A book is like a message in a bottle. You stand on the shore and gently let your story drift out of your hands into the world on an uncertain tide. Then you watch it bob away, hoping it’ll land on some distant shore and be read and enjoyed. You have no idea if it’ll be found tomorrow or ten years from now and you can’t know whereabouts in the world it’ll get to, but you just have to trust. Trust in the tides, the hands that might receive your offering and the words on the message themselves. That’s where I am at the moment, trusting and waiting and hoping that my book resonates wherever it washes up.
Of course, it’s not easy letting a book go out on the kinds of stormy seas we’re being tossed about on right now. Particularly when the book is not exactly an uplifting read (or so I’m told!) But it is my hope that Dark River does have a grain of optimism it. There is love in that story, and care and devotion and sacrifice. It was certainly my intention to write something of what we’re seeing in our current troubles - that where there is darkness there is always light.
To my great pleasure, that’s something that the reviewers of the novel have picked up on. It’s been a joy and a privilege to be reviewed so carefully and sensitively and to have the feeling that people have engaged with the book and considered it as its own being. My thanks to all the reviewers who have taken the time to read Dark River and write their thoughts on it - their own messages in bottles that sail away to eager readers on all shores.
So now my novel is out in the world and I, like most of the rest of humanity, am inside, trying to protect myself and my family from this new thing to worry about. Self isolating with a small baby looks a lot like normal life with a small baby. I still spend most of my time on the sofa gazing at my daughter feeding or sleeping or being surprised that the object in her mouth is actually her tiny chubby fist. I still seek out gaps in the day where she’ll be asleep in the sling so that I can read, our chests pressed together, the soft rhythm of her breath punctuating the sentences of the novel in my hands. I still stand in my bedroom in the dark, rocking and humming and trying to guess at the magic seconds when she’ll be asleep enough to put into her cot.
Who knows how long we’ll be inside like this for? Who knows how big my baby will be by the time this is over? No one can say. But while I’m inside, I’m also spending my time wondering what kind of world we’ll emerge into when the virus has gone, how we’ll remake things with the lessons learned, or not. Until then, I’ll just keep sending out words on the tide, just to see how far they’ll go.