Rewrite: Day 9. What kind of book?

The question is quite innocent.
What are you doing with yourself in Bristol all week?
The answer: Writing. The reaction: He's doing a course. At the university.
No, I'm not doing a course, I'm just writing. I'm on retreat. Writing. There is a pause, a little space, while this information is digested.
What are you writing?
A book.
What kind of book?
This is where I get stuck. Inside me, there is panic in the circuits. I don't know what kind of book.
Just a book, I say.
"What? A Novel?"
"Yes, a novel."
"What kind of novel? Crime? Romance?"
No, not either of those. Both of those. Just a book.
I am writing a book about people, about our lives, about how we live and why. A book. What else are books for? There are plenty of answers to that question of course. Books are to entertain, to inform, to fill the shelves in the library, to make money for the publisher/agent/author/bookstore/retail mega-corporation.
But, no. Books are for living.
In the end I settle for this:
"It's a book about an archaeologist."
It is enough for now.
"Let me have a copy," they say, "when it's finished."
That's the rub. When it's finished.
I have work to do. I must get on and get it finished.

Jancie Hardy has blogged on genre confusion here:
The Other Side of the Story
[via Roz Morris ‏@dirtywhitecandy] 

Ends