So I'm doing the Happy Author Dance round the kitchen, because the boxes of my author's copies of A Secret Alchemy have arrived. Twelve hardback and twelve of the big, handsome export trade paperback: I even thanked the courier man. And yes, it does look gorgeous, and yes, I did take it to bed with me yesterday (well, it spent the night on the bedside table, but it was well within patting distance), and yes, when I got up I brought it back downstairs, where it's been glowing quietly on my desk all day.
But why it should be such a thrill, I'm not really sure. It's not my first novel, and it's not like any separate element of it is new. Quite apart from the fact that I've written every word, and most of them at least five times, I've survived the copy-edit, seen the page proofs and laboured over them all over them again. Then, after a pause, I got the first, temporary-covered bound proof months ago, and then the one with the real cover. I've approved cover copy and tweaked blurbs. I've had the hardback jacket and trade paperback cover pinned up on the board behind the monitor for months, except when I rushed upstairs to fetch them to show a friend (always dropping the pin into some obscure corner, not to be found until three weeks later when emerges of its own accord in time for me to tread on it in bare feet.) I've uploaded the cover here and on my website, written pieces for the site, for Waterstones Books Quarterly and Vulpes Libris, given two different talks about it at Goldsmiths and one to the Richard III Society, and left bits and pieces of thoughts about it all over the net. And I'm about six months earlier in exactly the same processes for the American edition: proofs for that were apparently in evidence on the HarperCollins stand at Frankfurt.
And yet, and yet... It's a book! A real book! It sits in my hand, thick and substantial, the jacket rough and alive, the pages furling under my thumb as familiar names and loves fly by. It's a book as none of its earlier incarnations were, because books are more than an assortment of elements, aren't they? Thinking they're no more than a collection of the things I've been grappling with for the last three and a half years (or ten years, if you count from my first blinding conviction that I had to write Elizabeth Woodville), is like thinking that a person is no more than a collection of blood-vessels and synapses. I'm not sure if books breathe, but they certainly live. Like Graham Greene's (was it him?) knife, which over the years had been given three new blades and two new handles but was still, in some essential sense, the same knife, the novel which began to exist whole in my head about three years ago, now has its body. It may have a rather different face in the US, including some slightly different synapses, but it's still the same... not person, exactly, but creature, definitely. It's a creature because it has been created, and the person who created it is... ME!
Excuse me, I think it's time for a reprise of the Happy Author Dance...
