The Bright Sword Was Published

And about time too

After ten years The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur was finally published last week.

It’s a bona-fide life-milestone for me. I spent almost a fifth of my lifetime working on this book. The Bright Sword folder on my laptop has 2,271 documents in it. My younger kids (11 and 14) don’t even remember a time when I wasn’t struggling with it. Even now its transmogrification from a cluster of overworked files on my hard drive to a physical printed book in people’s hands is amazing—it has a whiff of the miraculous.

(Not unlike that time when Sir Lancelot attempts to heal the cursed wounds of the Hungarian knight Sir Urre, and even though Lancelot knows himself in his heart to be a sinner, God is merciful and lets him perform the miracle, and Lancelot breaks down crying. “And ever Sir Launcelot wept as he had been a child that had been beaten.” Every once in a while Malory just smashes it.)

Publishing a novel is a joyful but not completely un-stressful experience. It’s either perverse or overdetermined that someone as thin-skinned and prone to self-doubt as myself would choose to practice a profession that actively solicits public scrutiny and judgement. Since last week I’ve grown a pair of pathetically sensitive author-antennae which are constantly quivering and alert for the pettiest imaginable slights—non-optimal bookstore placement, not-appearing on lists in magazines, any trace amounts of ambivalence in a review, stray remarks from strangers on Twitter etc. (Though so far the reviews have been good—which makes everything much easier.)

And the book-touring: it’s a great great privilege, and I love it, but traveling incessantly, isolating yourself from friends and family, and constantly binging on social media is probably not the best way to preserve one’s mental health.

But that’s all by the by. In my saner moments I’m just very proud of The Bright Sword and relieved and happy that we finally got there. It’s the story I always wanted to tell, and now it’s gone off into the world, and godspeed to it. To quote the good King Arthur: that is the adventure.