The pleasure of holding a new book

There’s something special about holding a brand new book for the first time…

The first set of Silos came back from print-on-demand providers Lightning Source today – impressed, as I hadn’t expected them to deliver before Christmas. Quite odd, really – holding something so tangible that’s come out of a lot of hard work but has in many ways been otherwise entirely virtual.

Will be sending copies off over the next few days to various colleagues scattered around the globe who’ve contributed ideas and critique. But this one was hard in unexpected ways, and took a surprisingly long time – almost seventeen months from start to finish, compared to less than three months for Disciplines, and barely a month for SEMPER and SCORE (though that one was more of a glue-it-together process, since I had most of the material already in other forms). So yeah, an odd kind of extended labour: doesn’t compare in the literal maternal sense, of course, but a valid metaphor at least.

Odd… nothing quite like it… the pleasure of holding a new book…