On Yeats day 2015, I travelled to Dublin to collect a first edition copy of WB Yeat's short story collection, The Secret Rose, from the lovely Tanya Collie of Broadford books.
This first edition was purchased by a Mr Danny O'Sullivan as part of my crowdfunder project, that allowed me to produce a special book for #Yeats2015, the 150th anniversary of his birth.
I wanted to put his stories together with my novel Her Secret Rose, that tells the story behind the writing of the stories. And produce it in a special replica edition of tthe 1897 edition.
Thanks to Mr O'Sullivan and other Yeats fans, it's happening: the book is now in preparation.
I will be making only 500 print copies, which will be numbered and for sale only on this website after publication.
I'm also making an ebook. If you'd like to be one of the first readers of the ebook, you can preorder your copy here.
I wouldn't be the writer I am without Yeats. Indeed, I possibly wouldn't be a writer at all without Yeats.
His own story, and sense of himself as a writer, as a magician, as a man, has always fascinated me. As has the muse who inspired all three of these dimensions of his self.
This book has taken me over a decade to research and get right, doing a bit, going away to work on other things, coming back to it. I think it's the best thing I've done so far.
And now that I have had the opportunity to produce this special edition, I feel like it was waiting all that time for self-publishing to happen, so I could deliver this tribute to the master and the marvellous Maud.