WRITER AS GERBIL

I feel like a gerbil running on a wheel. A rather large gerbil, mind...

I am finished final edits on Novel 2, The Closet of Savage Mementos and am just awaiting final proofs before it goes on its merry way to the printer. Whoop! There will be launches in Dublin and Galway in April. In the course of this last edit I discovered (thanks to Deirdre O'Neill, my lovely editor) that my obssesion-words while writing it were hover, grunt and manic. Ahem.

It's weird the way your relationship with a manuscript changes the closer it becomes to being a book. Doubly odd on this one, maybe, because it was inspired by very personal events in my life when I was a mere 22 year old. So I love the novel, then I don't, then I want to bury it, then I want to tell people about it constantly because I feel so affectionate towards it. Mostly, I want to see the final cover and, then, the final book. Maybe then I can start to 'own' it.

Meantime I am rewriting Novel 3, Miss Emily, using a list of suggestions from my editors in Penguin USA and Penguin Canada. It is close work and enormously rewarding. I am plunged back into Emily Dickinson's world and it is a place I am very happy to go. I heart research.

In the midst of all this I am enjoying the buzz around the spring issue of The Stinging Fly (I edited the fiction section) which came out this week and will be launched in March. And I'm looking forward to taking part in the Publishing Day at the IWC next Saturday, the 8th March. It promises to be a great event. The Penguin Irl Director will be there as well as a UK literay agent, poetry experts and there will be a writers' panel, which I am taking part in.

I'll be on Arena on RTÉ Radio 1 on Monday night reviewing Bark, the new story collection from wonder-writer Lorrie Moore. Oh, Lorrie, please be my BFF. (Does anyone else become convinced they would get along brilliantly with all their favourite writers?)

Also I am busy prepping for the launch of After Garbally, by Group 8, the exhibition by my artist collective here in Ballinasloe on the 14th March. It's full steam ahead with preps for that at the moment.

There are a hundred other things waving flags in my general direction and I'll get to them anon, so if you are waiting for something from me (a blurb, an edit, a hello) hang in there, I'll be with you soon!