That's it, almost certainly

So that's it, almost certainly: I've crawled through the proofs of A Secret Alchemy, finding every last misplaced comma, although it's also gone to a professional proofreader; I've picked up a couple of little anomalies that somehow between us we've all managed to miss; I've seen for the first time how the changes I made at the copy-editing stage integrate when I read it straight through; I've to-ed and fro-ed quadruple-checking the days of the week for one strand, and in another I've realised I've married the Duke of Buckingham to the wrong Woodville sister. The last real job is done, and the beast is face-down on my desk, waiting to go back to Headline, special delivery.

All being well, that's the end of my dealings with the actual words of A Secret Alchemy. From now on I'll be reading them aloud, discussing them, talking to people who've read them, nervously scanning reviews about them, but I won't be involved with them in the way that you are when you're writing. With a whimper (all those toings and froings) and something of a bang (it's a long time since I read it straight through, and d'you know, I really think it works), it has become a separate entity.

I'm glad. There isn't suddenly a book-shaped hole in my life as there is when you finish the real, mad, obsessive writing of a novel, and move onto the editorial stage. Rather, for some months now I've just wanted it to get out there, to be published, to free me to start the new novel. A Secret Alchemy hasn't been the easiest of novels to write - sometimes I wish that the thing that makes me want to write a book wasn't a deep unease about whether I can pull it off or not - and it's time I moved on.

But as all one's novels are, this one was written in - I could even say written by - a particular stage of my life. What's ended up in the book, and what was in there but got cut in revising, is nothing that anyone else would recognise as autobiographical, but how it is on the page is how I once was. That's the oddity: it's as if we co-existed for a while, but soon our existences will separate. And so, in stuffing a few hundred photocopied pages into a jiffy bag and going down to the post office, I'm saying goodbye to a part of my life. As grown-up, photographer Anna puts it at the beginning of The Mathematics of Love:

It was then - that moment - that the shutter opened, and snatched a scatter of the light and dark, throwing it on to this piece of glass, fixing the sun and shadow of those few seconds for ever. And then the sun moved on and took the day with it, while the plate held those shadows and kept them, and carried them to other places and to other times.

Comments

[Sue Guiney]

I wanted to tell you that I linked you, and quoted your blog, in my blog. I found I was writing about something similar and I wanted to tell everyone what you had so wisely said on the matter. I hope you're pleased. It's at http://sueguineyblog.blogspot.com

[Emma Darwin]

Sue, thanks for the link! I liked your piece: I certainly can't get away from time in my fiction. And best of luck with the launch

[Jo]

Of COURSE! That opening section was grown-up Anna! Aaaahhhh - I see that now! I am so daft. I meant to go back and re-read that bit when I finished the book so I could think about it with the whole book behind me, as it were, and instead I gave it to my mum to read and forgot to do that.

I really loved the book, by the way - I keep meaning to email you and bore you with my thoughts! But I hooned through it (it was a book-in-one-hand-with-a-glass-of-wine-in-the-other-while-cooking-pasta kind of book). And I always read too fast when I am enjoying something. Bad reader! Bad. But yes - really loved it - and am looking forward to A Secret Alchemy very much.

[Emma]

Jo, so glad you liked TMOL - do email if you'd like to, though I know one moves on... And interesting about Anna's little first section. I'm thinking a lot at the moment about how books 'set up' their reader with what to expect and how to deal with the book - the practical application of reader-response theory, if you like. (Or even if you don't. I prefer the glass-of-wine-and-pasta approach, myself.)