It's a Funny Feeling You Get...

26.6.2023

It's a Funny Feeling You Get...

It would be a gross overstatement to liken the feeling alluded to, above, to that of a castaway throwing an SOS out to sea in a bottle, then sighting a rescue ship's smoke on the horizon.

There were funny feelings queueing up as I prepared to publish my first novel. Some of these were actually funny, such as when being utterly certain there were no more typos to detect in the manuscript...

Others were the other kind of funny: not funny at all. These are locked in the vault.

But, as most everybody knows, in the moment a funny feeling turns up, it demands all one's attention.

There were funny feelings when my book first came out, though, that particular funny feeling fades quickly away. There's the funny feeling when the book travels—first, to neighbouring suburbs and further afield in your own state, to places with delightful names such as Storm King, Queensland. Covering ground as quickly as a cane toad, interstate travel is on, with sightings of The Last Promise in locales including Unanderra, New South Wales, over the border to Victoria and thence to South Australia.

But intercontinental travel is what we craved! Those funny feelings are different: they're...foreign—foreign in a funny way, mind you, and I had those funny, inexplicable feelings when word came from Canada, special funny feelings when Ireland took possession of a copy (I wrote most of it there), then Italy and Spain and The Untied (oops! I'll leave that there) Kingdom.

But there's nothing like the funny feeling I got when I saw this!

You could give me one of those funny feelings...

TA