Letting Go

Out into the world...

And then it was time for beta readers. People I trusted to read Kezia. How would it seem to them?

So I created copies on Lulu and had fun designing the cover and writing a suitably hooky blurb:

What if everything you believed about your family was a lie?

When seventeen-year-old Kez chooses a name from a gravestone for a school project, he thinks he’s found the easiest way to keep his head down.

He’s wrong.

The girl in the grave — Kezzia — died over a thousand miles from home, in a place no one will name. No record. No explanation. Just silence.

With Evie — precise, methodical, and unwilling to let anything go — he begins to follow the fragments. Hidden records. Small inconsistencies. A trail that leads from a quiet English town to the chaos of war — and a story someone didn’t want told.

But the deeper Kez goes, the harder it becomes to ignore the truth closing in on him:

This isn’t just her story.

It’s his.

And uncovering it could change everything he thought he knew about his family — and himself.

Some histories are buried for a reason.

And then… I found myself going over and over the manuscript, tweaking a word here or a line there, adding or deleting a sentence.

Could I ever let it go?

It can’t move forward without reader feedback, yet how can I ask anyone to read it when I know it’s not the best it can be — and can’t be the best without some outside eyes upon it?

I am too close to it now. Every sentence has been read and reread a hundred times, it feels. Maybe not quite. But not far off.

So I chose six or eight readers, all for different reasons.

And then I felt that feeling every writer, artist or musician must know: the pain and exhilaration of exposure.

Can I bear that they may hate it? Can I dare hope they may love it? Can I accept it will be somewhere between the two?

Once I’d uploaded the text and ordered the copies, I went for a walk.

And immediately the ideas came.

What if…?

What about…?

Did I make this clear? Too clear? Did I trust the reader?

Is it all a hopeless idea and will they struggle to know what to say? Not the truth, obviously, because that would be damning. Some faint praise instead.

And on and on, as I sat among the sand dunes drinking green tea from a takeaway cup and told myself:

Shush.

I need a break. At least a month.

Letting go is hard.

But letting go I must.

I’m a novelist and somatic life coach, working with writers, creatives, and anyone wanting to bring more creativity into their lives.

You can follow my progress through My Novel Year – Kezzia, my dual-timeline novel set between Victorian Britain and present-day Suffolk. This will be my last post until i have some updates on how it gets on out in the world.