Much needed update on things to come...

It's been far too long since my last post, BUT I'm glad to report that I now see the end of the tunnel ! Translation is actually finished. I'm rereading the whole thing, and it is going smoothly as well. Almost there !

Plus, there is much in the pipeline...

I entered a contest to win a book, the other day, and I WON ! Little me, who never, ever wins anything. But the best of the best is that I discovered an author who grew up as an expat and a military brat. Kimberly Willis Holt won the National Book Award for her novel, When Zachary Beaver Came to Town. That's the book I won, by the way. And now, she has another novel out with a global child as the protagonist. Piper Reed Navy Brat.

Kimberly is holding a blog tour, and, AND, AND, she kindly agreed to stop here on Thursday to answer a few questions. How fitting that my first author interview should be with an author who had the kind of childhood that inspires much of my writing !

As life would have it, this happened on the day that my little one - 3 and half - had to say good bye to her very best friend of two years - these two were truly inseparable from the moment they could communicate with a few words. The family is leaving Hyderabad and moving to London, and I feel so sad for my daughter, because I know it will be hard for her. This is the downside of expatriate life. There are many wonderful advantages : we get to travel a lot, we live in different countries, and we experience different cultures as well. It's very enriching and I don't imagine life any other way anymore. But, as for everything, it's not all about plane tickets, and exotic destinations ; being an expatriate also means that every two, three or four years, we have to move again. We pack everything up - actually, that's pretty good because we then get rid of all the junk we manage to pile up even in so short a time - change house, get used to a new environment, to new languages, new people and new ways of doing things, of saying them, of expressing them. And, just as important, it also means that we have to say good bye to people. I'm an adult, and my social skills are rather poor, anyway, so I'm used to that. But my heart breaks every time my children have to part with their friends. My older daughter went through that when we moved from Nigeria to India, and again last spring, when her best friend left Hyderabad. And now, it's the little one.

So, how serendipitous that I should discover Kimberly Willis Holt just now, as she's about to start a blog tour to promote her last novel, which covers precisely that theme. I'm so thrilled that a book out there is recounting this type of experiences. I cant wait to read Kimberly's thoughts about it.