Confession #1
This little book’s not mine anymore
After three years and seven long months, I’m done. Final edits to The Crack have been made and signed off by my publisher, the story and words are as good as they’re getting, and next month it all goes to print. My first book-baby will officially fly the nest — and hopefully on January 5 it will find a way to land in the right readers’ hands.
Letting go of it this week has been strangely emotional and more than a little difficult. A book-shaped hole (or crack) has opened inside me at its sudden absence, and I can’t help but reflect on the mountain of effort and work it has taken to reach this point.
Most of you know that my (rocky) road to publication reads like a thriller of its own — stacked with plenty of twists and plot reversals for this particular protagonist — but in 110 days I’ll finally get my own denouement. (And yes, there’s still a part of me, the distrusting crime writer part, that is secretly waiting for the final FINAL upheaval/twist that says, gotcha good, didn’t I?)
BUT the author endorsements are in, the final cover is locked, and it’s time for me to let this book go. We discussed this slightly unnerving situation last week, at a catch-up with the Melbourne contingent of the Debut Crew 2027, where someone said, ‘Our books aren’t ever really finished, we just stop editing them’. And they’re absolutely right. There are always things we’d like to go back and change, simply because we’re not the same writers at the end of the process that we are when we start. So I like to think that maybe The Crack doesn’t actually ‘finish’ with me after all, it finishes with you, the reader.
And for me, after all this time, that’s the happiest ending there is.
Next month, I’ll be sharing the first official glimpse of the final cover for The Crack, but in the meantime, I thought it’d be fun to show you some of the early designs which didn’t quite make the cut. Seeing these designs was the first time for me that all of this felt tangibly real and their quality gave me a whole new appreciation for how clever book designers are! Do you have any favourites in there? Let me know in the comments.
Thanks so much for being here, as always, and see you next month.
(110 sleeps to go!)