow at me, amusement making her brown eyes bright with golden flecks. I loved how much she always smiled, the dimples that filled her cheeks, and the smile wrinkles that told me how much she had laughed in her forty-five years of life. She had a warm, calming presence in what had been a whirlwind of crazy ever since she had become my agent five years ago, plucking me out of doubt as a writer and throwing me into authorhood. Sure I was still full of doubt, but I had her and that was something I would always be thankful for.

She pushed her short-cropped black hair out of her face, several slick black strands falling again and framing her left temple. "You do this every time you know." I followed her as she moved down a hallway.

"I do what?" I asked confused as my hands adjusted the peach blouse I wore so it sat straight on my shoulders.

"You always look at every book like the first time. It's like you still can't wrap your head around being an author," Sanders said as she came to a stop at the edge of the hall. A crowd could be heard, boisterous and loud, around the corner. The excitement was clear in the air, electrifying.

I tugged on a strand of my blond hair, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot, suddenly shy. It didn't matter how many times I picked up a book. When I finally saw the cover, the words on the page, my face on the inside, it always felt like the first time.

It didn't matter that this was my third story. I had just seen this particular book for the first time and I still got that feeling of disbelief. Of living someone else's life. Or that I was holding a piece of magic that someone else had conjured up, giving me all my dreams, or even more terrifying, that someone had brought me so close to everything I had ever wanted but would pluck it away just as I had gotten to know what that feeling of heaven was like.

"Well... you see..." I managed to stutter as I tried to explain that feeling of elation and terror that always seemed to go hand in hand.

"Relax Laliana," Sanders said, patting me on the back hard enough to send me stumbling forward a few steps. "I merely meant that I love how much you still love this. You are just as excited as you were the very first time I handed you your first book. The magic hasn't left you and I think that's adorable."

I laughed, the sound slightly too high-pitched to be real. The nerves were hitting me. "Okay."

Sanders handed off the books to an assistant as we turned the corner, the noise of a waiting crowd growing louder. "Just be your happy self and the crowd will love you. They always do. You are impossible not to love."

I bit back several sarcastic responses, too flustered to deliver them properly, and I refused to deliver a good line poorly. With a small push, Sanders sent me walking as someone announced my name.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the author of your newest favorite book, Laliana Summers!"

I forced myself to walk normally— something I practiced so that I could recall it when my body suddenly forgot what normal was. That was one of the many reasons why I never wore heels.

The risk of falling and face planting into the ground in front of everyone was enough to sober me up into accepting that heels were a pipedream not meant for someone who had to remember to put one foot in front of the other whenever more than one pair of eyes were on me.

I smiled brightly and waved as I made my way up onto a stage with a dark purple carpet and looked down into a bright blinding audience, the lights washing out all details. I waved towards a thousand people I couldn't see, but I could clearly hear because the noise grew earsplitting.

I had to fight my instinct to turn and run. Girls screaming like that was more terrifying than exciting. If I could wear earplugs for the walk onto the stage without looking like the weirdest, rudest author in the world, I would.

After I sat down safely behind my table, thankful I had managed to get behind it without falling or forgetting how to sit like a normal human, I could see their faces and my fear washed away.

I enjoyed meeting the people who read my stories. It made the whole thing feel real. I probably needed to get more human interaction into my daily schedule because I hummed with excitement as people approached, books at the ready for me to sign.

I spent all of my free time staring at a screen, writing seapunk stories— which was a fancy way of saying mermaid steampunk. My series was about a mermaid princess who tricks her dad into turning her human before she steals his crown and takes up with a pirate, using her sea powers to become the most feared captain in the ocean.

I really enjoyed writing it, but after a while, I had a hundred theories on how people would react to my characters, and no human interaction to test whether my theories were correct until the book was printed and read. The wait was hair pulling level stressful. I just never knew what people would think.

It was so exciting to see those moments come to life as people walked up to me, books clutched in their hands, ready to passionately debate who should end up with the protagonist, who should have gotten punished for betrayal, and who would end up as the true ruler of the underworld sea and the sea above. I never had enough time to jump into more than a few sentence exchanges before the person was shooed away to make room for the next one.

The evening passed in a blur, leaving my body tired, but my heart hammering wildly like a hummingbird that had too much sugar water. The whirlwind ended with Sanders dropping me off in front of my house, shouting through the rolled-down window of her sleek black car before driving off. "Try to get some sleep bright-eyed girl! We have an early morning tomorrow!"

I smiled back at her, amused by her nickname for me, before I buzzed up the stairs two at a time, making it to my apartment door halfway down the hall. Locking and bolting the door to my one-bedroom apartment behind me, I changed into a pair of large flannel pajamas, humming the melody to "A Pirates Life For Me," as I went.

Dancing around the kitchen, I drank a cup of water, smiling to myself before moving into the bathroom.

I stopped in the doorway, growing deadly silent, the tune dying on my lips. A heavy silence filled the bathroom as I stared at the mirror, chills running down my spine.

I read a set of words scrawled out in blood-red lipstick on my bathroom mirror, shattering my idea of solitude.

Laliana

I lived alone, but someone else had been inside my house. Someone who had been in my bathroom moments before I had been. Someone who could still be inside. I let out a blood-curdling scream.

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If you were to be a famous author, which genre would you want to be famous for?