Sending new words out into the world can feel like jumping off a cliff. You don’t know how it’s going to land, or if people will connect. There’s that lurch in the stomach as your feet recognise thin air, the last-second terror that maybe you should just forget all about it and go hide in bed.
And yet we do it don’t we? We scramble up, stride forward; step off. Over and over: crafting the narrative, reshaping the vision, reconfiguring our place in the world.
I want to tell you so many things about my new book, about how many truths I had to unearth within myself before I could write it, how many times this body had to travel around the sun before an understanding of certain lessons began to finally blossom.
Although its heart remains poetic, I needed to switch more to prose for this piece of work. I have ideas about certain concepts that I could only really play out in novel form. It’s like a game of chess – you have to sit and move the pieces around the board in order to predict certain outcomes. It also allows me to put forward propositions and then argue it out from multiple perspectives.
The same can be said of the characters – you might be given contradictory information about them, shaped by other’s opinions. I suppose what I want is for you to make up your own mind, based on their actions, not because of what you’ve been told through someone else’s filter – which is very much a reflection of how I see life.
Anyways – this is me jumping off into a glacial pool in Slovenia in April 2019. Water was freezing. Also a lot deeper than it looks – the water clarity shifts the perspective somewhat, which is a lovely metaphor for a novel I think. ? @andyrgarside
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