Hello everyone!
Two Irishmen were working in the public works department. One would dig a hole and the other would follow behind him and fill the hole in.
After a while, one amazed onlooker said: “Why do you dig a hole, only to have your partner follow behind and fill it up again?”
The hole digger wiped his brow and sighed, “Well, I suppose it probably looks odd because we’re normally a three-person team. But today the lad who plants the trees called in sick.
How are you all? Good I hope? I was particularly tickled by that joke.
(Generally jokes give me anxiety ‘Did you ever hear the one about…? makes me want to run away muttering about having left the gas on or something..) but this one I liked, because my house is like a tradesman’s convention right now, and while a nicer, more efficient or professional collection of men you could not find, the racket they cause is not conducive to the creative process!
So, we returned to the cottage having been out of it all summer to allow the men to do their worst on the house. It’s two hundred years old, and like its owner, is probably feeling every single day of it right now. Many of the fixings were original, and so we need to proceed with great care for fear of having the whole shooting gallery come down on our heads. But it is lovely to be home, dust and drilling and banging and all.
In the midst of all the chaos, my new book The Harp and the Rose was published and it went so well I could hardly believe it. The book got to #51 in the whole of the Kindle Store, there are millions of book in the store, so that’s some achievement, (of my readers and my marketing team – not me – I hasten to add) and it sits happily at #1 in lots of sub categories so I am delighted and relieved. If you haven’t read it yet you can click the blue link above to get it. To those readers who bought, reviewed or told their friends and family about my books I thank you so much. and know your efforts are playing the wages of several fellas with hard hats and high viz jackets who are fixing our very old and slightly leaky roof.
There are lots of lovely things about being a writer, but one is when my stories become a point of connection between people. I love that. There are lots of examples of people drawn together through my books, like the man who reads to his friend on the phone each night, thousands of miles apart, or the daughter who always buys the large print version for her Mom but reads it herself first even though her eyesight is perfect so they can read the same copy, or the person who read all my cooks during their chemotherapy sessions to distract themselves during their cancer experience, or the man who got stuck in lockdown in a foreign country but had a kindle and a recommendation from a friend to read my books so he read twenty books over a few weeks, but this week was a new one.
A woman was going to meet her daughter’s boyfriend’s parents for the first time. it could potentially have been a bit awkward, after all, the only thing they have in common is their son is going out with her daughter, but she contacted me to say, they started talking about books generally and it turns out they both had read my books so it was an immediate ice breaker. Isn’t that lovely?
My children went back to school this week, and one of them began secondary school which she was so excited about you would think she was going to Disneyland not school, but it lived up to all her expectations which is a relief. She was telling me about her coding lesson, and I had her in stitches laughing at my recollections of a computer class in my school circa 1983 when we all took turns to stand behind Sister Perpetua where she sat at the one and only school computer. The poor nun knew as much about computers as I do about astrophysics so we dutifully watched her type laboriously with one finger. The purpose of this exercise wasn’t made clear at the time or subsequently. How things have changed!
So to the soundtrack of saws and drills but also the peace that mothers know in September when everyone is gone all day, I’m finally getting back to finishing my fourth Queenstown book, called Roaring Liberty and I’m really enjoying it. In it, it’s the Roarin’ Twenties and at the recommendation of my friend Jack, Harp is a flapper and really living life, but of course, trouble lurks, and life is never simple. I will say no more for now but I’m working hard on it.
You can preorder it here if you want to.
PREORDER ROARING LIBERTY BY CLICKING THIS LINK
It feels like the end is in sight with the dreaded C word, at least here anyway, as things are at last beginning to open up. We might even get to see some live music before Christmas. I can’t wait.
So take care of you and yours,
Le grá agus buiochas,
Jean