There is a special kind of madness that descends on your brain when you fill in an arts funding application.

Day one: you are a writer with a story to tell.

Day two: you are an accountant.

Day three: you are a project manager.

Day four: you are a risk analyst, a disability access consultant, and apparently also a person who knows what AAR means. (Don’t ask, I’ve already forgotten!)

I submitted mine today. Two years. Thirty-nine activities. One novel about Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes. One child’s voice. One very tired writer.

Catherine Corless is the historian whose research uncovered the remains of almost 800 infants at the Tuam Mother and Baby Home. Yep, the woman who made Ireland face what it had buried, literally and otherwise. She read the opening chapter of my novel yesterday. Pinch me moment!

She said the writing was too real to call fiction.

That will do me.

The Hut is coming.