I've had a plugging-Lucy-Diamond day, and what a strange and memorable one it's been. Very very nice but ever so slightly surreal at the same time...
First up, I did the local run. My publishers (do love saying that) have sent me some spare 'samplers' of the novel they've had printed up (just a chapter or so of the text, in a gorgeous little booklet), so I took a load up to our local shops to see if I could get the shopkeepers to hand them out, as well as dishing out my fliers too. I was just bowled over by the response. I LOVE my local shopkeepers SO MUCH! I do know most of them pretty well as I am there all the time (living the high life, you see) but even so, they all took loads of the samplers and fliers off my hands and wished me well, and wanted to know all about it. It was really, really lovely.
Went into town this afternoon - boring optician's appointment but I seized upon the opportunity to do a prowl around the book shops there too. Borders first - I'm in the 3 for 2s!! Yippeeee!!! I'm in there with all the Richard and Judys and Sarah Waters and Marian Keyes, and oh, just all the names you could want to have your book nestling cosily alongside! So that was really exciting, walking and seeing a pile of them there. Phew. Hot flush of excitement! And upstairs in their fiction shelves, you'll never guess who I'm next to alphabetically... Charles Dickens! My mate Charles! I felt a pang of guilt for having abandoned David Copperfield to the Raw Shark Texts - am LOVING DC but have not managed to finish it this month, thus failing spectacularly on my new year's resolution. Ahem.
Moving swiftly on to... WH Smith, I was in there too, not in any offers but quite a few copies in the Fiction shelves, hooray.
And then to Waterstones, where the books weren't yet on display, but I gave the woman behind the till a load of my fliers to put on the counter and she said, Ooh, I've just put a load of stickers on your book - £3 off!
So all in all, I felt really overwhelmed. I sat on the bus going out of town not quite able to believe it, to be honest. But the best was yet to come...
I got home and there was a table set up outside our house with a pile of the samplers on it and a note in eldest daughter's handwriting - "Free, plees tack one" - and she was sitting out there on a little chair, beaming, saying, "Mum, I've given loads of these away to different ladies!" BLESS!
Like I said, a strange and memorable day. I know it's just a temporary lapse of reality and life will return to its usual pattern soon but I'm having an amazing time right now. Long may it last!
No more wardrobing
2 hours ago