Stepping out of the page

I HOLD in my hand not just a piece of paper, but many, many pieces of paper, cut, printed and bound together.

The object has a cover – a beautiful thing of blue, white, and an eye-grabbing splash of pinkish-red – and, inside, 131,000 words across nearly 430 pages.

I'm flicking through it, pausing every few pages to read some of those words and thinking at almost every stop: 'This is interesting. Who wrote this?'

Of course, I know I wrote it. I remember the process, but I'm far enough removed from it now that the final result can still take me by surprise. I wrote all that? All those characters, all the things they say and feel and do, and all the stories that happen around them? Where did all of that come from?

The answer - at once mundane and remarkable - is that they came from one small idea - what if you could go back to be yourself again at any point in your life? - which gathered up thousands of other ideas across draft after draft of 'How Soon Is Now?', over several years of writing and re-writing.

Readers are out there now, reading the e-book version and having those stories transferred, by the beautiful magic of books, from my imagination to theirs, while I'm here, holding the first-in-the-world physical copy of 'How Soon Is Now?'

It's a strange and moving experience to hold all of these ideas I've lived with since late 2019 in my hand, as a real, solid, handsomely-presented hardback book. This is the proof copy of the novel, to be checked for errors and imperfections, and it will be joined in a day or two by its paperback twin before both become physical products, available for readers to buy on Amazon.

There might, if readers are sufficiently moved by the online sales pitch and that witty, lovely cover design (thank you, Hannah Nystrom!), soon be copies of those hardbacks and paperbacks on bedside tables, on armchairs and in the hands of readers in homes and towns and cities I've never visited.

All these ideas exist in the real world now, and they're fluttering out like blossom into real lives. Books. They're incredible, aren't they?