But almost immediately, people are telling you how you should publish it.

“Oh, I know my cousin who self-published.” Or, “Just self-publish; it’s way quicker.”

And lately, I’ve been getting a lot of offers to do exactly that.

Self-publishing packages and publishing services.

Companies offering to take The Button Seller from manuscript to finished book.

• Cover design included.

• Editing handled.

• Distribution sorted.

• Marketing done.

The whole nine yards.

Every time one lands in my inbox, there’s a little part of me that gets excited.

I mean it’s obvious why, right? There’s a massive part of me that wants this book to exist as early as possible.

I want it in my hands. And more than anything, I want to see it sat on a bookshelf that isn’t mine.

So when someone says, “We can make that happen,” it’s tempting.

After all, I’ve spent months sending query letters into the void and waiting weeks for a response.

There’s a very seductive simplicity to this version instead.

I don’t have to wait for an agent.

I can just...

Do it (for a fee, obviously).

I keep saying no.

And I’ve been thinking about why.

It’s not because I think self-publishing is somehow lesser.

There are some brilliant self-published books out there. Writers have built enormous careers independently, found audiences traditional publishing might never have given them, and produced books they should be incredibly proud of.

I have enormous respect for that.

It’s just not what I want.

At least, not right now.

I want to experience the other side of the process.

I want to find an agent who believes in The Button Seller enough to put their name behind it.

I want someone who knows the inner workings of this industry to tell me what isn’t going to make the final cut.

I want an editor to tear the manuscript apart and help me make it better.

I want to learn how the publishing process actually works from people who’ve spent their careers inside it.

And, perhaps most importantly, I want to know that when the book gets onto a shelf, it got there because somebody genuinely believed it belonged there. And that someone wasn’t just me.

That matters to me.

Maybe that’s naive.

Maybe I’ll eventually send out every last query, receive every possible rejection, and decide that the independent route is exactly what I should have done all along.

If that happens, I’ll own it.

But I will not make that decision because I’m impatient.

And I definitely will not make it because somebody convinced me that paying for publication is the only way to make my dream happen.

That’s the part that makes me cautious.

I’m a writer.

I know how much The Button Seller means to me.

I don’t know enough about the publishing industry to know which opportunities are good ones and which ones are just really impressive sales pitches.

So for now, I continue my wait.

I will keep querying.

I will keep writing.

I will try my best to build an audience.

I will learn.

I’ve spent a long time writing a book, and I can afford to spend a little longer finding the right way to get it into the world.

And as always, there’s a great little connection that I can make to The Button Seller and Perry’s journey.

He spends a large part of The Button Seller waiting for someone to tell him that he’s important. But he inevitably learns that he doesn’t need permission to matter.

There’s a difference between needing permission and wanting the right people beside you.

I don’t need a publisher to tell me I’m a writer. I already am one. I know that with all my heart.

But I do want to find the people who look at the story I’ve written and say:

“We think we can help you make this even better.”

That’s the offer I’m waiting for. But until it arrives, I’ll keep writing.

The book isn’t going anywhere.

And neither am I.

All emails are sent.

Each one has an attachment waiting to be read.

There’s nothing left for me to adjust.

So, I should be happy with it.

But why did I just spend the last half an hour rewriting most of the sentences in Chapter 1 because I didn’t like the way they felt?

Hell, I removed the whole ‘sky cracks open and talks to Perry’ because, to be honest, I’d forgotten about that part and nothing about it comes up again in the book.

And yet the version I now have sitting on my hard drive isn’t the version that’s going to be read by agents any time soon.

That ship has sailed.

For some reason, that doesn’t matter to me. I keep opening the manuscript.

I keep rereading chapters, and I will notice tiny things.

• Words that I can swap.

• Jokes that can land better if I just jumble some sentences around.

• Paragraphs that need one line cut to make them breathe better.

None of these really matter in the grand scheme of things. Especially if most agents have editors who will help hash these things out anyway. But my brain refuses to sit still.

At first, I thought it was because I wanted the book to be perfect.

I’m not sure that’s the reality. I think it’s more because editing gives me something to control. And guess what doesn’t give me any control?

Waiting.

Right now, there are people I’ve never met deciding whether The Button Seller deserves a place on their list, and, in turn, on store bookshelves.

And a few of those people have already told me it doesn’t (which is totally fine; I expected many rejections)

I can’t change that.

Nor can I explain why I made certain choices.

I also can’t stand next to them while they read Chapter One and point out that Chapter Six is where things really start shifting towards the novel’s overarching theme.

All I can do now is wait.

And waiting, for me, is unbearable. I’m sure I’ve already mentioned this.

Editing is not unbearable.

Editing feels safe. It feels productive.

It feels like forward motion. Even if it’s forward motion on a road that’s got nowhere left for me to go.

There’s something comforting about changing a sentence because it’s a problem I know how to solve.

The looming question of “will anyone want to publish this?” isn’t one I get to solve.

All of this is just a distraction disguised as productivity.

The irony is that The Button Seller is about this exact thing.

Perry spends so much of the story believing he needs one more thing before he’ll be enough.

• He just wants one more sign.

• He just asks for one more piece of proof.

• He just needs one more reason to believe in himself.

The truth, of course, is that there isn’t one. And those things he needs never arrive.

At some point, he has to stop preparing to become the person he wants to be. He simply has to become that person when it is required of him.

I think writers have to do the same.

Your book won’t be flawless, but there will always come a time when you have to leave it alone and stop editing it.

You’ve said all that you wanted to say.

Anything after that isn’t really about the manuscript anymore.

So, I’ll make myself a promise. And, if you’re a writer who’s struggling with the same thing, I think you should make this promise too.

The next time I feel the urge to open The Button Seller just to tweak another sentence, I’m going to open the next novel instead.

If I’m going to spend hours staring at a blinking cursor, I’d rather it be building something new than endlessly sanding something that’s already left my hands.

Besides, the next story deserves my attention more than the last one deserves my anxiety.

Read more

Scratch that. There are over a hundred, I’m sure.

A literary agent could email me tomorrow and say, “you’ve got ten more minutes before we read it. You can make one last change.” I would scan through the whole thing and probably just change some of the commas to full stops.

But almost immediately, I’d notice an issue with a sentence, and I’d want to fix it more than anything.

That’s the trap.

Creative work never really gets finished.

It just gets abandoned.

We don’t stop caring about it, but eventually, there’s a point where continuing to tweak it won’t end up making it better. We would simply delay the terrifying moment when someone else gets to see it.

I think that’s one of the harder lessons I’ve had to learn.

For months, The Button Seller belonged only to me.

If could fix it whenever something wasn’t quite right.

I could rewrite a full chapter if it didn’t fit the rest of the theme.

I could give any character another conversation to flesh them out more and make readers care.

The story kept developing because I wanted it to.

Then I sent it off.

And now it doesn’t really belong to me. It’s out in the world, and that’s that.

That thought is both exciting and deeply uncomfortable.

I feel like I’ve lost control now that other people are reading my book.

Sure, somebody might absolutely love your favourite chapter.

Somebody else might think it pulled them away from the tension, though.

Somebody might fall for one of your best-written characters.

Somebody else might think they’re annoying or speak too much.

Then, somebody might laugh out loud reading a joke you adored.

And somebody else could very easily have that joke fall flat and think you’re unfunny as a writer.

Clearly, stories stop belonging exclusively to their authors the moment they’re read.

But I do think that’s beautiful.

I also think it’s really, really, really scary.

The funny thing is, Perry learns something similar.

Throughout The Button Seller, he’s desperate for certainty. He wants proof he’s doing the right thing. Proof he deserves to carry the burden he’s been given.

Life refuses to give him that certainty at any point. He simply has to make peace with acting anyway.

I think writing is like that.

You don’t get a flashing green light that says: “Congratulations. This manuscript is perfect in every objective way.”

You instead reach a moment where you’ve been as honest as you know how to be.

You tell the story as faithfully as you can. Then you let it leave you.

And that’s where I am now.

The manuscript is out there, floating.

My inbox is quiet. For now.

And instead of endlessly wondering whether Chapter 14 should have had one more paragraph, I’m trying to remember something easy to forget.

If I spend all my time looking backwards at the book I’ve finished, I’ll never write the next one.

And I really want to write the next one soon.

Not because I’m finished with The Button Seller. More so, because The Button Seller is finished with me.

That’s exactly how it should be.

It’s funny and ridiculous, sure. But there’s also a painful reality behind it.

Because I don’t think the cheese cart isn’t really about hiding from magical swords.

I think instead we all have one in some way, shape, or form.

Maybe yours is a job you’ve outgrown, but you’re too scared to leave. Maybe it’s saying you’ll write your novel “next year.” Maybe it’s never posting your art because someone might not like it, and they might leave a mean comment.

The details change, but the hiding remains the same.

For years, mine was saying I wanted to be a writer without actually letting anyone read what I wrote. I still struggle with this even now, knowing The Button Seller is out there sat in the inboxes of at least a dozen agents.

But rather than letting those closest to me read my initial written pieces, I’d come up with excuses like:

• “I just need to improve first.”

• “I’ll finish it when I have more time.”

• “It’s not ready yet.”

The truth? I was scared and hiding it away.

I love writing so much. But the idea of failing or being bad at it is remarkably terrifying in such a vastly complex way.

If I never finished a novel, nobody could read it. If nobody read it, nobody could tell me it wasn’t good enough. Simple maths, really.

The cheese cart felt safe for Perry, until one day it didn’t.

Eventually you realise safety has a cost. You don’t just avoid failure. You avoid becoming the person you could have been.

Writing The Button Seller forced me out from under my own cheese cart.

And again, the book is now sitting in literary agents’ inboxes.

Could they reject it?

Yes.

But that’s still a better story than one where it stayed on my hard drive forever because I was too frightened to take the plunge.

That’s something Perry learns too.

So here’s my question.

What’s your cheese cart?

Because I have a feeling you already know.

And I also have a feeling you’re stronger than the voice telling you to stay underneath it.

If I’m excited about something, I want to know what comes next.

Rather fittingly, I’ve picked an industry where the standard response time is:

Six to eight weeks.

Since I sent The Button Seller out to literary agents, I’m now in the part no one really talks about.

The waiting part.

And it isn’t the patient kind. Oh no, no. It’s the agonising kind.

The kind where every phone buzz makes my heart briefly forget its rhythm.

The kind where every email notification becomes a potential lottery ticket.

It’s funny how quickly imagination fills the silence.

Maybe they’re reading it as I type this.

Maybe they loved my first chapter.

Maybe they hated my query letter.

Maybe they’re about to offer representation.

Maybe they’ve already rejected it and haven’t pressed send yet.

I’m aware that those thoughts are far from useful.

They’re just my brain trying to solve a problem that simply waiting, patiently, would solve for me.

But it’s okay. I’ve got my ways to stay productive during this limbo.

Every day I spend waiting is another day I spend writing or learning.

That means more time for Substack and Instagram posts.

More time to dedicate to a new chapter of my next novel (and yes, there is another novel).

More time to become a better storyteller than I was yesterday.

Because I will go mad if I let myself sit by my inbox for the next two months.

If The Button Seller taught me anything, it’s that life tends to happen while you’re busy focusing on the wrong thing.

Perry spends most of the novel looking for proof that he’s become someone worthwhile.

The irony is that he becomes that person by continuing to walk. He doesn’t wait for it to come.

Maybe that’s the lesson I need now.

The emails will come when they come.

Most will probably say no.

Hopefully, one will eventually say yes.

Until then, I’ve got another story to write.

I’d much rather be known as someone who kept creating than someone who got very good at refreshing their inbox.

I had to send it to some of my friends, family, and peers to read. And they congratulated me.

They told me how exciting it is. They asked when it would be published. They started calling me “an author.”

And my brain immediately replied:

“They clearly haven’t read it yet.”

I’ve spent the last few days sending The Button Seller to literary agents. Every email feels like I’m exposing myself in an incredibly vulnerable way and asking a stranger to decide whether it deserves to exist on a bookshelf.

It’s terrifying.

Not because I think the book is bad. I don’t. I genuinely believe in The Button Seller.

It’s terrifying because I struggle to feel like I’m good enough.

That sentence is uncomfortable to write, but I suspect a lot of creative people know exactly what it feels like.

You spend hundreds of hours making something. You pour yourself into it. Then, the moment it’s finished, your brain starts rewriting history.

“Anyone could have done this.”

“You just got lucky.”

“Soon someone who actually knows what they’re doing will point out everything you’ve missed and tell you why it won’t go any further.”

The funny thing is...

I accidentally wrote an entire novel about that feeling.

Perry Fenwick starts The Button Seller, convinced he’s the least remarkable person in the room. He’s a man who sold buttons for six years because it felt safer than risking failure. Every victory is, in his mind, an accident. Every success belongs to someone else.

Even when he carries an ancient magical sword, he can’t quite believe it chose him.

He spends the entire journey waiting for someone more deserving to arrive.

Honestly? So do I.

Every time someone says they enjoyed the manuscript, a part of me thinks they were just being polite or maintaining our friendship.

Every time I press “Send” on a query email, another part of me is convinced this is the email where someone finally confirms what I’ve believed all along.

That I was pretending.

That I somehow wandered into a room meant for “real” authors.

But here’s what surprised me while writing the ending.

Perry doesn’t defeat that voice because someone finally tells him he’s special.

He defeats it because he slowly realises his worth was never something a magical sword could give him in the first place.

It was already there.

The sword didn’t create the man.

It simply revealed the one who’d been there all along.

I’m trying to believe the same thing about my writing.

Getting a publishing deal won’t suddenly make me an author.

Selling thousands of copies, though an absolute dream, won’t magically silence my self-doubt.

Those things would be wonderful. They can’t be my foundation.

The writing has to be.

So while The Button Seller is out in the world, sitting in agents’ inboxes and hopefully finding its way to the right people, I’m trying to do what Perry eventually learns to do.

Keep showing up.

Keep writing.

Keep believing that creating honest stories is worthwhile, even on the days my brain insists otherwise.

Maybe that’s what this journey is all about. Maybe that’s what becoming an author actually means.

I’m not someone who’s never doubted themselves.

I’m just someone who kept writing anyway.

If you’ve ever wrestled with impostor syndrome the way I have, I hope Perry’s story resonates with you the way it clearly resonated with me.

You don’t have to feel worthy before you do meaningful things.

It didn’t so much fly through the market as confidently force its way through it, scattering pigeons and a man selling suspiciously animate turnips. It came to rest, point down, humming faintly. It seemed almost humanly too pleased with itself, sat in the cobblestone six inches from Perry’s nose.

This was Cobbleford. Just three streets of stalls built around the old market well. The sort of town most maps didn’t bother labelling twice.

“No,” said Perry.

The sword did not appear to hear him. Swords rarely do.

“I mean it,” he said, shuffling backward into a wheel of cheese so old it had its own weather system. “I don’t want any part of what you’re attempting to offer me. I have plans. I have a stall. I sell buttons.”

The sword pulsed. Somewhere above the rooftops, thunder cracked in a way that felt personally directed at him.

“Oh, come on!”

“Chosen one,” boomed a voice that seemed to originate from several directions at once, none of them polite. “Rise. Your destiny awaits.”

Perry looked around for the actual chosen one. The tall, jawline-forward sort of person destiny usually went for. He instead found several dozen marketgoers backing away from him, with the particular haste of people who did not want to be standing next to whoever the sky was yelling at.

“There’s been a mistake,” Perry said, to the sword, to the sky, to whatever committee handled this sort of thing. “I once cried at a puppet show. I am, comically, bad at everything. I sell buttons.”

“You have been chosen.”

“Chosen for what, though? Have you considered, and I say this with the utmost respect, that you might have the wrong Perry? There’s a butcher two streets over also named Perry. Broader shoulders. Owns an axe already. Very fight-shaped man. This is almost certainly a filing error.”

The sword rose from the cobblestones on its own and drifted forward. With the gentle, terrible patience of something that had clearly done this before and would happily do it again, it pressed its hilt into his open, flailing, completely unwilling hand.

Every hair on Perry’s arms stood up. The button stall behind him burst, suddenly and with some embarrassment, into flame.

“Huh,” Perry said, staring at the sword now welded to his palm by what he could only describe as cosmic bureaucracy. “That’s new.”

Somewhere in the crowd, a small voice belonging to a boy who had clearly been waiting his whole short life for a moment exactly like this one breathed: “It’s him. It’s really him.”

“It is not really me,” Perry said, with the weary conviction of a man who had, until four minutes ago, had a very manageable life. “There has been some kind of mistake. I would like to speak to whoever is in charge of prophecy so we can sort this out like professionals.”

The sky cracked open. An enormous and winged beast screamed in the distance, delighted, like it had just heard the dinner bell.

Perry looked at the sword. The sword, infuriatingly, gleamed.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. New plan. We run, and we complain about it loudly the entire time.”

He got exactly four steps before he tripped over the boy who had called him “him.”

“Sorry! Sorry, are you-” Perry scrambled upright, hauling the child up by the collar with the sword-hand. The boy now had approximately eight inches of enchanted steel hovering an inch from his ear. Perry yanked it back with a wince. “Don’t – that’s not – I don’t actually know how not to point this thing at you yet, give me a minute.”

The boy did not look concerned. The boy looked, if anything, thrilled, in the specific way of someone who has just watched their favourite bedtime story climb out of the book and land on them.

“You’re really him!” the boy giggled. “The stall-keeper. The one the sword picked.”

“I sell buttons,” Perry said, for what felt like the fourth time that morning. Perhaps repetition might eventually make it a legally binding defence.

“My gran says the sword’s never wrong. Says it picked a farmer once, back before the Sundering, and everyone laughed at her too.”

“Great. Wonderful. I’m sure she was very smug about that in the end. I, meanwhile, would like to not be eaten.” Perry looked up. The screaming thing in the sky had resolved into a shape. Vast, green-black, and unmistakably headed toward the market at a speed that suggested it had already decided how this was going to go. “Kid. Genuinely. Run.”

“I’m coming with you!”

“What are you, like eleven?”

“I’m thirteen, and I’ve read every account of the Sundering there is. And you don’t know anything. You’re going to need someone who does.” The boy said this with the flat, unarguable confidence of a person who had rehearsed this exact speech in his head many, many times, waiting for an opportunity that had finally, gloriously arrived. “My name’s Tobin. And I am coming.”

“Tobin, I appreciate the support. But this is not a good time.”

The dragon – because it was, Perry now confirmed with a sinking heart, absolutely a dragon – landed on the market’s central fountain with a crash. It sent stone and startled fish in every direction, folded its wings, and looked at Perry the way a cat looks at a mouse it intends to bat around the room for a while before eating.

“It knows,” Tobin breathed, delighted. “Look, it knows who you are already.”

“Everyone seems to know who I am already except me,” Perry said. The sword in his hand had begun to hum again, low and expectant, like it was waiting for him to do something impressive. “Tobin. New plan. Same as before, but now there’s a dragon in it.”

“What’s the plan?”

“We run, we complain, and if the sword actually does anything useful, I will be shocked, but not half as shocked as everyone else.”

The dragon inhaled. Somewhere behind them, several stalls were savagely reminded they were flammable.

They ran.

Running, Perry discovered almost immediately, was considerably more complicated with a sword welded to one hand and a thirteen-year-old attached to the other. It was made especially more difficult when heading through a market that had decided, en masse and without consulting him, that the correct response to a dragon was to leave every cart, table, and precariously balanced pyramid of melons exactly where it stood.

“Left!” Tobin shouted, apropos of nothing.

“Why left?”

“The lore says heroes always go left at the fountain!”

“There is no fountain anymore, Tobin, the dragon is sitting on it.”

A gout of flame turned the melon pyramid into what would, loosely, be described as jam. Perry went left anyway on the grounds that arguing lore with a thirteen-year-old mid-immolation was a poor use of his remaining seconds. They skidded around the smoking remains of a spice stall hard enough that the sword swung wide and neatly bisected a hanging awning, which fell on them both like a canvas ghost.

“Sorry! Still getting the hang of the-” Perry hacked the fabric off his face with a wild swing that also, unfortunately, took the head off a wooden cheese advertisement shaped like a smiling cow. The cow’s expression did not change. “That wasn’t on purpose.”

“You’re doing great,” Tobin said, with the deranged sincerity of someone grading on a curve so forgiving it had lapped itself.

“I removed a cow’s head.”

“A fake cow’s head. Heroically.”

Behind them, the dragon extracted itself from the fountain with the measured confidence of a creature that knew exactly how fast it was compared to two people on foot and did not feel the need to hurry a meal. It took to the air in a single lazy beat of wings that knocked over an entire row of tents like dominoes.

“Tobin. Options. I need options.”

“There’s the sewer grate by the tanner’s place.”

“We are not going in the sewer.”

“Or there’s the bell tower, which has a very defensible-”

“Absolutely not.”

“Or you could try using the sword, which, you know, is the thing it’s for.”

Perry looked down at the sword. The sword looked, insofar as an inanimate object could manage an expression, deeply unimpressed with him.

“I don’t know how,” he said, and hated how much it sounded like admitting something else entirely.

The dragon’s shadow slid over them, vast and unhurried, and somewhere above, it let out a sound that was almost certainly a chuckle.

“Then,” Tobin said, grabbing his sleeve and hauling him toward a narrow gap between a collapsed cart and the old stone well, “we go with the sewer.”

“You said-”

“I said it first because I wanted to see if you’d pick the tower instead. Heroes always overcorrect toward dramatic high ground, but we don’t have time for me to be right about that too. So, to the sewer. Now. Go!”

Perry, for reasons he would spend a great deal of later reflection failing to justify, went.

The sewer grate was heavier than it looked and colder than he’d braced for. The drop beneath it was exactly far enough to make Perry regret every choice that had led him here, starting roughly with getting out of bed that morning. He landed in something he chose not to examine too closely, sword-arm first, which at least meant the blade didn’t go anywhere important. Tobin landed beside him with the easy grace of someone who had clearly done this before, which was its own small horror.

“You’ve been down here,” Perry said.

“Everyone’s been down here. It’s the only part of town my gran doesn’t ask about, which tells you everything.” Tobin was already moving, unerring, down a tunnel that looked identical to every other tunnel to Perry’s eye. Somewhere above them, muffled through stone and pipe, the dragon let out a long, disappointed roar, like a customer whose lunch had been taken off the menu.

“It’s going to circle back,” Perry said.

“It’s going to circle back!” Tobin agreed, in the tone of someone relaying good news.

“That’s not – how is that good?”

“It means it thinks you’re worth circling back for.” Tobin glanced over his shoulder, and for just a second the performance dropped away and there was a younger and more honest tone underneath it. “That’s the whole thing, isn’t it. It’s not chasing a button-seller. It’s chasing whoever the sword thinks you are.”

Perry opened his mouth to say something dismissive, something clever about mistaken identity and the very reasonable, evidence-based position that he was, in fact, just a man who sold buttons. Instead, he found, annoyingly, that the sword in his hand had gone warm. Not hot. Warm, the way a hand goes warm around another hand. He looked down at it with deep suspicion.

“Don’t,” he told it.

“Don’t what?”

“It’s being paternal with me. I don’t like it.”

Tobin laughed. A real laugh, sudden and squeezed out of him. It echoed strangely down the tunnel, bouncing off wet stone until it sounded like there were several delighted thirteen-year-olds instead of one. “You’re going to be terrible at this.”

“Thank you.”

“No, I mean really, spectacularly terrible. For a while. And then you’re not going to be.” He said it with the same flat certainty he’d used on the sewer versus the tower, like it was a fact he’d already read somewhere, in some book, about some other stall-keeper who’d stood exactly where Perry was standing now.

“You don’t know that.”

“I don’t,” Tobin agreed. “But the sword does, and it picked you, and it’s never picked wrong yet.” He shrugged, too proud of himself for someone currently ankle-deep in sewer water. “Left again up here. Then there’s a ladder that comes out behind the tanner’s place, and from there it’s a straight shot to the east gate, and from there-”

“From there, we are absolutely not continuing this conversation about destiny,” Perry said, sloshing after him. “From there, we are finding somewhere the dragon isn’t, and I am having a very long sit-down. Possibly a drink. And you are going home to your gran, who I imagine is extremely worried.”

“She’s not,” Tobin said. “She’ll have heard the sword went off. She’ll just be annoyed she missed it.”

Above them, distantly, the enormous and scaled beast thumped down onto a rooftop hard enough to rain dust through the tunnel ceiling. It let out a long, searching huff of smoke that curled down through the grate behind them like it was sniffing for the scent of somebody who owed it a very overdue snack.

“East gate,” Perry said. “Quickly. Let’s not test how good it is at tracking a scent.”

They ran on, and behind them, faint and rhythmic and far too close, that enormous thing began, very deliberately, to follow the sound of their footsteps.

The ladder came out exactly where Tobin promised. Behind the tanner’s, in an alley that smelled marginally better than where they’d come from. It offered, as a bonus, a clear view straight down the lane to the east gate. A squat stone arch, thrown open, guards nowhere in sight, having apparently made the same very reasonable calculation as everyone else in town.

“There,” Tobin said, pointing, slightly out of breath, slightly delighted anyway. “Through the gate, into the trees, dragons don’t like-”

The wall beside them exploded.

Not metaphorically. A significant portion of the tanner’s east-facing wall simply ceased being a wall and became, instead, rubble, dust, and one extremely smug dragon, which had apparently grown tired of the chase and decided the direct approach suited it better. It filled the alley nearly wall to wall with its wings half-furled. It looked down at Perry with an expression that a kinder narrator might have called curious. Though, if you ask Perry, he chose to interpret it as hungry and ready for blood.

“Okay,” Perry said, backing up until he hit Tobin. “Okay. There’s – there’s the dragon.”

“Say something heroic,” Tobin whispered.

“I don’t have anything heroic to say. I do, however, have a strong urge to lie down and cry.”

The dragon’s head lowered, slow and deliberate, until one colossal golden eye was roughly level with Perry’s face. Close enough that he could feel the heat coming off it in waves, close enough to see his own small, unimpressive reflection in it. He was but a man holding a sword he didn’t know how to use, standing in front of a boy he had no business trying to protect, in a town he sold buttons in, for goodness’ sake. Yet being looked at that closely, that patiently, by something that clearly considered him beneath a real fight, made a very small, very stubborn part of Perry extremely annoyed.

“You know,” he heard himself say, “everyone keeps looking at me like that. Like I’m about to disappoint them. And you know what? Fine. Maybe I will! But I’d at least like to disappoint you while trying, so if it’s all the same to you-”

He swung the sword.

He had no training. No form. No idea, in any technical sense, what he was doing. The blade went up and out in a shape closer to swatting a wasp than anything a real hero would recognise. By every reasonable law of drama and physics it should have done nothing at all except possibly dislocate his shoulder.

Instead, the sword screamed.

It was a small sound, almost embarrassed, like it hadn’t meant to make it. A bright, singing note that travelled up Perry’s arm and out through the blade in a thin arc of white-gold light, catching the dragon across the snout with all the force of a very polite slap.

The dragon recoiled. Not hurt. Perry was fairly sure nothing that size could be hurt by that. But surprised, genuinely and comically surprised. The way a very large dog looks when a very small dog barks at it with total conviction.

There was a silence.

“Huh,” Perry said, staring at the sword, which was now glowing very faintly and, if he wasn’t mistaken, looking rather happy with itself.

“You hit it!” Tobin said, at a volume better suited to somewhere without a dragon in it. “You actually hit it!”

“I don’t know what I did,” Perry said, “I would like it on the record that I have no idea what I just did.”

The dragon, recovering its dignity with the offended speed of something that had just been mildly startled by a stall-keeper, drew itself up to its full height, filling the alley with shadow, and made a sound that needed no translation whatsoever: round two.

“Gate,” Perry said. “Now. We will discuss my feelings about this later.”

They bolted for the arch, the dragon’s roar chasing them out into the open trees beyond. Behind them the sword, still humming faintly with its own private satisfaction, seemed for the first time openly unwilling to let go of Perry’s hand.

***

They stopped, eventually, in a hollow half a mile into the trees. The ground there dipped low enough to hide a fire and the canopy was thick enough to hide smoke. Perry discovered that the human body, after being chased by a dragon through a market, a sewer, and a collapsing wall, does not so much sit down as simply stop being asked to do anything else and collapse where it stands.

For a while, neither of them spoke. Tobin caught his breath in the businesslike way of someone cataloguing the afternoon for later retelling. Perry lay flat on his back, sword still in hand, watching the last of the daylight go orange through the leaves. He thought, with great clarity, about buttons.

Specifically, about the fact that he had, until roughly two hours ago, owned a very small, very stable business selling them. Horn buttons. Bone buttons. The good brass ones he kept under the counter for people who knew to ask. He had opinions about buttons. He had a system. Nobody’s life had ever depended on his skill with a needle and thread. He had liked it that way enormously. Now there was a sword welded to his hand that occasionally screamed at dragons on his behalf, and he did not have the faintest idea what to do about any of it.

“You’re doing the thing,” Tobin said.

“What thing.”

“The staring-at-nothing thing. My gran does it when she’s thinking too hard to talk. You’ve been doing it since we sat down.”

“I sold buttons this morning,” Perry said, staring vacantly at the canopy. “This morning. That was a real thing that happened, a few hours ago, to me.”

“And now you fought a dragon.”

“I did not fight a dragon, Tobin. I simply startled it; there’s a significant difference. One of those things ends with me alive and the other one ends with me as a light garnish.”

“You’re alive,” Tobin pointed out, quite reasonably, which Perry found extremely irritating.

He sat up. The sword caught the last of the light along its edge. Up close, without a dragon or a crowd or several tons of falling masonry demanding his attention, he could see it properly for the first time. It was plain, almost disappointingly so. No jewels or engravings, just clean grey steel that still faintly thrummed under his palm like it had a pulse.

“Why me,” he said. It was not a question. It was the sound a person makes when they’ve been holding an existential worry in for two hours and it finally gets too heavy to keep carrying alone.

Tobin, to his credit, didn’t offer an answer immediately. He poked at the unlit fire wood for a moment, considering. When he did speak it was quieter than usual. The showmanship dialled most of the way down.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody ever knows, really, until after. That’s what all the old accounts say. The sword doesn’t explain itself, it just picks, and everyone spends the next however-long being furious about it until they stop.” He shrugged, glancing sideways. “For what it’s worth, though. It didn’t pick the butcher. Broad shoulders, owns an axe already, very fight-shaped man, like you said.” A small, sideways smile. “It picked the one who ran away and hid under the cheese cart for quite some minutes and still got up anyway.”

Perry opened his mouth to argue that hiding under a cheese cart was not, by any reasonable definition, getting up anyway. He found again that he didn’t actually have anything to say to that.

Somewhere far behind them, faint over the treeline, the dragon let out one last long, disgruntled roar into the darkening sky, more sulk than threat. The sound of a beast that had lost its dinner and intended to complain about it to whoever would listen.

Perry lay back down.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “we are finding you an adult, and me a very large drink. Then we are going to have an extremely long conversation about what exactly I’m supposed to be doing with a sword that screams at dragons.”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight,” Perry said, closing his eyes, sword still humming faintly in his hand like it had no intention whatsoever of letting the matter rest, “I would just like to sleep.”

Above them, the first stars came out over a kingdom that had absolutely no idea what it had just gotten.

When we meet him, he’s a button seller. There is nothing special about him. Just a man who’s spent most of his life convincing himself that staying small is the safest way to live.

He’s self-deprecating. He overthinks everything. He’d rather apologise than argue and would happily let someone else save the day if they happened to be available.

But no one else is available. Not this time.

One of my favourite things about writing Perry was exploring the difference between fear and cowardice.

Perry is afraid throughout the whole novel.

But courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s deciding that someone or something else matters more than your fear does.

He doesn’t become brave because he stops being scared. He becomes brave because, little by little, he learns to stay.

• To stay in difficult conversations.

• To stay with grief instead of running from it.

• To stay beside people who need him.

• To stay even when every part of him wants to hide.

By the end of The Button Seller, Perry is still recognisably the same man who sold buttons in the market. He just finally believes that an ordinary person can change the world.

But if you want to know the journey he took to get there, make sure you read The Button Seller!

Who’s your favourite unlikely hero in fantasy?

If you came from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or because someone pointed you in my direction, I’m so grateful you’ve decided to come along for this part of my journey.

Over the past few months, I’ve been writing my first fantasy novel, The Button Seller.

It’s a story that started with one simple question:

What if the person chosen to save the world was the last person who believed they deserved to?

Perry Fenwick is a man who has spent the last six years selling buttons in a tiny market stall. He’s funny, a little anxious, and has become very good at convincing himself that ordinary is all he’ll ever be.

Then an ancient sword chooses him. And a dragon attacks his market.

Everyone expects him to become the hero from the stories.

The only problem?

Perry believes, without a shadow of a doubt, they’ve picked the wrong man.

Underneath the dragons, strange happenings, and ancient magic, The Button Seller isn’t a novel that showcases a brave hero saving the world.

It challenges the feeling of impostor syndrome. It explores the impact of grief. And it teaches you that courage isn’t the absence of fear, but choosing to move forward despite it.

Most fantasy stories ask whether someone is strong enough to become a hero.

This one asks a different question:

Can an ordinary person discover they were enough all along?

I recently finished the manuscript and am in the process of submitting it to literary agents and publishers. That process can take months (sometimes longer), so while I wait, I wanted to create a place where I can share the journey with people who enjoy stories as much as I do.

Here you’ll get things I won’t be posting elsewhere:

• Chapters from The Button Seller

• Deleted scenes and bonus content from The Button Seller

• Worldbuilding notes and maps

• Character backstories

• Updates on the publishing journey (the exciting bits and the disappointing ones)

• Behind-the-scenes looks at my writing process

• Early access to whatever I write next

I hope this becomes a place where we can celebrate storytelling together, as I have so many ideas in the works for future novels.

I’ve spent years trying different careers, different projects, and different ideas. Writing this novel is the first time I’ve created something that I truly feel proud of. I’m excited to see where this path leads.

Thank you for believing in my work before the world knows what happens next.

I hope you enjoy the adventure.

G.P.O. Connor