Book gestation

In our household, there are a few children’s series by contemporary writers that are popular. We wait and wait and wait for the next one to come out. “Mummy, why do we have to wait so long?” I love replying to this. “Because the WRITER is WRITING the next book. It takes time to write a book. It can take a long time. Sometimes it can take a year. Sometimes ten years, or even more.” My kids are disappointed, but don’t say anything more. We all go on waiting.

In my head, my answer to the question, “Why does it take so long to write a book?” goes more like this: Because the WRITER is WRITING the book! They don’t go to the toilet and collect what they have done in a specimen jar and then give it to this cool COMPUTER, this unreal TECHNOLOGY, this brilliant APP that makes excrement into AMAZING life-changing, thought provoking, or even just well written and entertaining BOOKS! It just DOES NOT HAPPEN THAT WAY. No. It’s usually not FAST and EASY and AVAILABLE just when you want it – at the touch of a button, and the flick of a switch, at lightning speed, in an instant, voila, no probs, too easy, there you go. NO!

So we keep waiting, and when we see or hear that the next book in the series is out, we can get all excited and go to the bookshop and buy it! Bookshop? Yeah! There’s one left! We go there and buy it. Buy it? Yeah! We hand over cold hard cash or our credit card and we think we are getting A REALLY GOOD DEAL.

And then we read the book. Sometimes we’ll read it more than once while we WAIT for the next one to come out. Sometimes there is not even a TV adaptation of the series that we can watch while we wait. Sometimes there is nothing in the APP store vaguely related to the book! Nothing! We just have to WAIT. God it’s hard.