I’ve been reading my own books.
I was at least partly prompted, I have to admit, by an entity that emailed me assuring me that it was not a spammer, telling me how inspirational my books could be, and scolding me for what a disaster my publicity has been of late. I know, sender of unsolicited negging guilt-trippy business pitches. I know.
At the present moment, I would have trouble telling you where you can actually buy my books, and I’m painfully aware that they aren’t available in as many places as they should be. As for things like having a social media presence, for what that’s worth these days, and knowing whether or not my mailing list works… *hollow laughter*
Up until very recently, I didn’t care at all. I did not have the capacity to care. The last five years have not left me much room to write, still less to care about selling about what I’d already written. And it was the not-writing that was bothering me.
In a slightly wacky but nonetheless effective practice, I had an imaginary conversation with the version of my future self who has actually been managing to write something. She had robust opinions about my correspondent’s sense of boundaries, but she agreed that my books were worth reading, and suggested I do that.
I was going to start with the work-in-progress workbook on how to write your book while you have a day job, in the hope that my past writing self would have something helpful to say, but, for fairly obvious reasons, the books I have in EPUB format are the ones I’ve already published. So I returned to Stancester. Speak Its Name last Tuesday. The Real World last Wednesday.
Anyway, it turns out they aren’t bad at all. Rereading, I have (of course) found several things I’d do differently now, but only a couple that really made me cringe. (Although I think I had an old file for Speak Its Name. I have vivid memories of fixing all those inconsistently curly inverted commas, and who the hell is Lucy? Didn’t I write her out? Combine her with Georgia?) A while ago I thought The Real World was the best thing I’d ever written, but then it got comprehensively ignored. Now I don’t think it’s stand-out brilliant, but I do think it’s still pretty good. They keep you reading. At least, they kept me reading – and I know what happens.
And now I seem to be writing the third. Don’t get excited: it’s four pages, just over 1000 words, and only about half of those are new. (Yes, I had started writing it some time in the five years of life upheaval…) And does anyone actually want to read Will and Georgia’s lockdown diaries? I doubt it. I’m not even sure that I want to write them. But there’s still a shred of that magnificent indifference clinging to me. I don’t care whether anybody wants to read it. It’s what wants to be written, so off we go.
Meanwhile, my future writing self is drinking coffee and smiling quietly, and talking me down from the old familiar “but can I really write this?” wobble. I haven’t broached the topic of sorting out distribution and publicity for the books I already have. It does not feel like a priority, not when there’s writing to be done. Still, I have just gone through all the links from my book pages and removed some of the dead ones. It’s a start. Thank you for the nudge, mystery correspondent.
Kathleen Jowitt 