A few weeks ago, after reading the book, a lovely lady in Nannup told me she thought I should be promoting it more, especially here in Nannup as I’m a local author and suggested I do another book launch. I thought it would be a great opportunity to meet new people in the town and asked how she thought I should go about it. Her reply was classic Nannup “I’ll organise it for you”. And that she did! Organised the venue, the catering, the advertising and even took over the job of taking expressions of interest in order to match that with the catering. We were both blown away by her kindness and as the day grew closer it was easy to see that there was more interest than previous book launches she had attended in Nannup.
We arrived at the venue about 30 minutes before the start time, armed with books, my banner and one of my rapidly becoming famous, Christmas fruit cakes. The venue was already taking shape, especially the refreshments table! The chairs were soon arranged, a table for Denise to take payments for books and me to write messages and sign them. Unlike the first launch where I was completely taken by surprise when I realised I was required to speak, this time I had given it a bit of thought and had at least picked out a couple of chapters in the book which I thought were both interesting and a little funny. I’d also written a short piece about things which had happened in my life since the book was completed.
At the arranged time, most of the seats were taken so the lady organising the event introduced me and the pressure was on. I decided to tell a short version of my beginnings and it just flowed from there. I explained a bit about intersex and how it occurs, my discovery of my beginnings and how my transition came about. I talked a little about my surgery and the months following before reading the two excerpts from the book. It all went exceedingly well and I managed to keep my composure and even told a couple of humorous stories at the end before taking questions.
All in all it was just the perfect event, the right number of people and the venue was ideal. I think I found the right balance between giving enough information without telling the whole story and there were a good number of questions to finish with. To top it all the catering was excellent, my cake went down very well and we made some lovely new friends. Thanks so much to Shirley for suggesting it and doing all the organising. We are blessed to have so many beautiful friends in our lives xx