I’ve been away from writing for a while as you can probably see by my lack of posts. Life, in all of it’s glory, got in the way.
I got married, lived happily ever after until recently. I was already in the process of transitioning away from my full time job to look after my husband as he declines. Yup – I’m staring widowhood square in the face and it’s not a pretty sight.
Then along came the Covid19 pandemic which threatens to take my husband sooner rather than later.
Life can be a bitch!!
So here I sit at my computer in my home office, winding down the work day of my full tie job ,while still in my pajama pants and slippers pondering what to do next.
I’ve been preparing for my semi-retirement for a while. Over the past few months I’ve been gathering all of the partial stories I’ve abandoned since my wedding and organized them into priorities, genres and tasks to get myself back into the publishing game. Note to self – having several genres is going to be a publishing challenge.
This Coronavirus pandemic has hastened me along because I’m going to have a lot of spare time in the days and weeks ahead. IF I don’t have something to occupy my over-active imagination, I’m going to be in real trouble.
It will be a little bit different this time. I’m not going to edit and publish other people’s work like I did when I was half of PaperBox Books. This time it’s all about me.
While doing my research, it’s been fun to see what changes have been made since I stopped publishing.
I’ve been an avid subscriber to the Amazon Kindle platform for a couple of years and was excited to see how they’ve simplified the process and made it so much easier to publish a book.
Having said that, from a reader’s perspective, there are a lot of great stories that I’ve stopped reading because the writing sucked. No matter how fascinating the characters or the plot, if I had to keep internally correcting the wording or grammar I’d get frustrated and find another book.
Amazon Kindle pays it’s authors per page read. It doesn’t matter if you have 100 people downloading your book, if no one can make it past the first 10 pages, you’re killing your revenue. Not only for that book but many readers won’t ever attempt to read anything by you again.
So as a writer, I’m taking all I’ve learned to heart. Who am I kidding, I was already super anal about grammar, spelling and story flow. Now I just have to get my butt in gear and finish a few of these stories and get them out there.
Hopefully posting this will help to keep me accountable, while the roller-coaster called life has its wicked way with me.
Keep safe out there!