Many authors
liken the process of writing a book, never mind finishing one, to giving birth.
Having just completed my ninth one, I’ve had cause to examine this analogy and,
for the most part, wholeheartedly agree. Just like childbirth, books or
word-babies are brought into the world amidst great joy, pain, struggle,
exhaustion and with the aid of assorted medicinals – usually, the liquid kind.
The latter self-administered and in varying quantities. For a lucky few, some
books make their entry more easily and with less hangovers.
Whichever
way the work arrives and no matter how many you’ve written, the end result is
fundamentally the same: you’re the mother or father of a beautiful lexical
child. At least, that’s how you consider it until someone tells you otherwise.
The one guarantee about being a writer and birthing a book, as opposed to a
human, is that there’s always someone out there prepared to tell you that’s one
ugly baby you delivered.
Now that
I’ve reached the end of The Curse of the
Bond Riders trilogy, having recently handed to my publisher my 220,00
word-child, titled Illumination,
replete with structural flaws, grammatical foibles and syntactical problems
(that like a good midwife/paediatrician, she’ll help me smooth over so people
don’t scream when they peep in the crib), I’ve decided that completing Book
Three wasn’t so much like giving birth as ending a long-term but deliciously
complex and demanding relationship.
It’s not
that I’m going through a divorce so much as a separation – one I’ve initiated –
but that doesn’t make it any easier.
I’m
heartbroken. I find myself turning to Shakespeare and quoting Romeo and Juliet to describe how I feel:
“parting is such sweet sorrow” seems to almost capture it. I feel the wrench of
disconnection, the void of absence.
But, there’s
another emotion alongside all these roiling ones and it’s threatening to
dominate. To be utterly frank, I’m also experiencing relief – relief that after
all this time, it’s finally over.
And that
makes me feel guilty.
For the last
six years, I’ve devoted most of my waking hours and spare time, some of it very
intimate, to Bond Riders, and its
rich and decadent world. I’ve neglected my partner, children and friends and
been immersed in a different time and space and come to know all these
wonderful and diverse characters who leapt from my imagination and onto the
page. I’ve seen them and they’ve seen me, on our finest and very worst days.
I’d even reached the stage of dreaming about them. I think it’s understandable
then that I have a sense of ambivalence about our time together drawing to a
close. On the one hand, I’m despondent about saying farewell to my beloved, but
on the other, there’s also a tiny bit of me that feels liberated. Well,
actually, a big part. You see, I have a confession to make…
For a short
time, I’ve not been true to this relationship.
I’ve been
having a bit on the side.
There, I
admit it. Like an unfaithful lover, when I should have been focussed on Bond Riders, my thoughts wandered into a
different tale. I started to fantasise about spending time with these new
people and ideas. It’s not that Bond
Riders lost its appeal; on the contrary, I loved it more than ever. But I
also knew that just as my relationship with it must end, so a fresh one had to
begin. It’s part of the deal of being a writer: that as one book cover closes,
another opens. That this process started before I’d broken up with my last
novel wasn’t intended. Really. I didn’t go looking for this. I didn’t ask for
it to happen. It just did. Despite setting my trilogy in Renaissance Venice, I
am no Casanova.
Call me a
scarlet writer, a fallen novelist, I really don’t care. I am so thankful. You
see, by moving on before my last writing affair is over, I’ve avoided something
many authors, me included, fear: that when one piece of work is finished, there
will be no inspiration or ideas for another one. That somehow, the old Writer’s
Block will erect itself, the muse will take a holiday or resign in disgust, or
the well of imagination will dry. I know some authors who wait months if not
years before finding their next tale. So to discover mine when I did is beyond
a reprieve: it’s a gift and I will take it with gratitude.
Now, I
straddle an imaginary crossroads, where one book ends and another commences. I
know the paths in both directions are beset with challenges even though they
disappear into a mist-bound distance. It’s both a comfortable and awkward
position to be in. I am Janus-faced: looking forwards to a virgin story and
backwards to my old flame and its publication and reception simultaneously.
Second-guessing my familiar work on the one hand, wondering what changes I’ll
have to make, where I’ll spit and polish the manuscript, while on the other,
creating afresh the triumphs and tragedies of a new world.
With Illumination
off being edited and farewells almost complete, I’m just about free to
consummate this new literary relationship. Currently, we’re still flirting,
with ideas, characters and plotlines. At present, my tentative, rather shy
steps have taken me into Fourteenth Century Britain and Flanders, the Hanseatic
League, trade in various commodities, and into the lives of a strict merchant
family with a dark and wonderful secret.
I am all
a-tingle over this. One would think I should behave with more decorum, act my
age and in a manner more appropriate to my writing experience. Truth is, I
can’t help myself. Maybe it’s too strong a comparison to suggest I relate to
the poet John Keats when he first read Chapman’s Homer and likened the encounter
to being “some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken…”, or
the explorer Cortez who shared with this men the vista of the Pacific and was
stunned into silence. There’s no doubt, I’m dazzled; I feel like I’m voyaging
through untrammelled frontiers and the excitement is visceral and acute. It’s
hard not to shout for joy from a mountain peak and become lost in the journey.
Even so, I
won’t forget what brought me to this point, the relationship I laboured over
with love and impatience for so many years.
Like all my
books past, present and future, no matter whether it’s regarded by others as
beautiful, ugly or with indifference, The
Curse of the Bond Riders will always hold a special place in my writing
life and heart.
Thank you for those lovely insights, Karen. It's left me with much to think about, and I welcome readers' comments.
Karen's website is http://www.karenrbrooks.com/books.html.
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