Today Death on the Hill is officially published. You probably won’t find it in the shops just yet – it usually takes a couple of days for book stocks to move from warehouse to shop floor. Which makes a publication day rather peculiar.
I’ve had my author copies of Death on the Hill for a while now. They’re sitting in a neat row in our front room and every now and then I go and take a look at them – I still get a kick out of seeing my name on the spine of a real, live book with pages and everything. I’m excited about seeing copies in bookshops but publication day itself is a marker in time that’s even more confusing than a mid life birthday.
You wake up and the morning is the same as the one before. When I was a child dreaming of being a writer I thought there would at least be streamers. The appearance of a book in print with your name on it would signify an end to the normal daily grind and an emergence into the artistic realm like a butterfly emerging from it’s chrysalis. I was a rather romantic child.
The reality is generally rather more prosaic. Today I got up at the usual time and headed off to court. There’s a new murder trial starting this week and there were several cases in the Monday list that I wanted to keep an eye on. Then I went grocery shopping. Life goes on.
In the days and weeks to come things will get busy. There’ll be interviews to do, publicity. I’ll start haunting book shops and counting their stock and fretting about sales figures. I’ll be pestering everyone I know to buy, or read, or review and shouting about the book from every available rooftop. This evening though it’s my publication day. A moment in time where the one thing that matters is that the book is written. It’s real and will very, very soon be coming to book shops all over Ireland. That’s something to be pleased about.
