I’m sitting here with my head in a towel, just out of the shower, writing this. The immediacy of tomorrow just struck me and I had to make note of it, as it’ll be the first time I’ll see my fiction in print–in print the old-school way that is, how every writer still works to see themselves. Although print these days may seem quaint, it’s a technology that’s survived five hundred years and there’s a reason for that, to get it in down in writing denoting a seriousness, the permanence of ink still resonating. With so much of our documents now virtual, it’s a charge, at least to this writer, to heft her own book in her hands, a tangible confirmation of her creative ability. I’m sure most other writers feel the same, at least most of the writers I know do, although there are some who don’t and that’s fine. But there’s just something about books in general that get to me. It’s the smell of ink and paper and the space they occupy, whether in a bookstore yet to be adopted, or packed into your own shelving, indicating a concrete database of accomplished cultural knowledge. I have five tall, crammed bookcases myself, a compendium of the varied aspects of my life, from my undergrad and graduate studies, to textbooks I use for teaching, signed books by favorite authors from my bookselling days, my reference for research, the non-fiction feeding my political bent and inner historian, to rows and rows of fiction as varied as James Joyce, Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker to Diana Gabaldon, Lisa Klepas and Khaled Hosseini. And now one more, decidedly personal.
Which you can buy by going right here. I see a space on your shelf it’d fill perfectly!
Gwen Jones Writes 