Life Cycle of a Book

From spark to publication - just how long does it take?

Hello and welcome! My book is out NEXT WEEK, which means I’m struggling to focus and my head is full of wasps. WILL ANYONE READ IT? WILL THEY LIKE IT? WHAT IF THIS IS HOW EVERYONE FINDS OUT I’M SECRETLY STUPID?? Etc etc.

I thought I’d write out for you a bit of a timeline of how I got to publication point on this novel. It’s been a long, long process, during which my life and my writing has changed massively. When I first started playing with this idea, I’d just written One More Chance, my first (published) novel, and didn’t yet have an agent. I was initially thinking in terms of needing a third poetry play to take to the Edinburgh Festival, which was my main creative outlet at the time. And I got really interested in the idea of tragedy, and of generational grief, and collective mourning, and what catastrophe meant in both a personal and a broader context. And I became particularly interested in this song, which tells the story of a shipping disaster near where I grew up -