Oh, the joys of parenthood, the wonder of bonding with a tiny soul, the bliss of cradling a new-born in your arms! As a mother of two, I wouldn’t have missed the experience for anything. I just thought two children were enough for me. I never dreamed I’d be doing it again at my age! After all, book birth hurts like the dickens.

Yes, I’m in the book delivery room, all bloated and cranky and just an all-around pain to be with. Because, just like with my firstborns, I’m nervous that I’ll fail. That my best won’t be good enough and somewhere along the line, someone will steal my baby and raise it better than I could. But why should I worry? I’ve paid my dues in blood, sweat and tears. I’ve survived the author gestation period – which is longer than an elephant’s, sometimes years, by the way. For those asking why I’m so irritable and how it can possibly take so long to birth a book, well, there’s more to it than you think.

As soon as the idea for your novel baby takes seed, you grab your copy of What to Insanely Expect When You Write A Book. You devour its pages and quickly conclude you don’t know enough yet. You sign up for writing and publishing Lamaze classes, held in a hotel ballroom at a writers’ conference. The instructors run you though your paces: Birth canal blocked? Do this. Labour too long? Try this. Word bloat mean your dressing gown’s the only thing that fits? Read this. Contractions – or hyphens or semi-colons – keeping you awake? Fix this. And listen up, writers! Never numb publication pain with a paid review-boutique publisher-no editor-no proofreader C-Section. That’ll cost you in the end. Breathe! I said, BREATHE!

Staggering under the weight of your over-flowing writer’s toolbox, you knuckle down to growing your book. Morning sickness, swollen ankles, indigestion, acne – it’s all there. Usually from a poor diet, too much sitting, and no direct sunlight, but it’s all there. The seasons change outside your window and still you grow and grow until the wordcount interferes with lung function and your hard drive crashes due to the 52-terabyte monster it’s trying to incubate.

You shed chapters and characters and secondary story threads – and adverbs – like clothing during hot flashes. Just when you think this 900^th rewrite will never end, you reach a wordcount the right size for a 1.5-centimetre book spine rather than the width of one of Stonehenge’s supporting monoliths. Now it’s time to purchase the baby clothes.

So many designers to choose from! Their outfits are gorgeous, and you want them all for your book cover. You test a thousand colours, images, and taglines. You pick the perfect font, only to find it can’t be used without coughing up an extra hundred bucks for commercial use. You pick again and send final cover blurb to designer, only to find it’s not the final blurb because you can’t use the term GPS, according to the lawyers. You haven’t budgeted for a lawsuit. Change to ‘naBigational satellite system’. Correct spelling to ‘navigational’. Now the cover’s final. Or would be if you could decide whether to use the author photo taken during the heady days of virgin authorhood or the one taken today in the delivery room. Greasy hair, panicked expression, coke-bottle glasses, required after writing a novel on your phone hanging over the side of the bed to shield the light from hubby because the only good ideas come at 2 a.m. when your journal is down two flights of stairs on the washing machine in the basement. Decide on the first-choice photo. Now the cover’s final. Unfortunately, the cover designer isn’t speaking to you anymore.

You look around your office, now free of the million scrapes of paper on which you’d written disjointed ideas. You’re almost there. The first inklings of satisfaction twinkle in your reddened eyes – just into time for the steamroller that is procrastination to squirt any joy out of your ears onto the “Upload your manuscript” publishing website. You vaguely remember you told everyone your publication date was in three months, but now it’s … NOT IN THREE MONTHS! Can you change your mind – walk away to find a less stressful way to procreate? Perhaps hand-feeding pregnant crocodiles?

It’s too late! Labour’s started – meaning your mum called to say the neighbours want to know why they can’t find your book online yet and does this mean your mum was making up the whole story about you being an author? Mum’s not happy. The pain! Oh, the pain! Waves of doubt, regret, foul language directed at your editor, publisher, beta readers, anyone within earshot of your desk. You can’t take it any longer. You beg for the anaesthesiologist. Epidural! Stat!! Doc arrives with chocolate and vodka. You swig straight from the bottle you cleverly disguised by wrapping it in last week’s ‘Publishers Weekly’. Somehow the meds get your through the uploads. Just when you think you’re about to meet your new baby, the website rejects your book cover because you uploaded the wrong format and the margins are all messed up and the retail price you entered doesn’t match the price you need to cover costs by, oh, about … Well, best not think about it. Regardless, the paperback proof copy is on its way. No stopping this train now.

Finally, finally, you lift from the cardboard box delivery crib this creation, this marvel of courage over doubt. Weighing in at 1.2 lbs, 9 inches long, cream interior, full bleed cover, parentage stamped in MV Boli font on the front cover, it’s everything you hoped it would be. If you squint, you can even recognise a semblance of yourself in its reflection. You gaze, count the wiggling interior pages, brush fingertips across the baby bottom-soft cover, whisper its name, More Or Less Annie, over and over in baptismal welcome.

‘A solid two stars!’ yells your book baby’s Grandma, who so hoped to be delivered herself of a Charlotte Bronte decades ago. She smiles bravely at the Tracey she was handed by a white-coated publisher. The publisher who then took a pass on buying Grandma’s Super 8 home movie rights.

Even after all this, deep down you know you did something amazing. Something organic, a part of you delivered to the world, slapped on the spine and swaddled in words that fought to survive through hesitation and jealousy and regret and epiphanies. Through ‘What do you do – I mean for a living?’ and ‘Yes, but what’s your book about?’ and … all that crap. Your book lives. You wave it off into its life outside you, realising it breathes life into you as much as you breathe life into it. Forever inseparable. So proud. So fearful.

You outstay your welcome at book clubs and writers groups and grocery store checkout lines showing anyone with a pulse photos of your baby’s sales rankings. You think you’re done with the delivery room. But what’s this? Stirrings, rumblings, clocks ticking? Another? You want another?! Within a week of release, you start all over again. Chapter One …

I dedicate this blog, with gratitude and incredulous admiration, to all book parents. We did it! May those who survived multiple births over long careers to remain in the readers’ hearts forever – I’m looking at you Anita Shreve, Nora Ephron, Tom Clancy – smile down on us and the new-borns nestled in our loving arms.

More Or Less Annie born May 18th, 2019. Baby’s fine. Mother’s a mess.