Dear friends,

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and new year. It felt odd not to send a festive update, but Unbound have got a shiny new website and the functions for emailing supporter updates are still being set up. Imogen has very kindly agreed to pass this one on for me.

It’s been over two months since I last wrote to you and outlined the steps to publication: developmental edit, legal read and copyedit, typeset and proofread, and print. Since then, All My Worldly Joy has been through its developmental edit. I was assigned to a wonderful freelance editor - the very person I had been crossing my fingers and hoping for - and she has been so supportive and nurturing throughout the process. Honestly, I could have wept. Up until now, only a few people had read the manuscript and they were not at all objective. I mean, of course they found it engaging and moving, either because they love me or because they were there for the events I’m recounting or because they were involved in shaping the storytelling. But for a stranger, and one with literary expertise at that, to find it worth their time... well, that’s really something. I’m proud of what I’ve achieved with this book.

Other book-related adventures have included some wailing and gnashing of teeth over trying to construct a short autobiography for promotion and marketing. Ideally, a biography should make some sort of sense, but my life and career have been a bewildering hodgepodge of miscellanea. We write so many versions of ourselves these days - on CVs, social media profiles... all fragmentary with a difference of emphasis. Are we all these people at once? Sometimes I imagine that these multiple Lauras co-exist somewhere.

I had professional headshots taken too, which was a source of some embarrassment. I am a lifelong camera-dodger. Generally I feel that it’s bad enough that I have to steer this meat boat around without people taking photographs. And I can’t seem to do a normal face. One glimpse of a camera and I start grinning like a postbox. People have tried to get around it by taking photos when I’m not aware that they’re doing so, usually at weddings, but that’s even worse. My default expression seems to be one of seething fury. I can’t tell you how many people’s wedding pictures I’ve spoiled by scowling in the background. I look like I disapprove of the match, like I’m an elderly duchess in a Jane Austen novel whose nephew has become attached to a most unsuitable young woman with only five thousand pounds, when in fact I was quite content and having a perfectly nice day.

I would like to apologise once again to my brother and his lovely wife.

The photographer who took my headshots was a nice fatherly Scottish man and a total professional. He made me as comfortable as possible in that situation, and then I had the pleasure of sifting through nineteen pictures of my own face. I won’t subject you to that, but here’s one:

I’m expecting to get the legal and copyeditor’s comments back in late February, so I expect I’ll be in touch after that. Wishing you all good things in the year to come.

With love,

Laura