Dragon Bones Has Arrived

video of the opening

When the woman behind the post office counter asked me what I was picking up, I said, “Books.” One day in the future, it may be such a common experience that I stop there. Not this day. I knew that the small box she brought out from the back room contained my free copies. In a whisper torn between excitement and embarrassment, I said, “Twenty books actually. I just got published.”

There should have been drums. There should have been trumpets. Instead, so late in the afternoon, there was a post office empty of customers besides me and only one clerk. “Ooh, you clever thing,” she said. It would have to do.

It’s been a long wait. I returned from Bhutan at the end of 2006 with a collection of anecdotes from my experiences. It then took a year to write them up, a year to edit and another two years of working through the process of getting published. That doesn’t count the years I spent learning to write in the first place.

So you can imagine how little time it took me, once through my front door, to tear open the box and pull the topmost book out. My name, Murray Gunn, sat discretely in the bottom corner, well below the large print declaring that the book contained DRAGON BONES. I’d never been a fan of the cover, but had been outvoted by… well, everyone who’d seen it. They were right. It looks fantastic!

It’s apparently on sale in Hong Kong already, but it will be another couple of months until it’s available anywhere else, so the twenty in my possession are a rare commodity. It will be my pleasure to give them to the people who most directly contributed to the book.

I was alone on the evening they arrived, so the video here is a re-enactment for my girlfriend and flatmate the following evening. The excitement is still real.