It’s Real

Almost Yours Again is live.

I need to say that again because I have been saying it to myself all morning and it still hasn’t fully landed.

Almost Yours Again is live. I did the thing. It is out there, in the world, available to be held and read and felt by people who are not me — and after everything that went into getting here, that sentence is still the most surreal collection of words I have assembled in recent memory.

Marc and Finn have lived in my head and my heart for a long time. A genuinely long time. They were there before the first draft and they’ll be there long after the last reader closes the final page, because that is the nature of characters who dig in deep enough — they don’t leave just because the book is finished. I have carried them through rewrites and editorial passes and doubt and more rewrites and the specific 2am terror of wondering whether any of it was good enough, and now they belong to the world as much as they belong to me.

That is wonderful. That is also, I will not lie to you, absolutely terrifying.

But it’s done. It’s real. And I did not get here alone.

Every share. Every preorder. Every message that landed in my inbox when I needed it most. Every kind word from someone who didn’t have to take the time but did anyway. Every person who read these ramblings and stuck around and said I want to read this — you are part of why this exists in the form it does, and I don’t take that lightly.

I have one thing to ask of you now.

Please love Marc and Finn for me. Love them the way they deserve to be loved — which is to say, completely, with full knowledge of their flaws and their history and the long road it took to get them back to each other. They have earned it. I promise you they have earned it.

Thank you. From the bottom of a very full heart.

It’s real.

— Avery 🖤