Thirty-eight days

Pantheon comes out on 2 October, which is thirty-eight days from today. The book is written. Almost nothing else is, and this stretch turns out to have its own shape that nobody warns you about.

There is exactly one hard date in it. The final file has to be locked with Amazon by 28 September, and if it is late the pre-orders are cancelled and the account is barred from running ebook pre-orders for a year. Everything else in this period is a preference. That one is a cliff, so the file went in early and the rest of the work happens around it.

Most of what is left is not writing, it is care. There is an advance reader team being put together, which means asking people to read a hundred and sixty-six thousand words on a deadline and then be honest in public about it. There are content warnings, which I have now written once, properly, and reuse word for word everywhere rather than paraphrasing them freshly each time and slowly softening them by accident. This is an adult book with violence, grief, institutional coercion and deception inside intimate relationships in it, and a reader deserves to meet that in the same words wherever they encounter it.

The website carries a mailing list now, though it spent its first hours quietly refusing every address it was given, for reasons that were entirely my fault and invisible from the outside. There is a launch plan for the next six weeks. Not one item of it goes anywhere without my sign-off on that specific thing, which sounds like bureaucracy until you consider that a single careless caption can spoil a chapter that is not out yet.

A thing I did not expect to be doing at this stage: still catching myself. One word I had swept out of the manuscript months ago, from seventeen uses down to seven, had crept back up to fourteen without ever tripping the tool built to notice exactly that, one quiet clock reading at a time. The website, on the day it launched, briefly carried something in its page source that the book does not hand a reader for a very long time. Both were found. Neither was found by being careful; they were found because something was checking.

That is where it stands. A finished book, a shop page filling in one retailer at a time, a small pile of preparation, and thirty-eight days.