Been resting for days to be okay for some storytelling today at 4pm at the Edinburgh Book Festival. *I like how the banner photo makes me look like I was standing - I
was sitting and managed to kick a glass of water over during the
reading, naturally.
I'm very proud to be doing this wee ten minute book fest slot today. Take note, Wessely school: people with this illness do everything they can to achieve, in spite of it all!!! (Just realised am shelved above James Joyce, that makes me smile.)
I feel like a bad citizen. My library books are overdue - can't renew them online as others want them - but I've had to measure out energy like gold coins and am not certain I'll get them back by the end of the week.
I'm very proud to be doing this wee ten minute book fest slot today. Take note, Wessely school: people with this illness do everything they can to achieve, in spite of it all!!! (Just realised am shelved above James Joyce, that makes me smile.)
I feel like a bad citizen. My library books are overdue - can't renew them online as others want them - but I've had to measure out energy like gold coins and am not certain I'll get them back by the end of the week.
12 comments:
That's wonderful news, NMJ!
Thanks, Andrea, for your kind words. Lovely to have a platform for my voice - three whole years after TSoM came out. HarperCollins sent up some books for the festival shop, always thrilling to see them lined up like this! I just hope some book tourists - there are visitors from all over the world - take a risk on a writer they have probably not heard of. TSOM will bring them into a world they never knew existed. ;)
And the writer's yurt was lovely too. My first time in there, a hallowed spot! So cosy and relaxing with its carpets and cushions and the rain battering on top.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/aug/15/edinburgh-book-festival-yurts-nicola-morgan
I have that weird ME/adrenaline thing now where you are shattered but all neuro-jangled too and can't sleep. I went to bed and got up again.
So excited for you, hope it was wonderful.
Fab-u-lous!
Thanks, greenwords and sylv, it was gorgeous and lovely experience - the writer's yurt is an oasis, I want to live there! - but am totally shattered today. I think I sound a bit frail in the audio clip - diffident even - prob a mix of nerves and co-codamol... I think I prefer my feisty self in the What About Me? promotion clip which I have recently reinstalled in my sidebar - after Wesselymania week, I felt the need. Sylv, don't know if you ever saw this. Double D Productions were going to partially dramatise TSoM at one point but it fell through, though I am still v pleased to have the teaser trailer for reference.
http://vimeo.com/10536172
Hope you are both doing okay, my dears.
...though I'm pleased I made the point in wee interview that my story Parched actually originated ten years ago. That is what is so lovely about writing, you can always go back - the writing is always there even if you can't/don't finish it at the time. Nothing is wasted.
So glad it went well. I was thinking of you and cheering you on.
Just read your stories. They are wonderful x
Thanks, Amy. I said elsewhere - i think - The Bangle Man was my contribution to the fundraising anthology 50 Stories for Pakistan in 2010, and Parched was in my former uni's online lit magazine - From Glasgow To Saturn - earlier this year. Nice to see them together like this. I am hardly prolific, but every little counts ;)
I thought Parched was beautifully understated as a story.
I wanted also to say thank you for writing The State of Me - it's perfectly pitched: witty and warm, so appealing to a wide readership, but also communicating the reality of living with ME. A really good read.
PS Have you seen Jim Jarmusch's film Coffee and Cigarettes. It's a series of vignettes; various people meet over coffee and cigarettes. Lots of shots of people drinking from cups and playing with them! Reading Parched, I thought you might like it.
Thank you kindly, Katy.
I did see Coffee & Cigs a long time ago, hazy now though, Tom Waits is in it or does the music?
I listened online and enjoyed reading the stories ... and hearing your voice! Well done!
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