As of today, April 19th, my book has been in the world for three hundred and sixty-five days. Both a blip and an eternity. Book publishing years are like dog years, except the exchange is even less forgiving. One year may make you a toddler in human time; in book time, it makes you ancient. The day it enters the world, the thing is fully grown.
Here’s what I say when people ask what it feels like to publish a book: You’re in a tunnel. Pitch dark. There’s a broken faucet dripping water somewhere. The droplets echo, which is your first clue that the space around you is cavernous. (It might be a sewer? Unclear.) Somebody hands you a flashlight. The flashlight is faulty. You can click it on, but it only illuminates a short distance in front of you—just enough to shuffle a few steps in the direction you hope is forward—before it flickers back into darkness. These are the units that mark your progress: Click, shuffle, darkness. You bump into the infrequent corner, stumble on the odd dead thing. If you’re lucky, as I have been, you have a person (or many people—friends and partners and agents and editors) shuffling along with you, some of who’ve even been here before. They narrate the parts of the process they’re familiar with; say things both reassuring and alarming like big step and jump now and uh-oh. There isn’t a light at the end of it, not really. The thrill (and the terror) is in how both dimension and direction only become clear in the doing, a few steps at a time, none of which you can quite envision when you first set out.
A year later, I am still in the tunnel. I am glad to be here. I can see so much more of it now than I could twelve months ago. I can report on what it’s like to other people who consider coming in; if I’m feeling perverse, I can even tell them to join me. Perhaps most telling of all, I’ve chosen to stay here. The book—and my career as a writer beyond it—is a thing I continue to think about, talk about, commit to, promote, and protect. I didn’t take any of the emergency exits. Even when I really wanted to.
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