Welcome to my new online home. Since we sold The Edinburgh Bookshop a week or so ago I’ve felt a little bit rootless without the anchor of opening hours and routines of stock ordering and shelving and talking to customers. I’m going to be concentrating on our sadly neglected publishing company, Fidra Books, and that’s going to take up a lot of time – bibliographic data needs to be tidied up, customers to reconnect with, authors conversed with about plans for the future, printers to organise and a sales plan to be devised – but the unfamiliar feeling of freedom still feels strange.
What is interesting though is that since it’s become common knowledge that I’ve moved on from the time-pressured world of bookselling all sorts of interesting people have been suggesting we get together to talk about all sorts of mysterious but interesting-sounding projects so I think freelance life is going to be full of literary wonders.
Hence I decided that I needed a website, this being the digital age and all that. It’s still very much a work-in-progress although I don’t intend to ever make it terribly complicated, but as I owned this domain it seemed sensible to make use of it. This is where I’ll be writing about the books I read, the places I go, some of those mysterious projects when they start to take shape but I daresay there will also be ramblings about other things such as cooking, travel, art and ships and shoes and sealing wax, cabbages and kings. There’s a page up there where I’ll keep track of what I read (old habits and all that) but I need to write a bit of code for that so it won’t be functioning for a few days.
So welcome – take a seat and introduce yourself. I’ll put the kettle on and you bring the biscuits.
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