A big thanks to all the readers of The View from the Blue House and especially those that left comments during 2010. On the personal front, the past year has been a relatively good one, even if it was a catastrophic one for the country as the crisis deepened and it fell into the clutches of the IMF.
On the reading front. I read some great fiction in 2010, discovered loads of new authors and caught up with some favourites. A great big thank you to all the authors I’ve read over the year for taking the time to write and share your stories. I'll announce my books of the year in the next day or so.
On the blogging front. I wrote 317 posts on The View from the Blue House and about another 100 on
Ireland After NAMA. More importantly, I got great enjoyment from reading a host of other blogs and developed a number of online friendships (even though I’m more of a lurker than a commenter) and I’d like to thank everyone all for their posts. In particular, the
Crime and Mystery Fiction Friendfeed has been a great way to track postings and to discuss them.
On the writing front. I had two books published in 2010:
The White Gallows, the second McEvoy book, and the second edition of
Key Thinkers on Space and Place. I also co-edited six issues of
Progress in Human Geography and put the first issue of
Dialogues in Human Geography to bed and it’ll be out in March. I finished off the third McEvoy novel, Ghostland, and discovered Harry and Pete, two workshy cops on the slow road to retirement. I’m presently working on a Harry and Pete novel,
Good Cop, Bad Cop, and thoroughly enjoying their company, even if they are a pair of chancers. The first Harry and Pete short story was shortlisted for Jason Duke’s red hot writing competition and led to signing with
DHS Literary Agency at the end of the year. I also gave my first reading at Kildare Reader’s festival – and made a hames of it!
On the media front. My research was covered over 200 times in the local, national and international media. I also had a handful of opinion pieces published in the Irish Times and Sunday Business Post and made a short documentary for RTE. It’ll no doubt quieten down in 2011, which is probably no bad thing as it takes up a fair bit of time.
On the work front. As ever it’s generally been a pleasure to go into work given I have a great set of colleagues in the most collegial university in Ireland. The highlights were a €5.2m grant as a lead PI on a project to create a National Audio Visual Repository and securing the future of the Institute with four core funded posts and just about managing to raise the funds to keep everyone else going.
I’m looking forward to what 2011 brings. I hope you all have a great year.
I'm reading Kate Atkinson's Case Histories at the minute. In the space of one paragraph she asks two interesting but difficult questions.
