When Your Book Becomes Your Child (How Childish)

On the strange resistance to promoting something you've poured yourself into.

You spend years with a project, letting it seemingly grow inside you, tending to it through all its awkward phases. Then the moment arrives to share it with the world, and suddenly you want to just... push it out the door and walk away.

"Just let it speak for itself," you tell yourself. "If it's meant to find its people, it will."

But what kind of sense does that make?

You wouldn't birth a child and then kick it into the road with a "good luck out there." The thought is absurd. Yet here we are, wanting to do exactly that with the book.

Maybe it's because we've been taught that caring about our work's reception makes us needy. That real artists don't promote, they just create and let the universe decide. There's something pure and clean about that story. Removed from the messy reality of wanting to be seen.

Think about children at different stages. The newborn gets constant attention, protection, careful introduction to the world. The five-year-old gets walked to school, coached through playground dynamics, celebrated at every small milestone. The twenty-year-old gets different support, but still support.

None of this stops being love just because effort is involved.

The book exists now. It wants to find its readers and interact with the world, also if the book hasn’t been finished yet.

The Art of Unwriting comes out Friday, August 15th. Like any newborn, it'll need some extra attention at first. If you want early access, message me. Message me if you'd like early access for the symbolic price of one euro.