arrows and stars

(the feeling of writing a book)

A couple of weeks after his exams, I drove my eldest son and his friends to the Pembrokeshire coast for their first independent camping trip. Following a swim in the sparkling sea, I set off for home, leaving him surrounded by kit bags and tent pegs. Driving away, I felt anxiously queasy, but I knew I had done all I could. I believe in my boy — it was time to let go and allow him to fly. ‘You are the bow(s)’ wrote Kahil Gibran, ‘from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.’ That night, as I slept, miles away the boys lay in midnight grass, watching the night sky. ‘We saw shooting stars’, my son told me later.

On the morning of my book’s publication day, I woke early, once again anxiously queasy. I made myself a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table to post my book launch video. I wasn’t sure I felt ready to send Chasing Fog into the world, but it had long been out of my hands: boxes of books had left the warehouse, bound for bookshops around the country. Parcels would soon be arriving on doormats, carrying the crisp scent of fresh paper. There were already copies in the hands of fellow authors and on the desks of reviewers. My book was no longer constrained in a file on my computer or tethered in a stack of paper: the time had come to launch, to let it fly brightly into the unknown.

Unlike last time, with this, my second book, I had a sense of what would happen on publication day. I expected to be active on social media, responding to kind well-wishes and thrilling photographs of Chasing Fog arriving – at last – in the hands of readers. I expected a slight feeling of anti-climax when, after months of anticipation, little tangibly changed, and everything around me carried on as usual. I expected to visit the lovely bookshop where I work to see my book on the shelf for the first time.

What I didn’t expect was to find that my wonderful colleagues had stayed up late to fill the bookshop window with copies of my book, a gesture so kind and supportive it moved me to tears.

I didn't expect that, at my book launch party the next day, there would be more tears, from my Dad, who came with me on my research trip for the book’s last chapter (and who messaged me later to say ‘I read the final chapter, of course. It is such beautiful writing’), from my friend, and from my cousin, who hugged me and whispered in my ear that she had found herself in the book. My star-gazing son was asked by my colleague, who was hosting, what it was like to have a mother who chased the fog. ‘If it’s foggy, we always have to follow it’, he said, ‘and when she’s in the fog, she is different. She makes voice notes on her phone, but it’s not her usual voice.’ Maybe, my colleague suggested, this was my ‘writer voice’. I did not know such a voice existed, but listening back to a sample of the audiobook, I had to conclude that he could be right.

Perhaps I should have been prepared for the book to be reviewed in newspapers and magazines, but I was not, and so each positive review came as a happy surprise, particularly the Country Life review by nature-writer John Lewis-Stempel. I began to receive messages from readers via Instagram: ‘it's beautiful’ and ‘I got lost in your words.’ There was an email from Dogberry & Finch, the independent bookshop in Okehampton (the town where I spent my early childhood, which features in the book’s second chapter), that read:

I love your book! I sold one a few days ago, have one in the window right now and it's inside on the shelves too. It's a keeper. I'll do my best to have it in stock all the time…

An indie bookseller myself, I felt this to be an honour.

Every one of these moments of connection made my heart swell with gratitude: I had bent like a bow, braved the moment of separation, and this was my reward. There are many reasons to write, but one of them is this: when you release words into the world, they splinter and spread like starshine, touching unknown people in unimagined ways. The greatest joy of being a writer is to learn that others have found their own meaning in your stories.

A book, I know, is a conversation between writer and reader. A book is only the start.

Thank you for reading,

Laura x

{This post is from my series ‘The Feeling of Writing a Book’. You’ll find the rest of the series here.}