THOMPSON
The month started off beautifully, with a dinner given by my mate Hilly. At last I had an opportunity to crack a celebratory magnum of champagne that I’d been given for my birthday last July! (Regular readers of this newsletter will know that I was in no mood for merrily quaffing champagne in the latter months of last year because I was doing too much :”0 We raised our glasses in a toast to mega-selling novelist and dear friend Marian Keyes, whose link from her February newsletter to www.katethompsonenterprises.com meant that I had spent 11 happy consecutive hours sending the first 25 chapters of my latest novel to e-mail addresses all over the world! To find out more about this project, please go to www.loveliesbleedingthebook.com. It’s a www Indie first!
fun at last
Looking back, I see
that February was a wonderfully sociable month! There was a party to
celebrate what should have been the birthday of our friend, lighting
designer Rupert Murray, whose untimely death last year rocked the Dublin
theatre world. His wife, Sheelagh, crammed the house with friends – some of
whom I hadn’t seen in a long, long time. Rupert would have loved his party:
we left early at around midnight, but Sheelagh said that there was still
dancing going on downstairs when she headed for bed at around 5.30am! I’m
delighted to say that Rupert won a posthumous award for Best Lighting Design
at the recent Irish Times Theatre Awards. Sheelagh accepted the award on his
behalf, looking beautiful.
There was a vernissage (that’s a posh word for an exhibition opening) for
Robert Armstrong’s new collection of paintings in the Kevin Kavanagh
gallery: the paintings are exquisite! It’s Robert’s first exhibition in five
years: I have an oil-on-canvas of his that I bought back then called ‘Grey
Volcano’, but the titles of his more recent paintings are quite quirky: this
one’s called:
The Valley of the People Who Don’t Know Anything
ARTS LIVES
There was a reception for a new RTE series called Arts Lives, where I met up with producer Ann Roper (she produced the recent documentary on Sheila Wingfield - see below), and presenter Miriam O’Callaghan - who is now officially RTE’s most stylish woman! The three of us worked together as waitresses many years ago, in a burger joint on Dublin’s Grafton Street when we were poverty-stricken students, and sported not stylish designer threads, but boho stuff from charity shops. We reminisced about how we used to pretend we were drinking coffee when our decorous cups were actually full of illicit wine - God knows how any work got done on the nights we gals were waitressing… (Yikes! I hope restaurateur Roly Saul who ran the joint - and now owns his own fab eatery in Dun Laoghaire - isn’t reading this ;)
SOMETHING TO HIDE
My friend Penny Perrick launched her biography on Sheila Wingfield, poetess and late Viscountess Powerscourt. It’s a fascinating, page-turning story of a poor little rich girl who was a thoroughly nasty piece of work. Every time I visit Powerscourt, I imagine what it must have been like to stroll out into those fabulous gardens of a summer morning, sporting a peignoir and nursing a cup of coffee, then settling down on the top terrace to watch the sun rise over the Sugarloaf Mountain. Now I know the place was wasted on the aristocratic, beautiful Ms Wingfield, who spent most of her time there in bed.
lOVE LIES BLEEDING
However, the most exciting party for me last month had to be the book launch for the Clandestine Chapters of Love Lies Bleeding. It was held in Hughes & Hughes bookshop in Dundalk (Hughes & Hughes are exclusive distributors of the book in Ireland). NB: You have to ask for the Clandestine Chapters. They will then be handed to you in a brown paper envelope from under the counter ;-) The honours were done by my dear friend and mentor, bestselling novelist Deirdre Purcell, who said lovely, blush-inducing things about yours truly. We had 9,000 bookmarks printed with the Love Lies Bleeding and Hughes & Hughes logos, and H&H provided wine and scrumptious Irish made chocolates - and for the first time ever I made a proper speech instead of writing a poem and hiding behind it. (People assume that, because I was an actress in a former life I’m comfortable with public speaking, but it scares me to death! That’s why I’ve always composed a ‘speech’ in rhyming couplets on previous book launches, so that I have something to recite, because reciting is - for me - so much easier than speaking extempore.) But this time I managed to speak without flustering or blustering too much. Yay! I’m learning!
After the book launch I
had newspaper and radio interviews to do about this audacious new Indie
venture, and a television appearance on Ireland AM where Mark Cagney –
stalwart champion of Irish writing – expressed his astonishment at the fact
that my publishing house had opted not to renew my contract (he wasn’t the
only one – I’ve had some truly fantastic letters of support from all over
the world). The Nationwide feature that Mary Kennedy filmed in January was aired on RTE
on 9th March, I contributed to an
RTE Drive-Time special on e-publishing, and – most exciting and
ground-breaking news of all - Love Lies Bleeding entered the
magazine top ten book chart! To appear
as an Indie on the Books Page of that savvy publication in the company of
giants like Penguin and Harper Collins and my former publisher Bantam is
some endorsement, so heartfelt thanks are due to Paige (Alison ;) and her
team for their vision and their enterprising spirit in embracing a brand-new
concept. As I write, this is the second week for the book to hit the chart.
Rock on, 
!
WESTPORT WELLNESS
Photo courtesy of
Michael McLaughlin
After all the activity, it was bliss to get out of Dublin for the last weekend of the month. I was invited by the organizers of Westport Wellness Week to spend time unwinding in the Ocean Spa at Hotel Westport and the Salveo Spa at Knockranny House. Here’s a picture of me doing just that (at the Salveo) and unashamedly promoting one of my own books (I thought A Perfect Life was appropriate, given the nature of the occasion!) Anyway, both Spas are sybaritic havens, and yet another reason to visit the West of Ireland - my home from home. Hotel Westport put us up in one of their deluxe suites, and we were showered with loads of delicious goodies from Matis and Elemis and Gilchrist & Soames (I stole the latter G&S freebies from the suite. Sorry – my hotel kleptomania knows no bounds.) ’Twas a fabulous, FABULOUS weekend: find out more about the treats that await you at both hotels by going to www.hotelwestport.ie and www.khh.ie
MORE FREEBIES
More freebies came our way courtesy of our friend Ciarán who was in Dublin last month to accept an IFTA for Best Actor (as Caesar in BBC’s Rome). I couldn’t go this year because the ceremony was on the same night as the Love Lies Bleeding launch, but the goodie bags this time were even better than last: a set of Mac make-up brushes, Waterford crystal champagne flutes, bling earrings, and fine wine. Because Ciarán doesn’t wear earrings, he gave them to my daughter. I got the make-up brushes, Mal got the champagne flutes, and we all drank the wine. Let’s hope C. gets another nomination next year, so we can get more freebies: Lordie, I am such a sucker for them! I even buy beauty products I don’t need (well – I do need them, of course I do, but I don’t need them, if you know what I mean) if they’re giving away bags full of miniature freebies: just got my Lancôme ones today – more make-up brushes, and I haven’t a clue what half of them are for.
5 STAR REVIEWS
Hm. What else? Well, my star rating on Amazon for Sex, Lies & Fairytales has gone up again. I now have twelve 5-star reviews up there (click here to read). And don’t imagine for one moment that I pen them myself, or ask mates to write them. I once read a cautionary tale about Canadian Amazon when something drastic happened to their privacy settings and all the real names and addresses of the people who’d posted reviews were displayed online. Apparently loads of authors had written glowing reviews of their own work, and really shite reviews about all their rivals’ novels (that’s partly where I got the idea for a plot device used in Sex, Lies & Fairytales). So you can appreciate that I don’t want my name attached to a review of one of my own books that goes: ‘This is the best book ever written in the history of the Universe!!! No exceptions!!! Buy it now!!!’
EMPTY NEST SYNDROME 2
What else, what else…? Oh, yes – you may remember that I spoke in my last newsletter about Empty Nest Syndrome? On the last day of February – I got a text from my daughter saying: i have been nominated to go to japan next year to study in keio university…i have to fill out my application form…am I going to do this? I promptly texted back: YES!!! – then burst into floods of tears. She’s living half an hour’s walk away from me now – how will I feel when she’s on the other side of the world? I can’t bear to think what I’ll be like when we say our farewells to her in the airport next September…
BOOKTRIBES
Ooh – one more thing. May I direct you to a really wonderful new website? It’s a kind of MySpace for book lovers, and it’s the best online book discussion forum I’ve ever come across, since the sad demise of Bibliofemme last year. Go to www.booktribes.com for a browse. I’ve posted a few comments, but I always feel a bit shy about doing that in case people think I’m bluffing. The books I’ve commented on are an eclectic bunch, and include George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Camilla Morton’s How to Walk in High Heels.
THANK YOU
To finish, I just want to say a really heartfelt thank-you to everyone who has written such wonderful letters of support to me (for a sample, please click here). As you can imagine, this has been a hugely stressful time, and your mail has kept me buoyant. It is fantastic to know that people out there are cheering the pair of us on (by the pair of us, I mean Mal! He is the one who came up with this idea, after all!) I’d also like to take this opportunity to apologise to Kathy in Australia for getting the order wrong, and to say thank-you to Oonagh, who turned up at the Love Lies Bleeding launch even though the weather that evening was atrocious and even though she had a late shift to get to, and to say thank-you to Sue, who spotted a glitch which has since been corrected! As Pixie says in Sex, Lies & Fairytales – my fans are my lifeblood. Please keep the faith. I salute and bow down to you all.
♥♥♥
from
Kate
PS: ORDERING BOOKS
to buy
By the way, while Sex, Lies and Fairytales is available to buy or to order in all good bookshops in Ireland, the UK and the Commonwealth, Hard to Choos is available to buy direct from booksellers only in Ireland at present. Should you wish to buy the book from Amazon, clicking here will take you straight to the sales point. You can also order Hard to Choos from Pixie's site. Lots of you are wondering where my backlist can be purchased. Amazon is good, of course, but my Transworld titles are also available - with free P&P in the UK - at Bookpost. (Just key in the title name in inverted commas - ie: "More Mischief")
to buy
© Kate Thompson, 2007
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