tumble in the wild

Well it’s been an insane year, and doesn’t look like returning to sanity any time soon.

I’m still oscillating back and forward between elation and terror about having my new book out in the world – joy at the thing existing, and being out of my hands and making its way on its own. But also terror, because it’s out of my hands, and I no longer have even the last fleeting, tatty, threadbare-with-visible-buttock-through-my-pants remnants of control over how it fares in the big wide world.

I had a combination bounce of joy/lurch of terror (a borch? a lurnce?) at seeing it in Scorpio a couple of weeks ago:

My surname means it’s a couple of shelves down, but hey, if Krispin’s cover doesn’t draw your eye, nothing will.

Then there were the two interviews I did on radio coming out within a few days of each other, one with Lynn Freeman on Radio NZ (Canterbury writer Joanna Preston’s eclectic collection ), and one with Morrin Rout on Plains FM (I’m in the second half, after Ruth Todd interviews the amazing Anne Kennedy).

And now tumble has turned up as one of the Unforgettable New Zealand reads in the Meri Kirihimaete mailer from kete – I think it turned up in the weekend newspapers, but am not sure exactly where. Mille (my mother-in-law) found it, and sent it home with Stewart:

Very cool! And also terrifying. And one of my students said there was a long waiting list of people wanting to borrow it from her library in Auckland … (Alternatively you could buy it? Just a thought.)

So there it is. Out of my hands, and doing its own thing in the wild.

I just hope it remembers to wash its hands.

ps – I haven’t forgotten about the competition. Or the playlist. They’re coming, so stay tuned …