Spare Parts
I keep thinking I should write about publishing The Spare!
I have been thinking this since April 7th. Once a day, once every two days, I just want to write about it.
There was a plan, you know? I made a tiny little plan for writing about different aspects of creating a whole book, the first whole book I have ever made. There were going to be character introductions! Talk about research, including the harrowing and bittersweet tale of how I cancelled the First World War and had to put it back!
But, of course. You know what happened. What was happening already, as a matter of fact. How it’s gone from the first week of March to the first week of July, blink and you’ll miss it, four months and nearly one hundred and thirty thousand dead in my country, my country, my horrible, horrible country, which is feeding itself on a drip of hope in a reckoning on a grand scale while there is so much death and so much fear, and our leaders are scared, or venal, or both.
And I wrote a book.
I don’t know how to promote a book during a pandemic that is being encouraged by the federal government. I don’t know how to celebrate, or how to be proud.
It is a comfort to me that many people have been enjoying it, and talking about enjoying it. I wrote a book that has kept a friend company during nights of deep anxiety, I wrote a book that has made people laugh, and cry, and leave reviews, and tell their friends, and this book I wrote lives out in the world now, where it can make people happy.
That’s worth something. Maybe right now it’s worth a lot. A book with my name on it, that I worked so hard on, is out in the world! People are reading it and feeling things because of it, and that’s magical.
In service of continued magic, I think I’ll try, over the next few days, to write something about why this book is so special to me, what it was like to write it, and where I’m going from here.
I still love the idea of having this kind of way of talking to all of you, and even though no one really misses a newsletter they don’t get, thank you for still being here, and still being interested.
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