Rick Goldsmith

My books arrived on a sunny Thursday afternoon and I hurriedly brought in the four boxes, which contained, in total, a hundred copies. I prized open the top box on the kitchen table to excited cheers from my eldest daughter, Aimee, and after some scrabbling I was able to lift the book out to an overwhelming sense of relief and pride. Relief, because the book – beautifully laid out, with good quality paper and the cover’s sumptuous colours and debossing (embossing in reverse) – was a very impressive object in its own right.

As someone who is very pernickety about book production this had been an ongoing concern: what if it looked cheap or naff? Well it didn’t, I’m very happy to report. Kudos to The Book Guild, my publisher.

I felt a deep relief that the book was finally out in the world after a gestation that stretched back to 2011, and which had a protracted delivery period that began in earnest three years ago. It’s always hard for your first, they say. Secondly, and this was a much harder notion to get my head around (I’m still wondering if I have), I felt pride. Pride that it was completed, that I’ saw ‘d seen it through. Admittedly I had a lot of help from many quarters (one of the joys of putting the finishing touches to the book was compiling an Acknowledgements section) but I knew it my heart of hearts that it was a hell of a slog which drew things out of me that I didn’t know I had. And which could so easily have been shelved at any given moment.

That’s the beauty and terror of any artistic creation: you can easily walk away and do a hundred other more pressing things at any given moment.

However, my pride was tinged with sadness as I flipped open the book and saw my mother and father’s names in the dedication. Julia, my wife, said how proud they would have been and it’s true, I would have dearly loved to drop a copy of my debut novel into their hands.

Now it was real. Really, really, real. So real I could hold it in my hands and flip through its pages. So real I could sit and read it in ways that the countless read-throughs on my computer, my ‘phone and print-outs didn’t match. Because it was an actual book and I was a book-lover and what’s more it was my book and was about to stand up on its own two feet and step out into the world to fall open into people’s hands and, hopefully, their hearts.