Friday 27 March 2015

Lessons learnt.

This week has been manic, first excitement when Suzy Turner and I spent the day going through every full stop on the manuscript in preparation the publish on Kindle. Then anticipation when I pressed the send button and had to wait for the book to go live, which it did later that day. Over come with excitement I made the mistake of trying to tell everyone, which I guess was quite a natural thing to do. Then this morning I decided to down load a sample from amazon, and am I glad I did because I saw mistakes that had been corrected looking up at me. Shock and panic struck, all I could think of was the fact that others were going to see an unprepared copy, how sloppy and how unprofessional. Then I thought about the fact that people may have downloaded it, I felt so bad and didn't have a clue what I should do about it. Suzy being my mentor was the first person I contacted but of all days I couldn't get in touch with her, suddenly I had the unrealistic thoughts that hundreds of people could be looking at the book while I was panicking; not true of course. At the time of my panic I had an email from JB Johnson who a book reviewer and promotor, who better to pour my heart out to. I was soon reassured that these things can happen and that it could all be sorted out with a bit of tweaking.  

Once my personal Wonder Women was on board things began to unravel. We unpublished the book and set about finding the error, which seemed to have occurred during the process of copying from open office to the word doc. What we had failed to do was preview after we'd made the changes and switched from one to the other. For me a massive learning curve to check everything, then check and check again. We can't trust just because it looks okay to the eye. These computers have hidden Gremlins and probably some of the Trolls from Suzy Turners YA fantasy books.

Good news it has now been republished and I'm just waiting confirmation. I will check it out again before I get excited and put it on face book.

Happy Days xx

Sunday 22 March 2015

A fresh start

The last post the I wrote was under very sad circumstances and looking back I found it hard to believe how much time had passed. So loads to catch up on, but trying to play catch up can be such a difficult thing to do. It would be fair to say that life seemed to stand still for a year after DJ died, I wasn't reading anything and definitely couldn't concentrate on writing or being creative in anyway. In many ways I just wanted everything to stop but of course it doesn't, life just keeps moving forward whether we are taking part or not.

A change came for me early hours one morning, I couldn't sleep and decided to open my kindle at a book a friend had recommended, Waking the Merrow by Helen Rigney, I just loved the character Evie and could not stop laughing at the way she was portrayed; worth reading. I just couldn't put the book down and was hooked again on reading. In August 2014 just over a year on from DJ I decided to write again. Instead of going back to my previous manuscript Perceptions, I decided to write something very different and new.

A fresh start needed a fresh story one that had been bouncing around in my head for some time. It's primarily a story about two families with additional characters that bring the story to life giving it twists and turns.
When tragedy strikes, the lives of two families are torn apart. Although the families live on opposite sides of the town the members of both families experience the pain of grief, betrayal and deception.
Everything becomes clear and is revealed when a specialist team of police officers are deployed from London to the town of Millbrook, investigating an international criminal, Yakov Volkov, who they suspect to be carrying out illegal activities in the area. 

I wish I could say that I worked diligently everyday for hours but I didn't. I picked it up and put it down depending on my mood or the time I had. I found myself writing just for my own pleasure and to maintain a positive attitude, however as the story began to unfold I actually believed it had some mileage and decided to take it bit more seriously. Once I had finished and beta readers had gone through the manuscript I decided to have an editor on the case. The feed back was positive and encouraging even with the corrections that seemed to glare up at me from the page. I tried not to be fazed by the red marker and became increasingly determined to complete the task to publication.  We now have the finishing post in sight. The book is with a final reader, it will be out there and I will officially be an indie author, how great is that. 

COMING VERY SOON :




 

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