I'll drink to that. By Jan Needle
What a place to brew beer! Happy is the man, someone once said, who can make a living out of his hobby. I think people who know me well might want to emend that to “Why can’t he take things more seriously? He turns everything into a cause for smiling, lucrative or not. He’s a disgrace.” Which is a pretty tortuous introduction to a series of not-very-well-connected thoughts about the process of bringing a book into the world. Or bringing it into the world again, to be fair, because it’s a rejig/refocusing of the first novel I ever wrote. And as I blogged about it last month, I’ll take a completely different tack to help you not to doze off. The book is called Wild Wood, and Julia Jones’s imprint, Golden Duck, is publishing it. And I’ve been enjoying myself immensely in the process, possibly because Julia and my son Matti Gardner have been doing most of the work. I only wrote the thing, and for the pain of that I refer you to my first paragraph. Now one of ...