The Birth of a Novel
Welcome to my blog.
I'm looking forward to this column as a way of posting occasional items that may be of interest to readers. This entry, my first, was prompted by a very special event - today was the day that I finally held in my hands the printed hardcover edition of my second novel, The Age of Shiva.
My editor had e-mailed me yesterday that she was overnighting it to me and, sure enough, at around 10 a.m. the bell rang. Looking down from my office window, I saw the UPS man racing back to his van. Not quite a stork-like image, but there, on my doorstep, all swaddled in its plastic envelope was the product of a gestation period of not nine months, but seven years.
It was beautiful, my baby, but I suppose that's what every parent says. 9.75 inches long and 6.5 across, weighing 27 ounces (which is 4.5 ounces more than its sibling Vishnu). More statistics (perhaps of interest only to myself): whereas Vishnu had about 93,000 words over 297 pages, Shiva has about 164,000 over 455 pages (a 76% increase in total word count and, quite curiously, a 15% increase in average words per page). And yet another statistic: it took me seven years to write Shiva compared to five for Vishnu, which my long-suffering agent and publisher should please note is a 26% increase in productivity, in terms of words written per year.
But surely there are more poignant feelings I should be sharing, about holding my newborn for the first time. Gazing at the cover photograph, for instance, which seems to capture the entire story in one shot - it probably couldn't be more apt even if I'd commissioned it. I found it on the Web - it took forever to track down the heirs of the French photographer Boubat who shot it in 1971 and negotiate rights with them. Or turning to the page with the poem by the Urdu poet Sauda, and translated by Ahmed Ali. Locating Ali's son for permission was another adventure - the trail eventually lead me to a phone number in Karachi, Pakistan, after a turn through Madison, Wisconsin. Mostly, though, I simply take in all the fonts and the flourishes and the jacket colors, enjoying how all the countless little decisions have come together to make a whole.
Of course, it's not the jacket or the quote or the cover photo that makes a book - it's the words inside, and how they have been laid down. Surely this is the moment to get all sentimental, to think of the effort each page seemed to require and the times when I wondered if I'd ever get done. All those years when I looked forward to precisely this moment: my book, my baby, complete in my hands, ready to be launched into the world. I feel the individual pages and allow myself to float away on the waves of warm and fuzzy sensation.
Lest I get too intoxicated with my own creation, there are always those statistics to bring me back. 164,000 words in seven years - doesn't that work out to only 64 words per day? I hear somebody gasp.
It's actually 64.19, is all I can muster weakly in response. Another good reason to be thankful I keep my day job.