Launching Spine

 I had a wonderful time launching Spine at The Harrison Chambers of Distinction on the evening of 27th June 2025. It was very, very warm, and full of the sort of hazy sunshine high summer evenings can bring, always on the cusp of breaking into a deluge. A pregnant evening, always promising a storm, a storm that, happily, never came.  

I worked the room, I sold and signed a lot of books - I'm running quite low on Fine! - and it was just so much fun. It's not always a terrific lark being a writer. I'm not complaining - obviously, I am complaining  - but a lot of it is rejection and earning absolutely no money and promises broken and snubs and gossip. Occasionally you'll write something you think is pretty great, but that's as good as it gets. But the launching of a book, and people turning up to celebrate you and it, to listen to you chuntering on - I did a speech for the first time - and I planned two readings, and they made me do a third. It was yer actual public demand. It was like a dream. 

I stood in the bar of the most beautiful hotel in Belfast, leaning on a grand piano, and read a lengthy description of opening my bowels into a hospital commode, twenty three years earlier. 

That may be a first for Belfast. 

I've done three book launches in just over a year and they've all been wonderful. 

What I haven't done are those follow up book tours, where you turn up in a book shop in a town where no one has heard of you and you have to explain that, yes, it IS a book about having a bad back, and you sit at a card table between two towers of unsold books, making casual conversation with the shop's owner, until it's time to scoop the books back into a holdall and head for the train station. Those I haven't done. Maybe I should. It's probably character building. 

Like I haven't built enough characters over the years. 

It'll be a long time before my next launch. My next novel, How Ghost Affect Relationships, isn't due to be published until March 2027. 

I have no books out next year. 

The hell am I going to do with myself?