Luckily, you don't have time to spend there anyway, because you have a book out in the world! It's in the first month of its life and you're doing things like driving places to read out loud from it and waiting for an email from the big Hollywood director who just had to contact you personally to ask if he could please pay an obscene amount of money for your movie rights. It's weird that the email hasn't come through yet, but it's probably because it was so ebullient in nature, your inbox filtered it as spam.

Anyway, this moment really is exciting because human beings are saying nice things about your work! People — not all people, of course, but some of the people who other people have decided are the ones who count — are reading what you've written and are taking time to share their thoughts. Some of these people are actually paid for their thoughts and even they're saying nice things! You might not have a lot of friends left, but you sure are feeling loved!

About four weeks into the debut publishing experience, all the people who were talking online about your book have moved on to something else. You call your agent to check in and are told she's on another call. This is weird, because the person she's on the other line with isn't you. This is one of the first signs of The Great Big First Book Comedown, the reminder that your literary agent has other clients. Ugh, is how your nervous system receives this information. Gross.

Five weeks in, your editor sends you an email and you notice that the signature line where your own book cover used to be promoted has been switched out for the book cover of somebody else. It's a book about someone who dedicated their life to rescuing golden retrievers. Ugh! Your nervous system registers. Golden retrievers are dumb!

By this point, regardless of how your book is doing, you're starting to feel bereft. You know that people are entitled to read books you haven't written because you've been reading those other books your entire life. It is absolutely insane to feel like your book needs to remain upfront in the daily conversation. You're aware of this. You're just not sure why your friend's mommy blog post about perfect gift ideas for 2-year-olds didn't include a link to your first novel is all. You want to call your new debut author friend from Michigan to ask if he's feeling snubbed at this point too, but his book was just featured in a viral video with Jon Stewart and you can't actually stomach talking to him anymore so instead you share the news on Facebook that your book's large-print rights just sold in Ontario and you are #CanadaProud!

Six weeks in is when you really start to lose it. You have no sense of scope. A stranger at a reading tells you she can't wait to get your book from her local library and it takes every shred of humanity you have left not to ask her why the eff she doesn't just buy the damn thing since there are 19 of them right there on the shelf. You can't even visit the internet any longer because it is a minefield of good news. Debut author so-and-so got picked as one of the top 10 writers to watch in southeast Brooklyn? Oh, and look at that! That's an awful lot of prize money for a first book. Boom! Wait, that guy you read with in a basement is the keynote speaker at AWP? That memoirist who has no sense of appropriate karaoke song lengths just hit the New York Times Best-seller List?! And wait, so did that girl you spilled ketchup on one time? Eight weeks on the best-seller list?! New York Times Most Noteable?! Barnes and Noble Discovery?! Boom boom boom boom boom.