Opinion – Feeling of being in print

I don’t know how many of you, dear readers, have published a book, but I’m sure that most of you must have written at some point some text, whether poetry or prose, and must have printed it only to see how it would look on paper. I confess I did so, many times, formatting documents with sets of poems, printing those and imagining them as books, only to taste the possibility of “being in print”.

It’s like words were offered a different valence in that moment, a new coordinate, they became closer to reality, palpable. Once you get to see your words on paper you experience some sort of old-fashioned thrill, the tome becomes a proof of consistency of your own writing, and that moment itself is enough to serve as absolute reward for all the hard work preceding it.

Well, this year my dream came true – I got to see two of my books printed, and I must tell you that it felt good to see those and to be able to hold them in my hands. It felt truly marvelous. If I were to compare that feeling with anything else, I could say, in a bit of a mushy manner, that it was close to how I felt when holding my newborns right after giving birth to them. Words like “wonderful” or “awesome” seem to describe quite poorly the feeling an author gets when facing his/her own printed volume.

Some of you may call me “softy” for talking like this, but I think the feeling is directly proportional with the amount of work and energy deployed into bringing to life such a project as printing. As you can well imagine, it always is a huge one. And the outcome feels just the same. Huge.