Back to life - announcing my current project - a novel

Max and I, May 2014

I am so glad that I have this blog. It sits here faithfully waiting for me to come back and say hello. It contains photos of my life and work, important stuff like the year of images and thoughts that I just lost when my external hard drive crashed stealing with it the whole of 2013! If I had been blogging, then more of my life would have been here backed up and safe (thank goodness for Instagram and Facebook, where lots of my photos are safe). Sigh. I have lived and learned that I need a back up for my back up.

As this blog is all about 'The Artistic Life', then I am going to lay out what I am up to artistically:

Writing. Editing. Planning on launching my first novel.

Right now, some of my kids are in the pool, my oldest is at karate, my gymnast is at gym, my third child is at her entrepreneurship class. The baby is driving with my mother, watching and commenting in babble on the world I am sure. So I have a minute to myself to blog!

I am at a point where I am ready to write novel number 2, so I am learning about self-publishing and how to get my first novel out of the top drawer and into print. As my non-fiction book was published by a traditional publisher, I was planning to pursue a traditional published for my novel. I browsed tons of agent websites, but most of them said 'We don't want your book, but if you want to try your luck send us a query letter (one page, one paragraph, a synopsis, the first three chapters, an email, snail mail, or whatever suits us best) that WOWS us, which we probably won't respond to because your book is probably awful anyhow'. I read somewhere that you should contact about 100 agents before you find one interested in you, and only if the stars align! I sent one query letter. Then I quit. I did not want to beg to be noticed. So I left it all for a while. I got on with life (I had my 6th child in January 2013).

Recently a friend of mine read my manuscript and loved it so I decided it would be better to publish it myself than do nothing with it. So I started reading about self publishing. And to my pleasant surprise in the years since I published my first book the publishing industry has changed, a lot! Many authors are realizing they can sell books without the middle men. It is not for the faint hearted. But the more I read the more excited I am about self publishing my novel.

My two favorite self publishing blogs that are chock-a-block with information on the topic are: a wonderful blog by an Irish woman, Catherine Ryan Howard, who has compiled a list of her articles on self-publishing, and JA Konrath's blog A Newbie's Guide to Publishing. I will need many more hours to myself to get through all the information they have packed into their blogs and to learn how to 'launch my book'!

Sure, my DIY campaign may not bear much fruit, but I am already enjoying this path where I am accountable no one but my (albeit right now, theoretical) reader.