Preparing for a September launch

 

(L to R) Sariah, Mary and Jen preparing to record

It was an amazing and exciting day at the McAdam Railway Station and Hotel yesterday.

Abigail authors Mary O'Keefe and Mark Walma met with Jennifer Yamazaki, Operations Manager for the Station, and Sariah Murray, newly hired summer student, to start to implement the promotional campaign for Mary's upcoming Abigail novel, Unclaimed Baggage. 

The day started with a lovely surprise: McAdam Historical Restoration Commission mainstays Gail Swan, Frank Carroll and Elsie Carroll joined the group for a coffee and a catch-up chat. It's hard to believe that 14 years ago the first meeting took place involving the Abigail creative team (represented by Mark, Mary and Mark's partner Patti) and the Commission's executive, which included Gail, Frank and Elsie!

Getting set up

So much has happened since then and the morning coffee was a wonderful opportunity for the group of friends to compare notes about their lives and the Abigail Massey journey they have all shared.

There was a lot of laughter, some tears and a number of stories shared, making it hard for Jennifer to get the group refocused on the task at hand: recording a series of videos featuring Mary and Mark in preparation for a summer of promotion for the new novel.

But focus we did. With Sariah serving as interviewer and Jen staffing the camera, Author Mary turned out to be a natural, providing eloquent, heart-warming and fascinating answers to the questions Sariah posed. Mary was so good, in fact, we nicknamed her "One-Take Mary" since she rarely needed more than one try to deliver a wonderful performance.

Mark was almost as smooth and the day, which we expected to be a long one, wound up early with photos on the Station platform and a delicious lunch at the newly refurbished McAdam Cafe.

The new novel!

Now it's up to Jen and Sariah to take the raw video and begin to prepare it (editing, cropping, adding titles) for posting throughout the coming months. This is all in preparation for the Book Launch Event for Unclaimed Baggage, which is now scheduled for late September (likely the 25th).

Even as we were wrapping things up in McAdam, we received word from Lynn Walma in Ontario that yesterday she picked up a printed sample of the new novel at the printers for our final review before the entire run is printed! It's beautiful.