I missed out on Nano today because I was invited to a very special event (to be fair I kind of invited myself, I feel I should point that out)… the binding of Into the Darkest Corner at CPI Cox & Wyman in Reading.

Despite nightmare traffic (Tube strike: not a good day to try and circuit London) I made it just on time and I got to see the whole process, from printing (not my book but that didn’t matter, I felt excited on behalf of whoever’s book it was!) all the way through to binding. Everyone at Cox & Wyman was so kind to me, it must have been a pain to have me turn up all excited and drooling all over the lovely books everywhere but I was treated like an actual, real life VIP. They are all such lovely people and they take real pride in what they do; it looks like a wonderful place to work and the whole building smells of books…

The production process there is incredibly sophisticated and so well-organised that books flow from one end of the process to the other very quickly – it was so impressive. It’s all down to such careful timing. Binding 2,000 copies of my book was going to take a matter of minutes, and it was all part of a huge schedule of all the other books being bound that day, so we couldn’t miss it! Can you imagine if they had to stop for a minute to let me catch up, it could potentially grind everything to a halt.

I’ve got so many pictures of it all but I’ll just share a couple of my favourites with you… the best bit of all, I think, was that the whole process of writing a book, editing it and having it accepted for publication by Myriad Editions has all been such a fantasy come true that to actually see my book turning into something solid, tangible, real… it was just amazing. It was all I could do to stop myself jumping up and down and hugging people and whooping and shouting out “look!!! That’s MY book!!!  I wrote that, me, I did!!!”

This must be what it feels like to win the big prize.

… back to Nano 2010 tomorrow!