Over the last few weeks I’ve been going back through old journals. A little over two years ago, at the end of July 2018, I wrote:
I am feeling ready to start the new books. They are both feeling pretty huge and intimidating, as if the end of them is a long way off, but that’s to be expected.
Yes, that’s books, plural. One of them was ‘the Ruritanian thing’. The end of that is still a long way off: it’s sitting at 12,500 words, and I haven’t done nearly as much work on it as I’d expected.
But the other one was what is now The Real World. And it’s done.
I’m always surprised by the way I suddenly know that a book’s finished. It’s a pleasant surprise, because it’s characterised by the departure of worry. I stop worrying about whether it’s any good or not. I stop worrying about who I might have offended and what I might have got wrong. I stop worrying about what people might make of it. It’s not that I stop caring – I still care, very much, about making this book good – but I stop worrying. It’s a painless separation, and it happens when the book is ready and not before.
When I say it’s done, I mean that I’ve got the text as good as I, personally, can make it. I may still change things. I have the usual cohort of beta readers and editors and nitpickers looking at it at the moment, and I may draft more in.
And I still have all the typesetting and design work, all the fiddly stuff that comes before pressing the ‘publish’ button, to be done. The cover is, I think, nearly there (of course assuming that I don’t look back at it in a month and decide that actually it’s irredeemably naff), but there are a lot of other things to be done.
But I’m confident enough that I’ve got something decent that I’ve committed to a publication date.
2 November 2020.
Mark your calendar, sign up for my newsletter, add it to Goodreads, whatever. Or just pop back closer to the time. It’s going to happen.
Kathleen Jowitt 