For writers, the times when you are actually working – i.e. researching and writing, rather than promoting or publishing – can be rather isolating.  Asked all the time 'if you've finished yet' or 'do you have something in the pipeline', there is a little visible evidence of how productive (or not!) you  might have been.  Without a book out there, it's easy to feel vanished, as if you have done nothing much.

For me, 2011 has been one of those years. Nothing went much to plan.  Unable to work on Citadel for a few months, for reasons beyond my control, it meant that I didn't have a book published this year and the publication date (revised now to September 2012) felt an odd, rather hollow sort of a day.  But, of course, plenty of other projects did come to fruition. I wrote Endpapers and saw it performed at the Bush Theatre and Westminster Abbey in October.  I produced a first draft of a larger play commission,  Dodger, which I'll be working on in the spring.  I contributed several short stories to anthologies and magazines, including a piece about the Yew Trees of Kingley Vale in Why Willows Weep, published in aid of the Woodland Trust, and 'The Lending Library', a ghost story to be published in The Library Book, a commissioned book from Profile in aid of National Libraries Day on 4th February 2012. Also, work got underway on the anniversary book I'm publishing with Unbound for for Chichester Festival Theatre. And the Orange Prize and the libraries campaigning and the filming of Labyrinth and ...

And yet ...

In the end, a year without a novel published – when I had expected, hoped it to be done – feels a rather half hearted sort of a year, regardless of anything else that did or didn't happen. And it's a good reminder of why any of us who write for a living, actually do so.  Because however much fun (or not) the publicity tours can be, the signings in bookshops, the visits to literary festivals or book salons, it always comes back to the novelist, working quietly, alone, in her room.  The satisfaction in being a writer is, simply, that.  In the writing itself. There is a real pleasure in the solitude, the living almost entirely in one's head (though obviously emerging periodically to be with family, friends, going to the supermarket or walking the dog). It is a luxury to be able to give ones' attention totally, and absolutely, to one single project.

So although it's now Christmas and publishing shuts down for a few weeks, I shall be spending the festive season at my desk, working on the last few chapters of Citadel.  Getting it ready to deliver to my publishers in the New Year.  And that, really will be a wonderful Christmas ....



Best Wishes for Christmas and a Happy New Year.  See you all again in 2012 ....

Kate

Last Thursday evening, several hundred people descended on a small, rather shabby, basement nightclub in London's Soho, to celebrate the launch of a book by Graham Smith.  We Can Be Heroes is a collection of previously unseen photographs of London night life and clubbing in the early 1980s – think Boy George, think Steve Strange and Robert Elms, think Heaven 17 and Spandau Ballet.  Sharp, asymmetric haircuts, white pancake and black eyeliner, floppy white shirts and tall hats, this was the era of the New Romantics, of flamboyant cross dressing, of nightclubs such as Blitz and The Beat Route (which is where we found ourselves last week).


© Roger Blagg

We Can Be Heroes is the latest book to be taken successfully to market by the crowd-funded publishers, Unbound.  It had been a great week for Unbound already, having just won their first award – FUTUREBOOK Innovation Award for Best Start-Up (2011), but the atmosphere inside the launch party was electric.  Famous faces from the worlds of music and fashion, mixed with the ordinary readers (like me) who had sponsored the book and wanted to be a part of committing to print a small slice of 80s history.  It was the clearest illustration yet that the idea of asking readers what they genuinely might wish to buy, asking them to support it as a way of testing the market, really did work. Everyone felt an equal player at the launch party, there was no sense of the readers being separate from the author or publisher, or even from those whose younger(!) selves featured in the glossy black and white pages.

It is also interesting to see, as debates about technology and publishing continue, how opinions already are shifting about the efficiency or desirability of new, different, publishing models.  And in a week when the CEO of Faber issued a rallying call to arms to publishers to embrace new models of working, Unbound seems now to be more than one step ahead of the game.  As for the book I'm publishing with Unbound in April 2012, we hit our funded target too this week, ahead of schedule.

Thanks to everybody who's supported Chichester Festival Theatre at Fifty – judging by last week, the launch party really will be something – but most of all, congratulations to Graham Smith and the team at Unbound.