On a map. Also, a train. And inside a book. Basically, I've been everywhere this weekend. Except to the gym.

Wow.  LOTS of writerly things going on this weekend.  All very exciting. The main thing is, I now have a couple of copies of Stations.  Yes, it's actually a real book now!  Look!

and, even more excitingly, for me at least, look!

There it is!  My story, in AN ACTUAL BOOK.  I am so excited about this that I literally have not stopped smiling all weekend.

More about all that later (come on, you really didn't think this was the last time I was going to mention it, did you?) but in the meantime, here's a map*:

And here's a little video we made on the train.  Basically, what you will see in my part of this video is me trying very hard not to explode with excitement and joy while reading the first few lines of my story FROM AN ACTUAL BOOK.**  You can decide for yourself whether or not I succeed. (Spoiler alert:  I don't entirely succeed.)   How I am going to cope with reading the whole thing in front of an audience,  while maintaining my cool, I have no idea.  I might have to resort to reading a print out; looking at the book is just TOO MIND-BLOWINGLY EXCITING***.

Oh yes, readings.  We are doing some.  There is going to be an official launch on December 2nd, which I'm going to and where some people will be reading, but I don't know if I'm one of them yet; there's an event at Brick Lane Books on December  6th and another one at the Ideas Store in Whitechapel in January, and I'm reading at both of those, and there are various other events going on in between, which should all be listed here. 

Helpfully, just as I'm starting to think about maybe practising for those readings, I received a fantastic audio recording of the first two thirds of Bloody Marys today - read by  a very nice sounding man (with a wonderful voice) who did a superb job of bringing my characters to life.  The recording was made by some radio production students, as part of their course-work and I absolutely love it - fingers crossed they'll give me permission to post that here, too.

So lots of Stations excitement this weekend.  But that's not all I've been doing.  I've also managed to squeeze out 5000 words of my NaNoWriMo project so far, most of which are completely ghastly but it's NaNoWriMo, so you know, that's sort of the point; and I've joined in with  a twitter-based storytelling experiment, via my new alter-ego, @FitnessDee

I managed to send one of her tweets from my personal account by mistake this morning, causing a certain amount of confusion for those twitter friends who know me in real life:

Luckily, I noticed and managed to put the record straight:

I'm already having a lot of fun being @FitnessDee;  if you want to get involved in the story, you can  -  details can be found here.

So it's been a busy weekend.  And it's going to be an even busier November.  Lots going on, but all of it good, and somehow in between it all I've got another 45 000 words to write for NaNoWriMo.  Don't suppose any one has an extra November they can lend me?



* I've been meaning to post this map for a while, and was even going to say something like "if you look at the map really closely, and you know your train stations, you should be able to work out the title of my Hoxton story".  Which is  still true, of course, but since the title of my Hoxton story is right there in the photo above, it's a slightly moot point.

**Actually, that's not all you'll see.  You'll also see my new coat.  So now you know.

***I don't mean this to sound as glib as I fear it probably does.  I am genuinely, properly excited and pleased and proud of the book.  And I do plan to write a longer blog post which explains why.