Ice cream, trees, bookshops

Approximately-weekly news, #86

Before we begin, Some Announcements:

• The Lost For Words Bookshop Shop is open for business, here! I’m very excited to see what you are buying. (Totes, tees and notebooks, mostly. You are my people, people.)

• I will be delighted to post you a Lost For Words Bookshop pin badge, for free. Just reply to this email with your name and address.

• I have a July slot for a manuscript assessment or developmental edit, and a space to take on a new mentee Right Now. Do these call to you? If so, take a look here and then get in touch for a no-strings chat about your writing and how I can support you.

• Readers of America! Both A BOOKSHOP SUMMER and FOUND IN A BOOKSHOP are currently 99c on Amazon! I am delighted by what I believe is called the ‘Bestseller Flash’….

  

  If you have bought, and read, and recommended - thank you, thank you, thank you.

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As regular readers know, A BOOKSHOP SUMMER came out in paperback last week. I planned to write a dedicated newsletter about it, but Thursday whizzed past in a cheerful busy haze: I worked, I chatted with people on Instagram, BMB* and I went out for lunch and then had ice cream, I finished the first draft of my next book**, we drank fizzy wine out of delightfully camp glasses.

The only photo I took on publication day is of the ice cream. which, as I’m sure you can tell even though we don’t have ScreenTasteTechnology*** yet, was delicious.

And on Friday, I kept thinking, ‘I must write that newsletter’, but when I thought about it, nothing came to mind. I waited for a theme, or an idea, or something related to A BOOKSHOP SUMMER to occur to me, but nothing did. I even discussed it with Harris on our Friday morning walk, and though he was very helpful (he pointed out I have never written about the very specific noise a pigeon’s wings make when you startle it out of a stone barn, or the deliciousness of that patch of grass half way down the farm track) nothing seemed to cohere.

So today, I give you: the unthematic guide to things I think about when I think about A BOOKSHOP SUMMER.

I think about the time I spent learning about ancient woodland. Much of this is in the novel. But I return, so often, to my memories of that morning and how it felt to be in that beautiful place with someone who had known it for years, and could show me all of the things I would never have understood. ‘Magical’ is, I think, is an overused*** word, but I’m using it here. It was a magical day.

I think about how important reading for the sake of reading is. Much of the novel is about reading aloud, just for the pleasure of it: which is not only emotionally true but Scientifically Proven. And it was good to write about, to explore, that; but I never forget the delight I get, right in my solar plexus, when I pick up something and begin to read. (It doesn’t even need to be a book. I bet I’m not the only person here who will read the back of a bleach bottle if they are unlucky enough to find themselves in a loo with no reading matter to hand.)

I think about the poem - not mine - that is included towards the end of the book. I don’t want to Do A Spoiler, so I won’t say anything else, but if you’ve read it, you know how perfect, how moving, it is. Relatedly, I think of how unimaginably difficult the world is for so many, and how I hope that writing about it helps, somehow.

I think about grief, of course: the grief that is in the book, the grief that walked with me as I planned and wrote it. I think about (and this is a happy thing, on balance) waiting with Lou in A&E for a bed to be found, and as we waited she helped me to think of the names for the characters. She came up with Rhiannon and Guy, and when I read the words I can still hear her saying them.

I think about Loveday, and the bookshop that is as real to me (and many of you) now as any I have visited. I can see it. I can smell it. If it were real I would live in it.

This isn’t it - this is my local second-hand bookshop, the majestic Barter Books. The Lost For Words bookshop is smaller, and the ceiling isn’t high, and it doesn’t have an amazing cafe*****. But it has the same vibe, of safety and warmth. And at the same time, that delicious thrill, of knowing that when you pick up a book anything could happen, is in every single molecule of the air.

I think about how good, and hard, and brave, and complicated,****** it is to love someone else. And how essential.

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This week’s permission:

You have permission to be OK with things when they feel a bit all over the place.

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Until next time, my friends, be well, stay well. Thank you for loving my new book, and telling me so. And please tell me if you’re planning to visit Barter Books and we can meet up for a coffee.

Stephanie x

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*In case you’re new here, Beloved Mr Butland

**just thought I’d slip that in there. Woohoo!

***have I just invented this?

****and a bit misused, I think. I mean, things that were actually magical would be a bit terrifying, no?

***** though you can always go next door for something tasty from its equally fictitious neighbouring cafe

******Oxford commas, always and forever