Now on Sale…

25 January 2011 by Conor Published in: Little Princes, Nepal, Next Generation Nepal, Travel No comments yet

Almost exactly two years after first deciding to write this book, Little Princes goes on sale today.

I’m a little bit surprised that it’s actually kind of emotional for me. I’m not really the emotional type – I’ve got too much Irish blood in me, maybe. (Irish men cry just long enough to clear the amniotic fluid from their lungs, then it’s stiff upper lip until cremation.)

I’m not about to burst out in tears or anything, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t caught off guard by how much this day meant to me. I resisted writing this book at first, for various reasons. But the fact is that to write a book was a life-long dream of mine. I never, ever thought I would do it, and I surely never thought that if I did, it would ever get published.

But here we are. A book is coming out today with my name on it. It seems so strange, like somehow it just happened without me. I’m not sure how to explain it, except that it’s all so unlikely.

I want to write about some of the pre-publicity tour stuff, because it was such a hoot, and I will very soon. But at the moment I’m just going to leave it at that, with the shortest and most boring blog entry ever, because I feel like anything I would write in this moment would be false. My mind would be somewhere else.

My mind would be, probably, wondering what my father is thinking. He continues to be a wonderful poet. He taught me, from high school on, how to write; by that I mean that he taught me how to get excited about writing. He taught me to learn the rules backwards and forwards and always be conscious of which ones you were breaking. He showed me, from quite a young age, how it’s all in the re-writing – that turning in a first draft is akin to going out on stage after only looking over your lines once. How if you just keep tapping and sanding and polishing, you’ll turn a hunk of rock into something beautiful. As lazy as I was in college, I never once turned in a paper without editing it at least once, even if it was five a.m. the morning before it was due.

So I dedicate this moment to my father, Eamon Grennan. He never could have known that I would join the family business any more than I could have known it. But what a joy to share it with him.