I have been told that my new book, Mountain Tails, has arrived! It is probably at my post office right now, for me to collect next week when the road dries out and the creek level drops!
I can hardly wait, even though I have of course read it – the real book is quite a different matter from an on-screen or A4 manuscript.
What will it feel and smell like? Will I cry as I did when I first held ‘The Woman on the Mountain’? Will my drawings look OK in actual print? Will I find any missing commas?
It is also heading for bookshops all round the country, but Exisle, my publishers, have made a special arrangement for my web site visitors — you can buy Mountain Tails at a special 20 per cent discount by ordering from the Exisle website here and quoting the coupon number MT2009; you can use that coupon any number of times.
This collection of short pieces about my wild animal neighbours here in my wildlife refuge is accompanied by my black and white drawings, and hopefully it will amuse, intrigue and educate readers as much as the critters themselves do for me.
In raising awareness of their uniqueness, it also aims to raise awareness of the plight of our threatened and endangered species, and at the end I have included lists of ways to get involved for those who want to help, and contacts for doing so.
I will be giving talks at various places and as Exisle arranges them I’ll put up posts to let you know. Always good to meet my readers, such as Kez at East Maitland last year.
Many events wlll be before Mother’s Day, as Exisle think it will make a great Mother’s Day gift.
PS: I have it! A dear little book, but the only time I felt like crying was at the dedication to my Dad, whom I still miss terribly. Exisle have again done a beautiful job of production – designer Nanette is so attuned to the tone of a work that I can’t imagine a different cover now.
Yes, I’d like to redo one or two drawings that don’t look so good at the reduced size; but mostly I just wanted to add all the other animal events that have happened since, dozens of postscripts needed – or a second collection in a year or so? I had forgotten that, for example, the whole python saga was after the manuscript had been sent off!