There is a moment, and I have just been in it, which is not like any other.
I have touched my book. In finished, ready-to-sell form.
People compare it with childbirth (which is ridiculous: childbirth is an insanely hazardous and traumatic process fraught for some with a kind of awful beauty and producing the single most precious thing in the world. I love books, but unless your creative process is really alarming, books are not children). They talk about it in the same breath as weddings and divorces and graduations and all manner of things, some obscure and personal and some blindingly erotic.
Yes, they do.
But that somehow isn’t what it is.
The moment is internal and hugely pleasing, yet also alarming, oddly unsettling, powerfully affirmative, strangely aging, prideful, proud, regretful, and overwhelming.
A huge brown box arrives in your house and you cut through the tape and it has your book in it, real and soon-to-be-published and impossibly more solid than it has ever been until now. Very soon, it will be at least reasonably commonplace in bookshops, for a little while, and you may even see someone reading it on the bus. People will react to it, and to you, in different ways. They may be delighted, stimulated, or changed by it. They may be bored. You can no longer control that, if you ever could. Your relationship with the world and the way people see you, and it, will be altered. In some way, you have changed everything around you. It’s like a bomb made of paper, or a virus.
All of which is irrelevant, because the experience is not verbal but immediate, and you’re having it, not talking it – which is, of course, the opposite of what you did to make the thing happen in the first place. It is humbling. And very much not.
Well.
My second novel, Angelmaker, has physical form in the world. It is no longer mutable. I have held a copy and been stunned by how pretty it is, and amazed that anyone would take what I do and make it into this thing.
I can now say, because I am one, that it is exactly not like becoming a parent. That is an altogether shared thing, and the beginning of something so imponderably remarkable that it boggles me.
But having your book – especially a second book, which proves that you can at least write more than one – make the transition from idea to object is amazing, and strange.
I know, I know, there should be a picture with this post, but my house is dark because all the bulbs went over Christmas and I have only just got home.
Anyway.
Wow.
