It doesn’t get any less exciting – or at least not yet!
The moment of holding the book in your hands for the first time, holding the cover up to the light, spinning it slowly between your fingers. It makes everything worthwhile – even the unbelievably tedious process of proofing, re-proofing, tweaking the layout and all of the other small tasks which seem to go on for ever.
The fear is always there that you have somehow missed a chapter or two in the final compiling process, or a page break has decided to return in the middle of the first page despite your best efforts.
Now that I’ve held it, everything seems to be where it should be, and I love the cover design which was done for me by Carys Tait. It just gets better every time I look at it.
The Old Orchard is my second book, but was actually the first one I wrote and I can still remember the feelings I had when I sat in front of the blank screen for the first time.
Becoming a writer! What a ridiculous idea! Who did I think I was? The ways in which I would fail stretched out in front of me, with the only consolation being that I would fail soon and therefore fail small. The humiliation would only be in front of a close group of friends and family who would pat me kindly on the head and tell me to get back to running companies and leave the creative stuff to creative people.
It’s now two and half years later and I’ve had such wonderful feedback about Best Eaten Cold from so many people that I might have hoped to feel confident that this writing business was something I could do.
It’s funny how it doesn’t really work that way. The same fears are there, but now I have the potential to fail in front of a larger group of people. I suppose I will have to accept this as a reality of my chosen profession and it may be that the fear is necessary to keep me motivated. I’ll probably never know.
The Old Orchard is different from Best Eaten Cold – not quite as dark – but I believe that it’s just as good, if not better.
Now, I’ll have to wait to find out if other people agree.