Dancing the flamenco with my readers

Yesterday, after hours spent wandering the streets of Sevilla, eyes wide at the beauty of this city, I came home to my apartment to spend my allocated hours doing the final, pre-publication proofing of my novel The Hidden.

It was a strange sensation; feeling in every pore of my being the sultriness of this city with its heat, flamenco bars on every corner, and super-talented Spanish guitarists busking for austerity euros, as tourists and locals alike drink their cerveza and eat their tapas; and then diving back into the proofing of my novel - set in Cairo with its spies, terrorists, prostitutes and wannabe dictators, with its raw life on the streets, a sort of mirror image of life here.

I got to thinking there is a remarkable similarity between these two narratives going on at the moment; the real-life, in-the-now Sevillano narrative and the fictional Cairene narrative of my novel.

And then something happened.....

I connected with and came across a small group of readers, through social media, who told me how much they loved my writing. At that point, everything made sense.

This small group told me they loved my stories, and thanked me for 'taking them away' into another world, a place where they could learn about life from an electric perspective, raw to the bone.

I fell in love with this group of readers; these wonderful individuals who took time to tell me what they thought of my writing and my stories.

So I am dedicating this blog post to them. I don't want to name names, because I don't want to embarrass them but now is the time to get personal and write them a little message, within this 'message'.

So here it is:-

"To my dear readers, thank you for loving my stories, thank you for reading them....I used to write novels with no reader in mind, just this crazy, driven desire to understand the world by running a microscope over the minutiae of human experience, in different locations, in different times. I was always driven to do this and it was probably a selfish experiment, something to do with therapizing my own inner craziness, trying to come to terms with why I am such a traveller, in need of foreign languages and foreign cultures, like a junkie in need of heroin.....

"But now, I am going to write all my future novels with you people in mind and dedicate my writings to you. Thank you for dancing the flamenco with me."