New Book Launched!

So this is it.

After 27 years of dreaming, 18 months of writing, nearly a year of sending out querying letters and waiting to hear from agents and then not hearing and then hearing but only to hear the word no, after another 3months of edits and then another 4 months until the fated words ‘You have a book deal’ was received by a fateful email, and then another year of edits, journalist breakfasts, praying, hoping and a lot of worried expectation, I held the book I had started on a fly leaf notepad in the car while waiting for my husband to come out of…can’t remember where with the sentence: ‘To understand what it meant to be a Hathaway you’d first have to see Aurelia.’

That was it. Meagre, inauspicious and humble beginnings which have somehow through sheer will and effort and luck have given fruit to a fully bound, available in retail and in stores book. I wrote a book…somehow I still find it hard to say out loud.

When people say I am an author, I shrink, feeling embarrassed because in my head that’s what I always wanted to be, but when your fantasy becomes a reality, you’re not quite sure what to do with yourself. Because how can it be real to anyone but yourself? When your friends text you pictures of your book on a store shelf next to other authors you have read or have waiting on your bedside table at home; when you sit in a radio studio next to a writer who has been going for 25 years and 18 books later when you have just started out; you cannot help but do a double blink to make sure that this isn’t some incredible mirage induced by alcohol and vivid hallucinations…

But the sad thing is now my part ends. Now the book is done, bound and everything and on sale. I can do no more. It reminds of a child’s game when you send a toy boat down a lake and set it free. You cannot control its path and you cannot claim it back. It’s out there for better or worse and it is now beyond you. And yet you would not choose to do anything different. The loss gives way to something greater… you hope.