*CLOSET* IS IRISH TIMES BOOK CLUB CHOICE FOR DECEMBER

I'm thrilled that The Closet of Savage Mementos is the Irish Times Book Club choice for this month. Martin Doyle calls it 'a moving, beautifully written portrait of love, grief and motherhood'. Swoon. There will be interviews, articles, reviews, videos, podcasts and webchats over the next month about the novel. More here.

INTERVIEW ABOUT *CLOSET*

Writer Shauna Gilligan interviews me today about my new novel The Closet of Savage Mementos. We talk character names, adoption and gigs. It's here.

ARENA RTÉ TONIGHT

I'll be on Arena on RTE Radio 1 tonight, at 7pm, talking about my new novel The Closet of Savage Mementos.

GLASGOW READING - 29th APRIL

I am reading from my Scotland-set novel The Closet of Savage Mementos at the CCA, Glasgow, this Tuesday the 29th April at 7pm. More details here.

BOOK TRAILER FOR *THE CLOSET OF SAVAGE MEMENTOS*

My launch is tomorrow for The Closet of Savage Mementos. Ahead of it, I made a little book trailer for the book which is now available to buy online from Kennys Bookshop and from Charlie Byrne's. It will be in a shop near you by the end of this week. Or you can buy it at the launch! All welcome tomorrow in The Gutter, Temple Bar, Dublin at 6.30pm, where arts journalist Sinéad Gleeson will do the launching honours. And we will have wine, shortbread, whisky and Kendal Mint Cake. Hope to see you there!

BOX OF BOOKS DAY!

My book arrived - whoop!!

INVITE TO MY NOVEL LAUNCH - DUBLIN

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!

GLADSTONE'S LIBRARY - PICS & STUFF

View of St Deiniol's church and graveyard from my bedroom window

I'm enjoying my retreat in Wales though I'm not exactly writing. Well, I am am writing but it is all non-fictiony PR stuff for my forthcoming novel: articles about my time in Scotland 22 years ago (the novel was inspired by something that happened to me).

Sophia in the garden

When I am not writing, I am reading - then ripping up - my diaries from Scotland (therapeutic!), walking in the pretty village of Hawarden, or eating. The food here at Gladstone's Library is beautiful and abundant.

Entrance to Gladstone's Library

Hearth panel: Louisa Yates (library director) Tania Hershman, Adnan Mahmutovic,
Neil Griffiths, Melissa Harrison, Peter Francis

There was also the small matter of the Hearth Literary Festival here at the weekend, which I went to, so that sucked up some writing time. Very enjoyably. I took my friend Tania Hershman's flash fiction workshop and it was fast-paced and we had to work really hard. Great fun. So I wrote there!

The Glynne Arms, a lovely pub in the village

Hawarden village, house

Bilingual road sign, Hawarden

It's hard to believe I am half-way through my stay already. My room is so warm and comfortable that I am going around in a heat-and-food induced fug most of the time. I need to buck up and write more. Novel no. 4 is calling to me ('Write me! Write me!') and there are exciting developments with novel 3 and my agent, which I can't talk about yet, but which are adding to my distractedness while here. But it's all good :)

Tania and I went to Chester yesterday - a metropolis after Hawarden

ON COVERS, TITLES & END-OF-NOVEL STUFF

Lionel Shriver - pic from The Guardian

I am in a very weird position at the moment in that I am working on crucial end-of-writing things on two separate novels. It's all good fun but my mind is having to leap from one book to the other in alarming timeframes, and there are plenty of other things going on besides.

This week, I have seen covers for Novel #2,  The Closet of Savage Mementos, (exciting!) and have narrowed it down to two possibilities. The designer is rejigging both at the moment and I am dying to see the finished products. I have just written blurb for that novel too and am waiting to see what my editor makes of that.

Meanwhile, my agent and I are toing and froing across the Atlantic about the title for Novel #3, which she will be submitting to publishers this month. My original title is not all-encompassing enough so we are trying all sorts, from the wordy to the downright plain. Nothing has satisfied both of us yet so we will continue researching, then batting things back and forth until we land on the right title.

In the middle of all this I have two deadlines for stories, one of which is proving baffling to me (the story that is, not the deadline). The other is nearly done but it is mournful and I am not 100% certain it will suit the publication. Hmmm.

I was reading an article about Jennifer Weiner this week in the New Yorker (on gender imbalance in publishing etc.) in which she mentioned personal dressers and personal assistants and all sorts. I'm not quite at that stage (!!) but, sometimes, I feel there should be three of me: The Writer, The Admin Person and The Mother.

All this busy-ness reminds me, too, of that recent Lionel Shriver article in the New Republic, about being pulled 20 different directions as a writer, and which one sniffy commentator called 'a writerly diva fit'. Pfff. Lionel was making the point that being too busy means less time for actual writing (which is very agitating for a writer). A quote: 'Now that every village in the United Kingdom has its own literary festival, I could credibly spend my entire year, every year, flitting from Swindon to Peterborough to Aberdeen, jawing interminably about what I’ve already written—at the modest price of scalding self-disgust.'

I'm with Lionel. I'll end on a more uplifting quote from her about the whole business: 'If sometimes stressful or distracting, even subsidiary commitments are also opportunities: to connect with flesh-and-blood readerships, to air views and grievances, to exploit a more theatrical side of one’s character (I’m a ham), and for pity’s sake to get out of the house.'

TITLE FOR MY NEXT NOVEL REVEALED

I am buzzing today. I had a great morning editing and adding colour to my American novel with all I learnt/saw/absorbed in Massachusetts.

Then, this afternoon, I got the very welcome news that Louise Erdrich has granted me permission to use an adapted quote from her poem 'Advice to Myself' as the title for my Scottish novel, due spring 2014. Yipee! Louise is a novelist and poet and she owns Birchbark Books, a book shop in Minneapolis. How cool is that?

So, I can now reveal....drum roll... that the novel will be called The Closet of Savage Mementos. Next stop, the cover. Yay!