A trip to London usually means business for me these days, and what I mean by business is the nice stuff as well as the work stuff, because basically I love my job. (When I say job, I mean the business of writing and publishing, and how it opens my life to interesting people - but my job is also teaching and mentoring writers, which I also love). Yesterday I spent the day in London and it was a rich day, which will also be the framework for my post today.
Publishing parties are always worth going to
The Hachette offices are on the Embankment with breathtaking views across London. Standing on their roof terrace is like looking at an unreal city scape. Blue sky, clouds scudding, the snake of the River Thames. The general consensus from the inside is that publishing is tough right now, particularly literary publishing, and weirdly nonfiction. Newspapers are having to shrink space allocated to the arts. Even books that get great reviews struggle to get good sales. It is both reassuring and depressing to hear it, and so we look at each other and think - what next?
Straight to the heart
But we don’t write simply to get published… well, I don’t anyway. I write because I like doing the heart-work, in myself, but also connecting through the heart with others. A friend who I had met only online before yesterday made me lunch. She is a journalist, but she is also a writer of memoir, and we sat opposite each other in a brightly lit kitchen, ate various colourful salads and spoke about love, sex, our families, our books… as if we had always known each other. We wondered if it’s because writing memoir, and publishing memoir, takes a certain kind of personality - a certain kind of temperament…