Next on the list of entirely terrifying tasks in the course of getting a novel published is someone else actually reading it. It’s the goal, obviously. I want the whole world to read it, I want them to laugh and cry and smile at the end hugging it to their chests. But getting to that first reader took years.

The first time I gave a copy of something I wrote to a couple of people to read, I was so relieved when neither of them actually read it and I could just pull it back into my lair to quietly hoard for another two years. I did the same thing again last year – I sent a digital copy to two people, and almost immediately told them not to bother reading it because the brain gremlins insisted that it was illegible crap and needed work.

A year on, after doing almost no work to it in the end, I had a few copies printed and I gave one to a friend. He’s not my target audience at all, but that was better somehow, better because he can’t compare me to other writers of my genre. When he said he’d read 9 chapters already a day later, I panicked. I stayed up until the early hours of the morning re-reading my own work and finding typos and repeated words and dodgy punctuation, and things that Pages decided were excellent autocorrect amendments which made no grammatical sense whatsoever.

I then stayed up even longer trying to figure out how to stealthily get the draft manuscript back without him noticing, in the hope he’d forget it ever existed and would never know the shame of my making half a dozen errors in a beta draft.

And then I remembered: it is a draft, in the hands of its first ever reader. It is allowed to be imperfect, it is allowed to have a comma immediately after a full stop, and it is allowed to make me cringe just a little bit.

I have another three copies of this manuscript, with all the same errors, and I am going to hand them to readers warts and all, and only feel a little bit embarrassed about the fact that I spent so long deciding which colour shirt a character was wearing that I forgot to mention it was a shirt at all.

It’s my beloved child on its first day of school, and its socks don’t match. But I believe its merits are clear enough despite its flaws, and I’m standing by my weird little child. Even if I’m a little bit worried that the teachers will tell me off for teaching it to swear.