A Room Full of Elephants is released today. I’m so glad that after a year of effort my deranged wittering is finally in people’s hands, and the feedback so far is tremendously pleasing.

Release day is an odd one for an author. The excitement of sales, the checking of charts. Most of all, the feeling that it’s done, at last. I can’t tweak that paragraph any more. I can’t punch up that dialogue.

There’s plenty left for me to do, of course: marketing, for instance. Giveaways. Shouting into the wind, hoping for reviews. That’s the business side of the book business.

The book itself is no longer mine: it’s yours.

My head is still full of the quantum blur of superimposed drafts and dangling, discarded threads. Every line surrounded by ghosts. You, instead, get the focused view: the paved path from start to finish, a view I’ll never have.

I envy you that.

And yet every one of us, me included, experiences the book in our heads unlike everyone else. You see Keith one way, I see him another. And everyone is right. If it’s not stated explicitly in the words (and even if it is), the interpretation is entirely up to you. So you, collectively, see a cloud far fuzzier than the one I see.

The difference is that for me, the hallucinations triggered the words, and for you it’s the other way around.

Writing is weird.