I am a 44-year-old mother from Stillorgan.
This 86,000-word book took me six weeks to write before circumstances forced it onto the back burner for a while.
In July 2012 I discovered that I had an irregular heartbeat. I saw a cardiologist and he discovered I had
‘Atrial Fibrillation’ and a slight leak in one of the valves in my heart.
This surprised me as up to that point I was (and still am) quite fit.
At the time I was training for my fourth consecutive Dublin Marathon.
Part of the process for correcting the heart condition was a procedure called cardio version where the heart is shocked back into normal rhythm.
I was also put on a strong anti-coagulant as a precaution and all seemed fine. At a subsequent check-up in January of this year it was decided that, as there was a minimal risk of developing clots, the anti-coagulant could be reduced to very low level.
All was fine until two months later.
On March 20, as I was driving my two girls to school (aged five and eight) I suffered a stroke in the car. Thankfully I was able to pull the car over and phone my husband who, luckily, hadn’t left for work at that stage.
On admittance to the Beacon Hospital they discovered that this was actually the second of two strokes. I was told I had been exceptionally lucky and that it could have been a devastating stroke had I not been on medication to reduce clots.
I didn’t suffer any speech or paralysis as a result. I did, however, suffer some sight loss which put editing the book on hold even further.
I decided then and there to get this book out as it has always been my dream to be a writer.
The idea for Scumbags & Handbags came to me during my training sessions with the Gaelic for Mothers team in Kilmacud Crokes where my imagination ran wild.
The main character, the scumbag Robbie King, was created at a writers’ retreat weekend in Askeaton at 5.15am when a very persistent rooster woke me up.
The first chapter of the book was written as an exercise for that course and it just flowed from there.
Scumbags & Handbags is the story of two men, worlds apart, who collide in a hilarious romp through ladies Gaelic football.
When Dublin toe-rag Robbie King gets sentenced to community service at an affluent GAA club, his politically incorrect gob takes a lot of getting used to. He meets Tommy Boylan, the greatest Gaelic footballer to come out of Dublin. A moment of madness 20 years ago destroyed Tommy’s career.Now he’s back and yearning for acceptance, so he agrees to take on the job no-one wants.
To train a bunch of overweight, unfit, pelvic floor leaking mammies to play football.
But there’s a problem. –
‘The Hawk’, a deranged criminal and Robbie’s real boss. When Robbie makes a mistake the Gaelic for Mothers team find themselves in the middle of a five million euro cocaine haul. The Hawk is out for revenge and will stop at nothing to get it.
Scumbags & Handbags is available in paperback from www. Amazon.com or www.amazon.co.uk and can be downloaded as an eBook on Kindle and all other platforms.
Ideally I would love to hook up with a distributor in order to get it into bookstores.
I am in negotiations with local book shops so hopefully it will be possible to buy off the shelves as well.