Nugget – the Black Wombat!
I confess that I am in love.
Always have been really…
With wombats.
Prior to new Year’s Eve, Joe Konrath said: This year, I’m boiling my resolutions down to the essence:
WRITE!
Elizabeth Hunter wrote: I NEED the writing. It’s still my most-fun-thing. My escape. My happy place.
I love writing and want to write more books, but they can’t happen as fast as I would like and that’s okay. In fact, that’s better than okay. It’s normal and I’m perfectly fine with that.
And then there’s Kristine Kathryn Rusch, a commentator whose words always hold a distinct resonance and clarity for me personally. In her annual ‘Close of Business for the Year’ address she pointed out a couple of salient things…
‘The new world isn’t actively hostile, but it is difficult. And why shouldn’t it be? We’re working on an international level.
But one of the degrees of difficulty we’ve been dealing with since 2009 is that the new system hadn’t stabilized yet. Things changed, sometimes weekly, and those of us who jumped into indie publishing from the beginning were constantly revising expectations as well as ways of doing things.’
I joined the new world of publishing along with some of my closest writing friends, in 2008. We were published POD by an organization in the UK that was government funded with an annual Arts grant. We sold, we did well. But then we stepped out on our own and by 2010, dived into e-books.
Not just diving in I might add, but swimming whole marathons because the industry was mega-populated and the technology seemed to change by the hour…
The Gisborne Saga has concluded. More – the final in the trilogy has been published at last.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LBBLZZG
How do I feel?
Marvellous and nervous…
In a world where Others play with mortal lives, in a hidden province that survives on the backs of abducted slaves, Isabella, one of those stolen folk, sends a message woven into rare cloth made of paper and silk, in the vain hope that her cousin will find it, decipher it and rescue her.
Bells ring when I read Michelle Muto’s story of how she came to be published. I often say of my books, when I see a wonderful spike upward 
in their sales, that they remind me of the little engine that could, puffing up the hill and saying ‘I think I can, I think can.’
Life can be painful, there’s no doubt. There can be moments that halt the creative flow, moments so annihilating you wonder if you will ever get the flow back. However as Talia Jager says ‘when life hands you lemons…toss them out, grab your stash of chocolate, your writing materials, and head for the bathroom. You may just end up writing a book.’
Carol Davis Luce offered up some succint and profound words when she sent her Indie Chicks piece to Mesmered – facts that seem overlooked so often by the mainstream publishing trade.
This is what she says: ‘Agents and editors think they know what readers want. They don’t always know. Readers know what readers want, and they’re expressing their wants by buying books written by indie authors. Give yourself a hardy pat on the back if you’ve completed a manuscript, but the big applause goes to our devoted fans and readers. Without them, we would be nothing.’
Mel Comley is astonishing. After re-establishing her home, her life and her business in France, she became bored and began writing. And writing and writing! She has never ever looked back, or if she does, it’s purely to find added inspiration for characters and settings for her works. Read on…
I’ve never really wanted to get into the mainstream vs indie argument that has waxed and waned over the Net for the last couple of years. To me all writers are just that – writers.
How they are published is immaterial. What matters is if either have readers and if they can entertain. But this is Read an E-Book Week and somehow it seems appropriate.
Gisborne: Book of Pawns
The book that has dominated my life for the last eighteen months has finally been published as en e-book with the print version following in May. To say that I have enjoyed writing it is a given – Guy and Ysabel have become very close friends. But as with any book I write, whilst I have a loose plot outline in my head, I always love seeing where the characters will take me. At its inception there was absolutely no chance that there would be a second volume. But a chance writing of a tiny short-story for a miniature book laid a whole new plot in my head. And thus volume Two will be available in early 2013. This current e-book will be available at Amazon.co.uk within the week in an enhanced form with colour plates throughout: designed for the new colour e-readers. It will be available for all other e-readers (eg: Kobo, i-pad, Nook etc) in the next week.