This is a question I have been asked a lot in the past year, and so far I’ve either answered with words such as “great!” and “exciting!” or tried to play it cool by saying stuff like “oh, I just want it out in the world, you know?”. Neither is true.
To publish a book is to throw a stone down a very deep well and then wait for the splosh. The splosh is closure. The splosh is acceptance. The splosh is what makes you Joan Didion or Dan Brown (delete as appropriate). The splosh is an acknowledgement that you created something and it has found a home somewhere.
You send out advance copies and wait for the splosh. You check social media and wait for the splosh. You look at the books pages in newspapers and magazines wondering about the splosh. Sometimes you just sit and look at your inert phone and try to will the splosh. You wander round Waterstones desperately listening out for it.
You go to work, you take a walk, you watch TV, you spend time with your loved ones. No splosh. Sometimes you miss entire conversations because you are straining to hear it. You actively go looking for it on sites where strangers write two-star reviews of your work. Your stomach fills with gravel.
All around you, other stones are being lobbed in the well too. You can hear them bouncing off the walls, clattering down like yours did, and then: they splosh. Perhaps your stone got stuck? Perhaps you didn’t throw it hard enough? Perhaps throwing it in at all was a monstrous act of ego from which your fragile self-esteem might never recover? Perhaps - oh, this must be it - your stone is so very very special it doesn’t in fact need to splosh because ummm errr… In the meantime: all the others go splosh splosh splosh.
Ask me how it feels to write a book and I’d tell you it’s like levitating, like walking on the moon. Like waking up with springs in your heels and doing a Spiderman jump that sees you sail over buildings, leap bridges, vault valleys. This is the great part: energetic, exhilarating. Like recognising a pop song with lyrics during an otherwise chin-strokey techno night.
But the bit I’m in now is pure, doomy, nerves. Like Marie Antoinette in the cart to the guillotine, reassuring yourself that it will be over soon and that a couple of people along the way might notice that you have quite a nice neck.
A few other shelfish pre-occupations
*I’ve been listening to this lovely mellow album by The Weather Station while pushing my baby around in the buggy recently (warning: may contain jazz flute).
*In the absence of any trips to LA in my diary, Catherine Steadman’s latest thriller The Disappearing Act supplied all the West Hollywood glamour, ambition and double-crossing I needed (out 24th June).
*I’ve been buying these Honey Flamingo tube-knot candles as presents in the hope someone will get me one, but am about to cave and this pinky putty-ish one is my favourite.
Thanks for reading,
HW