It’s only been three weeks since I set out on this latest challenge – to walk a book tour 1700 miles through Britain – but I feel like I’ve come through a full three months of experiences.
The nerves of that first day had me completely frenzied; where not only did I pack up and leave my home for seven months, to set out into a journey that I wasn’t sure I was physically capable of, thrusting a book into the world that I’ve spent years creating without any idea of whether it’s any good or not, waiting for the wave of feedback to come, to tell me whether I did a good job or whether this was a tremendous waste of time, but, as I walked into the first afternoon, testing my steps on the shifting beach sands, my lodger, contract freshly signed and deposit transferred, messaged to say they weren’t moving in after all, and just like that the missing future rent would have to be added to my monthly budget.
This is the first time that I’ve gone away on a journey and kept a home, perhaps showing that I’ve managed to get one foot firmly planted in a settled life, no matter how chaotic I make it. But, it’s hard, to juggle itinerant living and financial commitments. I’m trying to have it all! A home and a hobo lifestyle!
It’s pretty usual to start a journey in a nail biting state of fear, but the effort needed to jump from a ordinary life of regular income and regular appointments into the unknown of walking and wild camping felt the most complex so far. I had a tooth out! I paid a speeding fine! I put a friend on my car insurance! All in the final days before the book came out. And yet I had a vision, in all the planning, of creating a journey where I would have time to lie back in fields and stare at the sky.
That’s what this book tour has to be. Chronic back pain meant that I set down a target of ten miles a day. Distances between bookshops means that sometimes I’ve given myself three days to walk 25 miles. It’s a very achievable mileage that gives me, if all is going well, lots of time to take breaks, which means throwing down your rucksack onto the turf, levering your sweaty self with much groaning down to the ground and then, with a sigh, taking some time to stare off into space for a while. The effort-induced dreamstate, a favourite of mine.
It’s a strange thing, bringing out a book from the dark cave of your solo creation time and holding it out into the light of public gaze. I might sell millions, I might have created a work of genius. It might become a film. It’s fantastical thinking, of course. But it might though. It might. The days before publication are like holding a lottery ticket, will this be the one that makes it, this time? But to concentrate on the best sellers eclipses the thousands of other very average selling books that are brought out every year. And a book might be fantastic, but never quite make the step into media coverage; because that depends on luck, contacts and marketing power, which not every author has equal amounts of.
So now One Woman Walks Europe has been out for three weeks I’ve had great feedback, some really good reviews, but of course, the fantastical thinking has to come down to earth and I have to face the fact that I haven’t written a blockbuster. In fact, the blunt fact is I’m taking seven months away from paid work to do a book tour that probably wont end up making a profit in royalties. Such is the parlous state of being an average writer.
So what’s the point of all this effort then? It’s not to sell books, that desperation can be pushed aside, it’s to have a good time. I’ve decided that I am in fact on holiday. I’m having a massive seven month holiday that I’ve worked really hard to create, in order to spend time doing something that I love – walking around the country with a massive rucksack on my back and talking about myself to complete strangers.
And I will smile and laugh to myself every time I get to lie down in a field and stare at the sky. Every time I wake up in the woods to see the sunrise touching the highest branches. Every time I shove terrible hiker food into myself in the hour before darkness, trying to get any calories in at all before exhausted unconsciousness claims me.
This is the point of it, this is the whole point.
