A Rather Remarkable Week
What a week. I’d like to write something profound and incredibly insightful but right now my mind’s a bit of a marshmallow and I’m still a little overwhelmed by all the good stuff which has happened in the last seven days. Notwithstanding the launch on Wednesday night, it’s been an incredibly busy week including fantastic interviews with both the Irish Examiner and Irish News (to be published later in the month), a new short story on the Ask What Now website (http://askwhatnow.org/articles/what-make-diminished-thing#.U5THBIkFBXU.email), radio interviews at Radio Ulster and with Bangor Community Radio, (which you can check out here https://soundcloud.com/ellierose101/jan-carson-interview), an article on the Irish Times website (which you should be able to read here http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/laughing-in-the-face-of-loss-how-nana-s-dementia-helped-inspire-my-first-novel-1.1818768#.U5TFMaqz_Dw.email), a fabulous reading to launch the Incubator Journal at the Black Box and daily trips to Waterstones, pacing the joint like a would-be shoplifter as I tried to ascertain whether the book had been delivered or not.
It’s definitely not been an ordinary week and there have been many, many highlights and, very few lowpoints. Mostly I’m just incredibly thankful for the enormous amounts of support I’ve been shown. Thank you so much for every thoughtful card, every orange-coloured gift, every text message, glass of wine, offer of dinner and of course every “Malcolm” selfie I’ve spotted on Twitter and Facebook, ( I was particularly charmed by Orla McAdam’s running across 4 lanes of traffic with a book on her head video- please don’t try this one at home folks). Good friends and community have got me to this point and it’s been incredibly humbling to see how many people have wanted to celebrate with me this week. I owe you all an enormous debt of gratitude and respect. Celebrating is so much more enjoyable when you have people to celebrate with.
Stay tuned folks, next week you’ll be inundated with blog posts as I navigate my way through the fantastic Belfast Book Festival. Make sure you don’t miss out on any of the amazing writers coming through town in the course of the next few days.
