Publication Day - The Story Starts Here
It's 8 o'clock in New York and I'm sitting in the hotel restaurant, a little jet lagged. Before me, bright in crimson and green, is an advertisement for Sepulchre on the front page of the Arts Section of the NY Times. A fantastic surprise.
Like all novelists, I take a sneaky peak around at all the people on the surrounding tables: fathers and daughters; tourists discussing which museum to visit today, spreading maps over the white table linen; businessmen with suits slung casually over the back of chairs. I'm a little shell shocked - 18 hours of travelling will do that to a girl - but feeling ready to go. Today, interviews and meeting with my publisher and agent, before the real work starts tomorrow.
The wonderful thing about being a writer as your day job - what am I saying, one of the many wonderful things - is that you get to travel to places you've met only before in your imagination or in the lines of favourites books, or songs. So last night at midnight, as March tipped over into April, I found myself being driven in the rain over the New Jersey Turnpike, with the familiar words of Simon & Garfunkel's America on a loop in my head. When I was a child, it was one of my favourite songs, wistful, speaking of a world I knew nothing about. I didn't even know what a Turnkpike was! Years later, though, I'm there.
It's just another way in which writing links the past to the present.And in books, maybe, more than any other art form. As readers, we can be taken anywhere in the world, at any time, to places that live still on the pages of a novel. This is what I hope readers will feel with Sepulchre - that you are right there, in the haunted woods of southwest France, walking among the shadows of a long-abandoned tomb. And who knows, maybe like me with S&G, some of you one day will be able to visit the real landscape in France that inspired my imaginary landscape in Sepulchre. Let me know what you think. I love to hear from readers what you love about the book, even what you don't! A novel, any novel, is only as good as the readers it attracts. It's a partnership.
So, to work. And I'll leave you with the first lines.
'This story begins in a city of bones.'
My real life story, on the other hand, begins in a hotel on West 54th St in New York.
A bientôt.
K
Like all novelists, I take a sneaky peak around at all the people on the surrounding tables: fathers and daughters; tourists discussing which museum to visit today, spreading maps over the white table linen; businessmen with suits slung casually over the back of chairs. I'm a little shell shocked - 18 hours of travelling will do that to a girl - but feeling ready to go. Today, interviews and meeting with my publisher and agent, before the real work starts tomorrow.
The wonderful thing about being a writer as your day job - what am I saying, one of the many wonderful things - is that you get to travel to places you've met only before in your imagination or in the lines of favourites books, or songs. So last night at midnight, as March tipped over into April, I found myself being driven in the rain over the New Jersey Turnpike, with the familiar words of Simon & Garfunkel's America on a loop in my head. When I was a child, it was one of my favourite songs, wistful, speaking of a world I knew nothing about. I didn't even know what a Turnkpike was! Years later, though, I'm there.
It's just another way in which writing links the past to the present.And in books, maybe, more than any other art form. As readers, we can be taken anywhere in the world, at any time, to places that live still on the pages of a novel. This is what I hope readers will feel with Sepulchre - that you are right there, in the haunted woods of southwest France, walking among the shadows of a long-abandoned tomb. And who knows, maybe like me with S&G, some of you one day will be able to visit the real landscape in France that inspired my imaginary landscape in Sepulchre. Let me know what you think. I love to hear from readers what you love about the book, even what you don't! A novel, any novel, is only as good as the readers it attracts. It's a partnership.
So, to work. And I'll leave you with the first lines.
'This story begins in a city of bones.'
My real life story, on the other hand, begins in a hotel on West 54th St in New York.
A bientôt.
K
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