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A Month is a Short Time in Publishing

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There is something reassuring that as much as technology and society seems to be speeding up the world around us, that writing and publishing still work on a slower time scale because until someone can come up with an algorithm smart enough to edit and understand natural languages, the editing and layout of stories is still something people have to do, at least for now.

Sure computers have sped the process up massively and I can use an application to compare files to make sure only the changes I have marked up have been carried out, but at various points I’ve still had to check the pages by eye and print off copies to read. I don’t always do this for editing, but if you want to take a really close look at the text then there is really no substitute for holding it in your hand as there is a difference between reading a text on a computer screen rather than paper.

I feel like I am getting better at this process, but it inevitably takes more time when you have to find an hour here or there round a full time job to do it. Heidi, who is the person coordinating my book’s journey through production at Troubador has been wonderfully patient and although I did find a handful of edits from the last typeset I wrote about here, the text is now set and we’re just working through the last few layout tweaks before I can pass it for press.

What has been finished is the cover, and I will blog about that properly once I have all the images I need to show you the various stages of the journey from vague ideas connected to the book, to sketches, selections, the final image taking place and the full cover.

I’m very close to letting go of the book, as every writer does, because at some point there is nothing left to do but let it go into the world and hope people take care of it.

I have been researching book three when I can for months now, but hopefully that should pick up pace soon, which is good as it feels like a long time since I did some actual creative writing.

However, my focus obviously has to be on the current book and I’ll soon be sitting down with my marketing person (it still feels a little weird to say that) to shape up what we can do to get The Price of Magic in front of as many people as possible. That might not have been the most showy way of revealing the title of my new book, but hey, I’m not really that kind of writer.

Onwards to the next thing.

To all the things!

The Difficult Second Album

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Somehow seven months have slipped by since I last updated this blog. That’s time for an entire season of NFL blogging, multiple edits of the new book and typeset checks so I guess I had better get things back on track with this blog and quickly, because whilst I may have been quiet on here, things have been anything but quiet for me.

So, where am I now?

I have come out of the post NFL relax week or two that usually follows the end of the Super Bowl and what I think of as my NFL blogging season. The NFL blog has been a great platform to learn when I can write, gives me structured thing to practise developing content and getting writing reps in, and gives me an excuse to watch a lot of American Football. I also thoroughly enjoy my weekly chats with Dan for the podcast, which also helps me form ideas for the blog and help give it structure, and this season get NFL trivia questions wrong. For those of you who were listening you will have got a sneak preview of the title of the new book.

I have already started to outline how I might tweak things for next season, but there’s plenty of time to think about that.

Whilst the season was going on, we’ve put in place the plan for the sequel to A Ghost Called Dog got everything sorted out with the relevant publishing companies and I’ve been hard at it. Mostly I have been focussed on turning the new book into the best piece of work I can. We have used the same editor, Karen Holmes, who edited Ghost but the new book is setting up something bigger and more complex so the draft I started from needed a fair bit of work and it took a couple of passes to turn that draft into a manuscript that works the way I intended

You always learn from your mistakes and there are several things I can take away from this process that will hopefully serve to improve the next book’s development. I say improve as I believe it is a common folly for all writers to start their next book full of confidence that they have learnt so much and there will be no problems with this one. Yeah right…

Still, I am determined to improve things both in terms of planning, plotting, and my initial editing process. I think I’ll always need to write my way through problems and questions, but hopefully I can weed out the excess that readers don’t need to see before putting the next manuscript in front of an editor. I might need a better laser printer for that.

I did at least avoid the whole difficult second album problem because my life did not change radically after the release of Ghost, and although it was my first published book, Ghost was in fact the third book I had written.

Currently, I am trying to get the typeset finished. My latest batch of amends has gone back to the publisher, and I’m confident once those changes have been made that the text will be set. We will still need to check the layout to find out what if anything has drifted and if we need to move any text around pages, but we are getting close. I am excited about how the illustration for the cover has turned out and as we have the dimensions of the spine sorted I don’t think it will be too long before the full cover starts to takes shape.

I’ll keep you updated on how things are going, and I have a couple of other tweaks and changes that I’ve been thinking about for the website and staying in contact with everyone.

For now I will say, I am incredibly grateful to all the people who have had kind words to say, been supportive, or just wondered where I found the time. I’m not giving up any time soon; I have a bunch of ideas for future books outside of the sequels for the little series I’m developing now. I just have to keep going with the writing and finding ways to get that writing into people’s hands, digital devices, or even uploaded directly into your brains once the technology exists. That last one might be a little over the mark…

One Year On

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Today marks a year since A Ghost Called Dog was published.

Since then I’ve been on the radio, had some lovely feedback, especially from children/parents.

I’ve recently had a letter from the British library to confirm receipt of their copy, which proves what I told my gran last year, that there is a book dedicated to her at the copy right libraries.

I can also say, that not only is there a manuscript for a sequel, but that it should be out fairly early next year. I’m only being vague as we’re still firming up a few things, and it is more than a little early for precise dates, but yes a sequel is happening and hopefully it will be bigger and better than the first book.

And if you want to see the rest of the series, then we need to get more people reading and buying, but more to come on that front in the months ahead.

I also have some fun writing challenges coming soon to the blog if I get myself organised.

There are very definitely wheels in motion.

Watch this space!

Selling a Book – Phase Two

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“It’s a marathon not a sprint.”

It’s one of those clichés that crop up in sport, and I’m pretty sure that I have used it both to describe an NFL season and writing a book.

In fact it turns out that it’s a pretty good description of not just writing a book, but getting one from draft through editing and design, and out into the market place. However, for an independent author, the process doesn’t stop once you have the agreement with the print on demand companies and digital outlets. No, because after all that comes selling the book.

It’s not a glamourous thing to do, and certainly no one has written films about writers contacting shops about stocking their book. However, that is where I found myself right now, settling down into the hard graft of prep and contacting. A process that is eerily similar to submitting books to agents, only this time it is a little less speculative and involves discussions of percentages and getting copies into the hands of people who make decisions.

The good is news is that where we have been successful in doing this, the book has sold. However, if I am to keep doing this then I need to expand the number of shops that are stocking the book, and magic up a lot more sales through the digital outlets.

I am working on developing a network of contacts to hopefully get the book out into more shops, but the disadvantage of being an independent is that I don’t have people doing this for me. So as we move into the second phase of selling the book I am looking for people’s help, namely you who are reading this.

I strongly believe that the best way to sell a book is through the people loving books and talking to each other.

So if you have read the book and enjoyed it, then recommend it to a friend. Lend your copy, get the word out. Also, if you are lucky enough to have a great local bookshop, talk to them about it or let me know so I can contact them about getting stocked.

On the digital side of things, and if you are so inclined, a good review would be very much appreciated. I’m not going to pretend that I understand the various rankings and algorithms that dominate online stores and review sites, but the bit that is important is that the more people who saying nice things, the better the chances that someone new finds the book.

I am in the home stretch of the opening draft of a sequel, and my experience with A Ghost Called Dog haw certainly wetted my appetite. I have multiple books in the ideas drawer ready to be written, but it is not enough for the book just to exist. I have to establish a solid enough business model to make this an ongoing concern. It is an old business adage that you have to speculate to accumulate, and I certainly don’t mind investing in this up to a point.

There has always been a tension in the creative arts between the art and the business. As an independent writer you have to confront this directly, trying to find a way to make the system work for you within your circumstances. For me, this means writing something that is artistically valid in of itself. The first stage of selling a book is to make the book as good as it can be.

However, once it exists then you have to start having conversations regarding price points and distribution, remembering that at the end of the day, there is a number of books that you have to sell to cover what you put in and beyond. There may be a day when I can get to a point where my books account for a part of my income, but for now I would be happy to make them self-sufficient. A literary ecosystem that is independent on my everyday life.

It’s quite a small dream in the grand scheme of things, but there is still a long way to go before I can make that a reality. So if you are so inclined, spread the word, get in touch about book stores, write a review, or lend it to a friend.

I would be profoundly grateful.

Dreams with a Deadline – Process Over Outcome

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I want to try something a little different this week before we get into the grind of the NFL regular season, which is why I am cross posting this across both my blogs, so if you’re not a sports fan please bear with me for a little bit as things will come around.

For the last few weeks I have been following the pre-season of three NFL teams and generally getting excited about the start of a new season. However, this is the weekend that as the final cuts are made, for some careers are ending and for others dreams.

As you watch Hard Knocks (for the general reader a series following an NFL team through training camp) the shift in focus goes from a team coming together to the tension that surrounds them as players start to get cut and the business of football really kicks in. Something like two percent of those who play college football make it to the NFL and the average career is a little over three years. The offseason roster goes from ninety to fifty-three this weekend, and whilst the practice squad has expanded over the last couple of years, when you look at those numbers multiplied over thirty-two teams with very few alternative outlets to play American football professionally there are a lot of people left hanging now.

Once the season starts we will start talking about players who are bad or good, but in reality you have to be pretty exceptional to even make it into a training camp, yet alone make a successful career of the sport of American football.

So what happens next? Some will hold on for a call once the injuries start, some will keep themselves fit and hope to try again next year, and some will have to walk away from their dream. Something they have worked very hard to achieve, with fine margins and no way to keep going.

Those who do not like sport will find such sacrifices hard to comprehend, even if they understand that for some this represents their best chance of making something out of their life. Even those of us who love to lift or run as amateurs struggle to truly understand the pressure that a large number of these players will have been going through. This isn’t just winning or losing; this is about putting food on the table for their families, a shot at something bigger than themselves, and chasing a goal with a deadline.

That deadline is the bit that can be truly terrifying. I remember in my twenties feeling a dread every time my birthday rolled around, looking at the things I had and hadn’t achieved and holding myself up against some idealised timetable. I’m a bit more relaxed about things these days, partly through having done things like publishing a book this year, and partly as I have come to understand that I have a restless nature. A couple of days ago a friend halted halfway through a sentence as they realised they were basically calling me crazy.

An NFL blog, writing books, an NFL podcast, a band, a pretty busy job – all the things as I like to say. I found it funny because I didn’t disagree, and they left out the lifting, the runs, the morning stretches and core work, the out of hours support, walks with my partner, the list goes on.

I have come to appreciate the trying of things, but whilst there are things that get sacrificed, I’m not in a position that I have had to sacrifice everything to pursue one goal. There’s some that will talk about how you can achieve anything if you pursue their dream. For some this is true, and I can see that it is offered as a genuine encouragement, but usually by people who have beaten the odds. If I can, then so can you. The problem is that, if you’re focussed on the result, then anything other than achieving that result, and it is all too easy to not get the most out of what you’re doing at the time. And if you sacrifice everything for one goal, then there’s a lot to pick up if that gamble doesn’t pay off.

That’s not to say goal setting isn’t important, or that you shouldn’t try to do what you love, but how you get there is kind of important. If this is sounding dangerously close to one of those life is a journey not a destination inspirational posters, then that’s because it is. So why am I bringing it up now? The answer is podcasts and how I got very lucky this week.

Podcasts feature heavy in this next section because of a discussion between Jonah Keri and Katie Nolan on Keri’s podcast. At the end of every episode Jonah Keri asks his guest for an inspiration thing that has helped his guest. It can be as serious or as silly as they like, and one of the themes that keeps cropping up is that if you love doing something, find a way to do it. Make the thing that you want to do, and you will get better at it and the success may or may not come, but do it for the love anyway.

The reason that these blogs exist are because as I got older, the idea of being a writer wouldn’t go away. I was not one of those children who had a clearly defined idea of what they wanted to do and pursued it through a specific path in education. I kept fiddling with stories and ideas, and then really started working on my writing as I got more serious about it.

The NFL blog started because I loved the NFL and I wanted to work on something that would help me with the mechanics of writing. The NFL would always be something to write about, I was following anyway and it was an extension of my love of the sport.

Along the way, I discovered what I love writing about in relation to football, read more, listened to more podcasts, watched more games. A self-perpetuating interest developed. Not only that, but I learned how to manage my writing time, when I could squeeze out extra words if I needed to, and in the process learnt how to write fiction in more focused bursts without waiting for inspiration.

I read about coaching, and developed my thoughts on this, stealing from Pete Carroll’s book about developing a philosophy, and borrowing the idea from great Bill Walsh that the score takes care of itself. I still haven’t distilled my philosophy down to a handy twenty-five word summary as Carroll asks, but I know the name.

Process Over Outcome.

The idea that you cannot control the outcomes of situation, but if you focus on making the process as good as possible, then you maximise the potential for things to go well.

I’m still working on selling my children’s book, I have a lot to learn. Mostly because I was focussed on making the book as good as I can through the editing and production process.

It is also important to not be afraid of making mistakes, you have to learn from them, but if you’re paralysed by the possibility of failing then you’re not focussing on the process and you might not even try.

The Wrong Football podcast started last season when my friend Dan came to me, and said he’d like to do a podcast with me, and my response was sure, but you have to produce it as I can find time to sit down and record but I’m too tied up with the site to do much more. I approached it like I do being in a band, I have to trust the other people to do their job, go with the best idea, it’s working in a collaborative creative process. Something I’m used to with music and something I have written before about on my writer’s blog.

Thanks to this process, on Friday night I got to shake the hands of a Super Bowl winner. In fact, a pretty significant one for me, because this wasn’t any old Super Bowl winner, but a member of the legendary 1985 Chicago Bears. The team that caused the surge of interest in American football in the UK in the mid 1980s, and pretty much the reason that I am fan of the game. Things come full circle. It was a great experience, certainly for Dan and I, who were very nervous to begin with as this was our first live interview for the pod, but we settled quickly enough because after all, we were talking football.

The interview should be coming in next week’s pod, and will be accompanied by a second interview another ex NFL player Nick Ferguson who was also a great guy, very happy to talk to us and evangelise over the game. It was a pretty incredible evening before we even got to the NFL event itself.

I’m very happy for the pod, and I hope the interviews come across well. I also look back on it, and I think to my own brief stints being interviewed about my book. I don’t see my purpose there as being a hard sell, I just try to be enthusiastic about what I have created. If I wasn’t enthusiastic then I wouldn’t have created it. You hope that your enthusiasm sparks something in others, at the end of the day isn’t that what we’re all hoping for.

The truth is though, that all of these things are interconnected. In a way, the play of Shaun Gayle led to me writing a book, and writing meant that I got to shake his hand. This interconnectedness is part of life, the complexity of the world that surrounds can be baffling, and sometimes it is nice to stare at a sports field and pretend it is as simple as winning and losing. However, once you start to study it the complexity soon picks up again.

I’ll soon be predicting games and writing about the league. I’ll also be working on a sequel to the published book, running, lifting, doing all the things. Following various dreams, trying to ignore the deadlines. Process over outcome. It’s worked for me so far.

What Happens Next

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I have finally had some time to take stock having been on holiday, and firstly, I have a book.

There is still a lot to do in terms of getting the book into new book shops, selling, and generally being an independent author, but I am definitely settling into the fact that the hard first step of getting a book into existence has been completed.

As you can see from the picture, I have had my first book event/signing, which went well despite the lovely hot day stealing a lot of my potential readers, but I had a great time in Waterstones Leicester. I am not a natural salesman, but hanging round in a book shop and talking to people about books was a pretty natural fit and I guess I must have been doing something right as I was taken for staff several times. I was able to pass these queries off to actual members of staff, who apart from knowing where all the relevant sections of the store were, also took great care of me and helped make the day the success it was.

In fact, lots of people have been genuinely great about the book being out. From the support of people at work, various friends in this country and abroad, plus local writers I had the pleasure of meetings at Waterstones, the reaction has been really positive and hopefully will continue once people sit down with the book.

In the coming weeks I will continue to reach out to bookshops, hopefully setup some more book events, and finally learn how we are doing with actual sales figures.

This will have to be a short blog as I’ve already started blogging about the NFL season, and I have various bits of book admin to do, but things keep rolling on, and I don’t think I will ever tire of finding out people have bought the book and how they found it.

Book Event

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I have been on the radio and in the local paper in the last week, and I will do a full write up soon, but for those of you near Leicester, I will be in the Highcross Waterstone’s from 10:00-15:00 selling, signing, and hopefully reading my book, and I would love to see you there.

Come and say hello if you can.

Cross-Training for Writers

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It has been a weird couple of weeks in the UK, and not exactly the backdrop to the launch of my book I was expecting. It is released on the fourth of July, available to order in both digital and physical formats from all the usual online book places and I hope to get it into some local book shops too. Well obviously, I hope it eventually makes it into a lot of book shops but one step at a time. I’m very happy to have already had some pre-orders so we are on our way but you have to break these grand projects down into small steps.

This takes me to the heart of what I wanted to discuss.

When I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the book coming soon, I was asked, ‘When did you find time to write a book?’

In my roundabout way I will attempt to answer that question.

I have fiddled with words in one form or another for most of my life. I have always loved reading, and I fiddled with little stories, wrote bad songs with the occasional good lyric, and helped arrange better songs. A couple of years ago, having somehow written two books over the course of perhaps a decade I began to get more serious. I started writing short stories for competitions; I started submitting to magazines and agents.

I also started to think more about writing. How to get better at it, or at least how I would try. There’s all kind of books and articles written about how to write. I’m not going to be exhaustive in advice that worked for me, what I wanted to talk about now is how I got better at writing books by not writing books. Specifically, the cross-training that informed how I approach writing books and I think made me better than I was. It is up to other people to decide if the resulting books are actually good.

Cross-training, is an idea from sports where you train in different disciplines to get better at your main sport.

16-06-30 Weights

Why a picture of weights? I want to talk about how lifting weights has made me a better writer. This might seem a little strange, but trust me there is a rationale behind it. The obvious benefit would be that a writer spends a lot of time hunched at a keyboard, or over paper depending on your method, so performing any kind of exercise helps keep you fit and gets the blood moving.

However, what I wanted to talk about is how making the regular lifting of weights a part of my life has helped me make writing a regular part of my life, and it’s not just that it is another habit I have picked up.

I am by no means an expert, my numbers would be singularly unimpressive to a lot of people and I definitely do not have washboard abs. However, over the years of trying, failing, and finally finding a routine that works for me I’ve noticed the habits picked up lifting weights are very similar to the ones I use for writing.

Approach – A Marathon Not A Sprint

Fitness is one of those areas where everyone has a shortcut, or a plan to sell you, not helped with the offseason claims of pro-athletes to have added 20 Ibs of muscle or dropped to an impossible body fat percentage.

In some ways it is easy, want to get stronger? Lift heavy, lift often, and crucially, be patient. It takes time to build strength. Most people can’t walk into a gym and deadlift 100kgs. The truth is, there are no shortcuts. You have to go through the process. In fact you have to enjoy the process, and you have to be prepared to put the work in.

Want to write a book. Write. Write often, and crucially, be patient. It takes time to build a book. You have to take a story idea, and turn it into words, all the while watching as it twists in the process of writing into something different to what you first imagined. You have to cut things you love because they don’t serve the story you are telling. You have to enjoy the process enough to keep going.

Planning – Something in Mind

If you wander into a gym with no plan, then you are not going to build towards something, and will very likely hurt yourself.

If you sit down and write a book without a plan, then you might write something brilliant, but the odds are that you are not a reincarnation of Shakespeare or Dickens and I’m pretty sure that the idea of them sitting down and just writing masterpieces is rubbish – they had to work at it like the rest of us.

For lifting, I am using a version of Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 program. I have modified it a bit so it works for me, but only after doing it for a year and figuring out that I get better results with smaller increments and learning to be flexible but keep getting the main lifts and body weight work in.

There’s a strong chance that you have no idea what that last paragraph means. That doesn’t really matter for our purposes. The key thing here is that I had a plan, I modified it slightly but stuck to the principles, and most importantly, I listened to my body.

For writing, this means write often, but if writing every day without fail turns your love into a chore, give yourself the weekends off. You have to watch that rest doesn’t turn into the habit of not writing, but if you enjoy a process then you are more likely to keep doing it.

With weight training and exercise rest is incredibly important, it is not just a matter of getting bored by the same routine, you have to factor in recovery and adjust as your body dictates. You really have to give your body time to build more muscle.

I believe it is the same for writing. You have to plot, plan, but adjust your plan as words drop into place and twist away from you. Trust me, sometimes I’m as surprised at a character’s actions as you are. Maybe there a writers who can do all this at the same time as they type or write with a pen, I can’t. I have some idea of where I’m going, but the scenes takes shape over days. I can see problems on the horizon and solutions present themselves when I’m not trying, but when my brain is roaming. Carrying a note book for these moments has proven to be a good idea.

Execution – Goal Setting and Tracking

You don’t just need to plan your lifts, you have to track them and update them. I have a nerdy spreadsheet to keep track of my four week cycles. I know what sequence I am doing my three different workouts a week, what weights progressions I should go through. The workouts move days or swap around as the week dictates, but I make sure I complete all of them.

For writing I have rough word counts. These change depending on if I’m blogging about the NFL (a practice that in of itself is cross training) or here. I don’t worry about long term goals and getting a particular quantity of words written in a month. I have a full time job, a band, and I write books and a blog. I can get 20, 000 words out in a month during the NFL season, but whilst I’m tracking what I do, I am not aiming for word limits but certain articles each week. Even then I don’t always make it. Life gets in the way.

With fiction, I aim to write between 300-400 words when I sit down to write. It doesn’t sound like a lot. It isn’t a lot really. However, if you keep adding them together they add up. If I have to break out into a deep bit of research to sort a problem then I don’t beat myself up for missing my creative writing total for that day. I keep a log so I can see it moving along. Keep doing that, and whilst the world sails around you, a book appears.

I’m still working on a sequel to A Ghost Called Dog. I’m still working on benching 225Ibs.

And as long as I keep chipping away in small steps using what I’ve learned under the bar to inform what I do at the keyboard, I am confident I will achieve both.

The difference is that 225Ibs will always be 225Ibs (physicists please let me ignore fluctuations in gravity for this comparison), while a book may be finished, but it doesn’t mean it will be any good. That’s why editors are amazing.

I think that pretty much anyone would benefit from some form of strength training just to feel healthier, but it might not be such a bad idea for your writing either.

A Book is Coming

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A book is coming. In Fact, technically it already exists as a physical object, although somehow in a twist of fate, out of the various people actively involved in the project, I am the only one who has not seen a copy yet. Some have gone to the publishers to be issued to the UK copyright libraries, others have gone to the marketing company and our copies were delivered to my parents as they had the advantage of being in! I will see them soon, but let’s go back to how we got here first.

The last couple of months have been a bit of blur for me, so I shall spare myself and you an attempt at piecing together an exact timeline of what happened, but here is what did.

Having submitted my edited and proofed manuscript we set about the fun task of getting the book typeset and designed. I had been already talking to artists about an illustration for the cover, and having been given a helpful steer by my godmother I was put in contact with Rose Hutchings who after a telephone discussion agreed to do it. This was an interesting process for me as I had some compositional ideas about what I wanted to feature, but I had not considered anything like the emotional tone. After our discussion, and having been sent a copy of my redrafted manuscript, Rose produced a number of sketches for me and with a certain amount of canvassing of other people to check my opinions, I selected the one that would become our cover. Rose continued to work things up for me, tweaking near the end until I had the illustration that you see below:

16-06-09 GCD v001

If I had some ideas about how I wanted the cover to look, I was slightly taken aback to find myself momentarily without an opinion about what I wanted for the actual layout. I love books as objects, and definitely have preferences for design, but hadn’t really thought about it much for my own project. So when Catherine very reasonably asked about things like font preferences, I was only able to offer up a liking for working in Palatine Linotype, which I hardly ever bother with as the first thing I have to do when submitting a manuscript is change the font to the usually requested Times New Roman. However, once Catherine and the people from 2QT started sending me some mock-ups of various design options and fonts, then preferences quickly came to the fore. After a conference round my parents dining table with various print-outs, and me grabbing my dad’s printing eye glass, we quickly settled on a font (for the record, Palatino was the first to be thrown out so as ever, I know nothing) and eventually we were able come up with a design layout.

We also had sent the final illustration from Rose to 2QT so the ever patient Charlotte Mouncey could turn this into a book jacket. I say jacket, as not only did she have to sort the front, but come up with the rest of the design and place the text of the blurb. This was something that I had tried to draft, working on the elevator pitch I had always used and with a word limit suggested by Ben Cameron who is doing the publicity campaign for the book. However, it turns out that people who run companies that do this sort of thing professionally are really good at doing things like writing blurbs and so when Catherine sent us a draft it was obvious what we should use that, so with a couple of tweaks it was set. After a couple of emails Charlotte then nailed the design of the whole jacket and the cover looks like this:

A-Ghost_Called_Dog_cov

So, just when I thought I was done with reading and checking. We got the final layout to check, and so one final read. This sent me back into another bout of editing frenzy but with a few final final edits we were done.

Things are in motion, and as I said, there are copies of my book in the world. It exists. It’s a thing. Now I just need to sell it. But people are reminding me to be proud, so for a moment I’ll allow that, in deference to Rachael, Dad, and Brooke.

It will be on to the next thing tomorrow.

Having Multiple Irons in the Fire

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One of my biggest writing challenges at the moment, is finding new ways to explain the gaps between updates on this blog, which are basically always down to there being too many things going on at once. However, in this case I am going to attempt to demonstrate why this is not always a bad thing.

So apart from the ongoing process of working through production drafts, selecting fonts and layouts, agreeing cover design having got the cover illustration, I have also started on a sequel for my soon to be published book. This was not necessarily what I had intended as my first children’s book was written as a stand alone story. However, back in December whilst discussing business plans with my dad, he casually mentioned that if this project took off, that ideally we would have a follow up book not too far off and preferably one set in the same world with most of the same characters. Oh great!

Luckily for me, the idea for a sequel popped into my head the next morning whilst I was having a shower. There may be hope for me as an artist that gets read after all, but I’ll have to see if the sequel turns into something I’m happy to publish or not. It is still too early to tell.

That said, one of the benefits of self-publishing is that I get to make that decision for myself, which makes a refreshing change for someone who has spent considerably more time writing than having been published. This is not a complaint, it’s all part of the process, but having multiple manuscripts and short stories finished, a book coming out, and others in the work does lessen the pressure than if I was working on the one book. Even if it does mean juggling various bits of writing for production reasons, competitions, on top of just finding a window to write.

I am entering fewer competitions these days, not because I think they are necessarily a bad thing, but because much like applying to agents, there is an element of a numbers game to them. A lot of the big competitions have thousands of stories entered, so it very hard to get a story noticed under such circumstances. Even making the short list is an achievement, and whilst I know that for me, I am really hoping to generate interest in a story rather than necessarily win, I do not need the external prompt of a competition to spark something to write. I have enough ideas battling for my attention as it is.

Having said all of that, somebody did bring my attention to a competition earlier this year, that the science fiction magazine Shorelines of Infinity were running, and low and behold an idea popped into my head.

I looked at the pictures they were using as a prompt.

Panels

I wrote. I entered. I did not win. In fact an excellent story called The Great Golden Fish by Dee Raspin (on twitter @DeeRaspin) won, and can be read in issue 3 of the magazine, available from their website here.

However, now that I have a blog, there is no reason for this story to lie around in my digital vault for no reason, with the picture that set me going, I give you my own story with one of the Illustrations.

Just click here to go to its new home on the internet.

I’ll be writing a blog all about the final stages of the book publishing just as soon as everything is sent off!