Last week I entered the dread zone, the disconsolate, nerve-wracking interval between a novel’s last edit and its first publication. How best should a writer pass this seemingly never-ending stretch of time? The obvious solution would be simply to write. But as my second novel Layla goes off to press, I’m too tired from the all-consuming editing process, too focused on what comes next to get deep into writing again. So, even as I form a pattern of words in my head for a third novel, I’m not ready to knit them out onto the page. Not just yet.

Layla’s cover, designed by Anna Morrison

What then I wondered, do other novelists do to make the writers’ take on Christmas day (i.e. publication day) arrive earlier? In times like this social media can be helpful, so I turned there to ask that very question. Old friend, novelist and presenter of the BBC’s Film programme, Danny Leigh, said he got his wife Lucy pregnant in between his second novel’s last edit and its first publication. Something I’m not anatomically equipped to do myself and even if I were… well, with two small children already, I’m not sure this is a solution. My fellow author at Myriad Editions, Lizzie Enfield suggested that I might use the time to remember to feed those aforementioned two small children… OK. Done that. (Fish pie if you’re interested). But. Now what?

Maybe I could use my creativity in a different, more radical way? Invent something which would make me pots of cash so that I’d never have to worry about book sales again. The always-comfortable condom, there’s one idea. The unpuncture-able bicycle tyre, there’s two. A tea bag that changes colour when your tea is brewed to perfection. Nope, idea three is also rubbish.

And so I’ve come to the conclusion that since I remain preoccupied with the novel, I might as well reach out to readers early on and do some… marketing for it. When I worked in book publishing my first boss loathed when that word was used in reference to books, refusing to see them as products. And sure, she was right in some ways. This is not a comfortable condom, an unpuncture-able tyre or a heat-reactive teabag that I’m marketing here. What I am trying to sell to the world is a book which I wrote in the passionate belief that contemporary fiction often unfairly neglects society’s toughest issues, that it often doesn’t give a voice to the female characters such as those I’ve portrayed in Layla.

So, call it marketing, call it reaching out to readers, gently letting them know that the novel is on its way, but whatever you call it I’m sure it is the best way to propel myself out of the dread zone, the best plan to make time whizz past between now and the novel’s launch day on February 20th next year.  And if I whet the appetite of a few readers along the way, well, then all my Christmases might just come all at once.