The End

Finishing Double O Book Two – plus a honeymoon in New York

Dear Reader,

Welcome back to girl with the golden pen! I’m happy to say normal service is now resuming after a brief hiatus.

As you may have seen, I finished the second book in the Double O trilogy and delivered it to HarperCollins and the Fleming family on October 31st – a not very spooky but certainly momentous (or portentous?) way to celebrate Halloween.

The final week of writing felt like sprinting a marathon, as I found solutions to all the fiendish puzzles Past Kim set up with the blithe confidence that Future Kim could solve them. There’s a serendipity that feels almost mystical when you’re fully immersed in finishing a novel. Everything I read or watched, every conversation I had, every window I passed on a walk seemed to offer answers. I didn’t have any teaching that week, and wasn’t seeing any friends or going anywhere, so it was just me and my characters, who, fully-throated by now, told me how things would unfold for them, endings simultaneously surprising yet pre-determined by Subconscious Kim. (It takes many Kims to write a novel.)

When writing Bond, I listen to the title songs from the films on a loop. If I need additional motivation to pull words out of the ether – or out of my socks, as it sometimes feels – I listen to the oddly motivating soundtrack of Hamilton. That week, I listened to both so much I woke up each day halfway through a line in my mind –usually ‘I’ll write my way out’ from Hamilton (no need to call Freud in on this), or ‘This is the end, hold your breath and count to ten’ from ‘Skyfall’ (again, Freud would regret making the trip).

I came to the last chapter on Saturday night, the 29th of October. I’d expected to reach the end to a rousing chorus of ‘Diamonds are Forever’, but turned the music off. The last pages seemed more delicate, precious and easy to break than spun sugar. (I imagine – I don’t bake, and if I offer you something I have baked, you should approach the offer accordingly.) I was writing in the living room at midnight with most of the lights off, sitting forward on the sofa with my laptop balanced on a foot-stall. It wasn’t comfortable, it wasn’t planned. It was holding your breath so long that letting go is elating. It was stumbling and then running in the dark and then blinking in the light. It was finding the final words, and then laugh-crying. Finishing a novel is a little like leaving a home you’ve loved but you’re ready to move on from. A triumphant grief. It was done.

Or not done, because it’s never done. Editing Kim will have her go next. But for now, the manuscript was ready to be shared (always exciting and terrifying in equal measure). I pressed send on the email and then made unseasonal pancakes and fell asleep. That week, I taught my classes to tolerant students who didn’t mind I’d spent all my words, and in fact gave me a very sweet round of applause, then slept and slept some more. Then we boarded a plane for a much-belated honeymoon.

Nick and I got married in October 2019, and planned to visit Japan for the spring blossom as our honeymoon in March 2020. But, you know. Back then, our friends and family kindly gave us money towards a honeymoon as our wedding gift. As our brilliant friends were now getting married in D.C., we decided to finally plan a honeymoon, as it transpired to New York, one of our favourite cities in the world.

We did All The New York Things. We saw two shows on Broadway: Gabriel Byrne in Walking with Ghosts (sensational writing and transporting performance) and Hugh Jackman in The Music Man (spectacular everything). You might not know this about me, but, next to James Bond, Wolverine is my great love, and has been since I first started reading comics as a kid. You can imagine how thrilled I was when Hugh Jackman was cast, a brilliant actor who always respected the role (see the end of his iconic Oscars opening song) and then turned out to be an incredible musical theatre performer too. Reader, when he appeared on stage I actually cried with happiness, and I’m not even ashamed to admit it.

We were staying at The Ludlow in the Lower East Side, a recommendation from the Bond community as a very James Bond-hotel, which I can fully attest to. We ate at Katz’s Deli and Russ & Daughters, both on our block. Russ & Daughters was the first business in America to have ‘& Daughters’ in the name, and they even had gluten-free options, so I was able to have the Everything Bagel with The Works – and it was DIVINE. We went to the 11.30pm spot at The Comedy Cellar. We saw Edward Hopper at The Whitney, who captured in paint the street corners and luminous windows all around us. We had burgers at Tom’s Restaurant, the diner in Seinfeld. We watched the Nets trounce the Knicks (unfortunate, as we decided at tip off we’d support the Knicks). We spent so long in The Strand bookstore it was dark when we left, though it had been decidedly daytime eighteen-miles-of-books earlier. We ice-skated at The Rockefeller Centre. It was heaven.

Have you read Helene Hanff’s 84 Charing Cross Road? It’s one of my favourite books, a collection of letters between Helene, a writer in New York, and the London bookseller who supplied her idiosyncratic needs. It’s a love story about reading, and two great cities. I felt very Helene Hanff as I visited HarperCollins in Manhattan to talk about our plans for the US publication of Double or Nothing in April 2023. It was wonderful to meet the team, who were previously confined to Zoom boxes, and were now confirmed as fantastic three-dimensional humans. I’m thrilled to be working together on what will be a VERY exciting publicity and publication journey. PLUS their office is like the brass and marble skyscrapers frequented by Jeeves and Wooster in the New York-set episodes of the ITV adaptation, which was probably filmed in Bloomsbury, but still took up real estate in my imagination as a teenager. All VERY fun.

I came home to some lovely news, too. A Wild & True Relation is on the Hot List by NetGalley for best new books coming in 2023, and featured as The One To Watch by The Bookseller. I’m very grateful to both!

Finally, a few updates for paid subscribers. I’ll be hosting the first Zoom Book Social for girl with the golden pen on Thursday 15th December at 8pm. I hope this will be a chance to get to know each other as a book-loving community! And that the time will work for most zones. I’ll send out a Zoom link, so all you’ll need is a free Zoom account to join. And, if you’re a writer and would like some feedback on the first three chapters of your novel plus a synopsis in a thirty minute one-to-one Zoom meeting, please comment below and I’ll pick a name from a hat!

And founding members will soon be receiving signed proofs of A Wild & True Relation! (Apologies for the delay, but you will have a very lovely bookplate to make up for it!)

If you’d like to upgrade to become a paid subscriber or a founding member, I’d love to have you along!

It’s lovely to be in touch again.

From Kim, With Love x