My book contract is signed

Do you ever write something down on a small piece of paper, fold it neatly, and hide it at the back of a notebook – or maybe between its pages – words that are like whispered wishes, sent to a falling star? I started doing that ten years ago, when I changed the course of my life – or rather, when I burned the bridges to my previous path and stood before a velvet darkness, stepping into it with trust, curiosity, and closed eyes.

Soon I knew just one thing for certain – I wanted to write a book that would be published in the world.

A funny wish, perhaps – especially for a girl (I’ve somehow always felt like a girl on a summer holiday at heart) who had just let go of the myth of a “career” and climbed down from all the imagined ladders leading to imagined tops. And yet, I held onto this one dream – that my words, printed in a book, might one day be read from many different shores. That they would matter to someone else, too.

That was ten years ago. Since then, I’ve found the sea on my map, founded the Sea Library, and three years ago began a new day job that helps sustain my dreams – at the National Library of Latvia. From time to time, I returned to that same wish, rewriting it on new pieces of paper. Sometimes the words changed: to find an agent, to change the agent, to finish the manuscript, to find someone who would want to publish it.

And then, ten years later, at the beginning of this year, I made a big and difficult decision – while walking through the snow by the pine forest near my home – to put my long-written, endlessly rewritten book away. Deep into a drawer. Not everything needs to be finished. Not everything needs to be published.

(The put-away memoir, however, has since uncoiled from its cocoon and been unexpectedly reborn – as a fairytale memoir in ten parts, “The Girl with the Blue Dog,” which you can read here on this blog.)

And then, literally the very next day – just as snowy as the one before – I received a message from a publisher in London, asking if I’d like to develop an idea I had once pitched to them long ago. Back then it was just a thought – nothing written, nothing researched. Month after month, email after email, as the winter turned into green and blossoming spring, we shaped the idea together. Until, in June, I received the long-awaited yes – they loved the idea, and the book proposal I had developed received a wonderful review. The contract process began – for a book that does not yet exist, but soon will.

Four months later – last week – I signed the contract.

And now, at last, I can share it with you: in two years, I will deliver the manuscript for a book called “Sea Libraries” (yes, in that beautiful, generous plural that frees me of writing just about myself). It will be published by Facet Publishing in London and will tell the stories of many libraries around the world that are connected to the sea and water in one way or another.

It feels as if all the paths have been flowing here, toward this moment – when, with a heart full of sea stories and experience from the world of libraries, I can finally become the storyteller who weaves it all together for you.

With deep gratitude to The Stimola Literary Studio in New Jersey, USA, and my agent Allison Remcheck – the best possible team for this journey, and such kind guardians of my work. And to all my friends and family who are here, beside me.

And to you – who read my notes, my letters, my blog posts.

The book will be published in June 2028. In June 2018, I opened the doors of my room full of books and called it the Sea Library, not knowing exactly what would happen next.

Maybe the sea imagined me - to become the keeper of its memory.

And yet, the sea is much more than all of this, and it doesn’t care about any of this. I keep returning to the beach nearby, to be next to the wildest and widest thing I know.