I’ve just realised that in previous posts I often talk about these huge leaps I am taking: I started off in February last year with a leap of faith and finished my last blog talking about great leaps into the unknown. Apart from making it sound like I’m some moon-bound superhuman lolloping all over the place, it’s not true. Writing isn’t about great leaps (at least, not for me…) it’s more about small steps. At the time they seem like momentous occasions but in hindsight it’s just another couple of feet down the road that will (hopefully) one day lead to publication.
That said, some days those baby steps seem more significant than others. So last week I stood in my local print shop and watched as two copies of Bloodie Bones rolled off the presses (I didn’t want to do it at home as I thought it might shake my poor printer to smithereens) and then packaged them up and sent them on their merry way through the postal system. (Now that’s an expensive business… someone explain to me how the Royal Mail are losing money hand over fist when they charge that much?)
It would be a lie if I said I didn’t feel any emotion - here’s two years of my life (well, if you exclude the sleeping, eating, going to work, watching telly, reading etc….) rolling out of a machine. It’s tangible proof that I have been sitting in the corner rocking to myself. Well, not all the time.
So they’re gone, and I suppose I should feel relieved, and part of me does. But perhaps more than that I realise I now need to worry about what happens when the damned things come back. What if they don’t like it? What if they hate it? What if they say perfectly healthy trees were unfairly put to death for this?
I am sure I could put the time before I get the feedback to good use, sitting in a corner rocking perchance? As it is I’m trying not to think about it and instead I’m typing up the novel I wrote just before I started edited Bloodie Bones (from the bad old days when I wrote everything out longhand… boy am I regretting hanging onto that trick for so long!) and finishing off a huge backlog of short stories that are nearly all *almost there*. So as usual there’s lots to be going on with.
But those two copies of Bloodie Bones are out there… and one day they’ll come back home.
