After school, we went to the library. It was a slightly run-down, 80s building, with peeling white paint around the door and uneven paving slabs that led up to the entrance. The front stacks were all newspapers, I remember, a paltry offering for an 8 year old in desperate search for adventure. It was right at the back, tucked behind the crime novels, that the real gems lay. Children’s books galore, stacked disorderly against a mural, inexplicably, of a fish.
I loved that library. It was the first place I learnt to enjoy reading, where I could while away hours while the afternoon whistled away. Sometimes I would sit at a little table in the corner and scribble stories: a girl who vanished on the wind into another land, a lost soul alone in the dark in a forest, a winding river where a different monster lived at each bend.
It was my first taste of storytelling. I dreamt of my words lining the shelves around me one day, of other little girls picking up my story and sitting in the same green chair as I and finding escape through I created.
It has been many years since those days, but some of the feelings arethe same. The library is still a safe place, I still don’t like artwork of oversized fish. But some are different. What was a passive wish to see someone read a story I scribbled after school on a Tuesday has grown into an uncontrollable desire, an obsession with finding readers for my tales. I fantasize about handing over a bound copy of my book, of the call from an agent saying “yes, absolutely, sorry I ignored your email for a year, I would love to represent you!”, even the thought of a bad review, because at least someone had been interested enough to try.
The thought of putting a book out into the world is exhilariting. It is also soul-destroying, tiring, disappointing, upsetting. It is mostly all of the negative things, and very, very rarely a nice thing. I imagine if you have success, it might feel different. I am early in the process, finding solidarity in those who have shared their stories online and are well beyond the one month mark I have been trying for. But it is the thought of readers that keeps me going, the thought that one day someone might leave a review that says “2 stars. Finished it, but only just” because that is the day I finally found a reader.
