I HEART NY & MY NEW AGENT

Hotel room view - uptown from the Bowery

Well, my agent meeting went well yesterday☺. She suggested a few things so I will be re-writing a little when I get home. She's lovely and we got on well, but I knew that from talking to her on the phone. So, all in all, a very positive meeting and I am now officially excited about my American novel. Yay!

Brekkie at McNally Jackson

Next stop, San Francisco for my chapbook launch. It is chapbook heaven here in NY - I had to stop myself buying tons of them in McNally Jackson. What a book shop! Filled with covetable books, notebooks, cards. Impossibly cool staff too. And it's hard not to love a book shop that serves granola and OJ.

NEW REVIEW AND 'QUIET' BOOKS

North Carolina based Irish writer Rich Rennicks has just reviewed my novel YOU, which came out three years ago (I can hardly believe it's been three years). Rich reviews it on his blog A Trip to Ireland. I love this about the internet - there is no two-week window for your book to get noticed; there is endless time and scope and space.

A small quote from the review: 'YOU is a quiet, surprising novel, that captures a young girl’s growing perception of the world quite beautifully.' Cheers, Rich, much appreciated :)

As an aside, 'quiet' is a word I often hear about my work. It gets me a bit knicker-knotted because I don't quite get what it means, except I feel I am being told that it is not altogether a good thing to be 'quiet'. The feeling I get is that publishers/reviewers/agents really want fiction a bit more shouty than mine and that's what will make a book a big hit, as opposed to the minor hits that I've had. Anyway, I think, as an introvert, quiet is where I'm at and will continue to be at for a long time to come. For what it's worth, Mr Rennicks didn't seem to think 'quiet' was a negative but others have (agents/publishers who have rejected my work in the past). Anyway, with a publisher I like for my last two books and my next (New Island) and a new agent on the foreshore also, this 'quiet' irritation may belong to the past.