History and the egg book

The relationship a person has with a book is probably something normal people don’t obsess over that much. For authors, it’s a whole other game. For some the book is a beloved baby, to be watched over and guarded as it takes it’s first, cautious steps into the world. Hovering  like a concerned parent, to see if people will love the adored offspring and treat it well, hoping no one burns it, hoping it is treasured and feted.

Then there’s me. I am no kind of mammal parent, making warm nests for little book babies. I have much more in common with the fish and reptiles who randomly spray their eggs into the world and abandon them. I’m continually surprised by things I’d forgotten I’d written.

There’s a gap of many months, sometimes more than a year between when I finish writing a book and when it becomes a tangible thing, available to buy. During that time I’ll normally have started work on some other project, the egg-book abandoned to be eaten by lobsters, or whatever its fate may be.

This tends to result in me having no idea what to do when those egg books reappear in my life. Apparently I wrote them, although they feel alien and distant. I ought to know what’s in there. Sometimes I do, but more often I read old work with the bemusement of a stranger, having quite entirely forgotten what I said. I’ve read chunks of things before realising I was reading my own words, and trust me, that’s as unsettling as it is embarrassing!

Writing a book is, for me, a way of removing all the things I’d been fretting and obsessing over. Once the things are in a book, they not in my head, leaving space for new questions, obsessions, and efforts.

On the downside, it means promoting a book I haven’t thought about in months, perhaps years, is shockingly difficult. What to say about it that I haven’t said before? What to do with this abandoned egg-entity returned to haunt me? How to persuade you to take in the curious thought-offspring that I’ve already abandoned? (Hopefully none of my publishers are reading this and realising how quite entirely awful I am at marketing my own work!).

So, yeah. Ages ago I wrote a thing called “Druidry and the Ancestors,” it’s about ancestors, and Druids, I believe. There’s a strange confession about pixies, and a lot of stories about life and questions about identity, I recall that much. If you fancy taking one of these funny book eggs away and trying to hatch it, they are currently very cheap on kindle.   amazon.com and amazon.co.uk