Sending your baby out into the world.

 Our books come to us as a new born idea. We must love it and nurture it and watch it grow. As it develops we must work hard to ensure it grows the right way, we must curb bad habits, prune away the unnecessary and hope the true beauty of our idea shines through.
 But all of this time we lavish, all of the care we give results, unsurprisingly, in a very strong attachment developing. We love our idea, the story it has become and the thought of sending it out into the world to be judged can be difficult.
 At this point it's useful to give it to those we trust, those whose judgement we have faith in and who we can rely on to be gently with our feelings. They can show us where we need to put in more work, areas that we might find difficult to see because we are standing too close.
 Hopefully those critiques will give us fresh perspective and with more work and care our stories can begin to shine.
 But the next stage can be one of the hardest because now we're expected to send our beautiful baby out to be judged by experts. And they might not see it's beauty, the care and effort we've invested, the love we've lavished. They may only see the things that are wrong with it, the mistakes we've made, the areas we forgot to polish. They may *SHOCK/HORROR* not love our baby at all. They may  *HORROR/SHOCK* reject it.
 The urge to protect out baby is strong, to keep it safe and warm and free from harm so surely we'd be best off keeping it in our hard drive and far away from those experts?
 Only...how can our book ever shine if it never sees the light?
 How can our work ever be appreciated if it's not out in the world?

And so, despite the fear involved in hitting the send button, in sending your baby out into the world, at some point, at some moment we have to let them go and find out if they can survive on their own.