Apr 1 2014

5 Years Ago Today…

… I was sat in JFK airport, waiting to board a flight back home. And it was while sat in the waiting area that I got a notebook out and started to write The Earth Angel Training Academy. I wrote the first 900 words in that notebook, then wrote the rest of the book in the two months following, on my old laptop that had no ‘L’ key.

The handwritten beginning of The Earth Angel Training Academy

I still have my original notes from before I began writing. Most of my ideas didn’t make it into the final book. Once I started writing, I really had no control over the story, or the characters. I was merely a bystander, writing down what they were doing and saying.

After those initial two months of writing, it took me a further two years to edit it and get it into print, after a brief attempt at entering the traditional publishing world. Originally, I called the book ‘The Angels Calling’ and even printed and hand-bound in leather a copy for my dad. After a handful of rejections, I decided to take the Indie route, having used print on demand services to publish Heaven Dot Com back in 2007.

The first edition of The Earth Angel Training Academy was published and launched in July 2011, at the Heart of the Dragon Festival in West Wales.

Original Cover

New Cover

Since writing the book, I have actually met several of the characters in real life, including Shelly, the mermaid, who I met in California last year.

In November 2010, I wrote The Earth Angel Awakening, which I then published in the summer of 2012. Then just last year, I wrote and published The Other Side.

In some ways, it feels like a lifetime since I wrote those first words in JFK, and in others, it feels like just yesterday. As you can see from my scribbles, Velvet was originally called Mulberry. Because the lady sat opposite me in the waiting lounge was wearing mulberry-coloured shoes. I can still see her shoes, and hear the noise of the airport, and see the planes taking off. Though I had been writing for many years by that point, and had self-published my novella, that moment in the airport was the very beginning of my journey as an independently published author, and a visionary fiction novelist. And in that moment in time, I had absolutely no idea what the next five years would bring. There have been awesome times, crappy times, frustrating times and absolutely ecstatic times. And I wouldn’t change a single moment, because it has all brought me to where I am right now.

Do you remember where you were five years ago today?

Mar 21 2014

Wise Words of Buddha

It’s been a quiet week on the blog front as I have been busy editing and also spring cleaning the house. I’ve also been working with the madly talented madappledesigns on the new covers for Heaven Dot Com, The Doorway to PAM and The Elphite, as well as the cover for my new novel, I’m Here.

The title of this post is referring to the quote on my calendar right now, which says -‘ Do not speak – unless it improves on silence.’ And I guess that’s why my blog posts are a little sporadic, because as a rule, I do not post unless I have something to say, that I think is worth saying, and worthy of my readers’ time.

Rocking with my firewalking buddies at last year’s UPW.

So why am I writing this post? Because at this very moment in time, a whole group of my favourite people are at Tony Robbins’ Unleash Your Power, in London. I attended the event last year, and it was amazing. I can honestly say that it changed my perspective on life completely, and made me realise that I could in fact live the life I wanted to live. Walking on fire was one of the scariest things I have ever done (even more so than breaking an arrow with my neck) and it made me feel like anything was possible. Since then I have been doing work I love, full time. I haven’t yet got everything sorted, but I know that I am so very lucky to live in such beautiful surroundings, to have an awesome partner and to be living my life’s purpose.

I have had times where I’ve wanted to give up. When it looked like things weren’t working out, or when the finances start to freak me out. And I would start thinking about what I should do instead. Perhaps I should go and get a job, it might be a boring 9-5, and I might only get minimum wage – but it would be a regular income! Surely that would be better? I’d get stuck in these ruts for sometimes days at a time, where I’d scour the job pages, send out CVs, etc etc. And do you know what? Usually I ended up giving up on that and going back to the task at hand – making a living as an author and a publisher.

It came to my awareness recently that I was never going to make Plan A work, if I was focusing on Plan B. If I truly believed in my Plan A of being a successful author, then I didn’t need a Plan B. Just having a Plan B makes Plan A destined to fail. I remembered these words from a talk that Brad Burton gave at a 4Networking meeting I attended, 18 months ago. He knew that his Plan A was going to work. Even when his family and friends thought he was crazy, even when he suffered setbacks and financial problems. He just knew. And he believed in it. I believe that it was his belief that made it work. His single-minded determination made his business successful. But it wasn’t an easy path for him, and I also believe that anything worth doing, anything worth creating, will require a decent amount of hard work, sweat and tears.

So I have thrown away all Plan B’s. There is no other path for me. My path is to do my writing and publishing, and anything related to it. Normal jobs are no longer on the agenda.

It doesn’t just apply to career, either. When you have a relationship back up plan, then your relationship is destined to fail. If all you can think of is what you will do, where you will go, or how you will cope when the relationship breaks down, then inevitably, it will indeed break down. You have to give 100% of yourself to the relationship you are in, and believe that it is ‘forever’. If you don’t want to do that, then it may be time to leave.

So what is your Plan A? What will it take for you to commit to it? Let me know in the comments 🙂

I hope that this post improved on the silence, if it didn’t, my apologies to you!

Mar 1 2014

Read an E-Book Week at Smashwords

I am participating in the Smashwords event – Read an E-Book Week, which starts tomorrow. I only have three of my books on Smashwords at the moment, so from tomorrow you can get a free copy of Choose Your Own Reality or Heaven Dot Com, and you can get a copy of The Doorway to PAM for just 99cents.

If you are an Indie Author, log in to Smashwords to take part, it should be fun 🙂 And readers – visit Smashwords tomorrow to view the list of free and discounted books that will be on offer!

Oct 2 2012

Smashwords

I have been meaning to make my books available on Smashwords for quite some time now, and I have finally got round to formatting them and uploading them to the site. You can view my page here. I have so far uploaded Heaven Dot Com and The Doorway to PAM. I will be uploading The Earth Angel Training Academy and The Earth Angel Awakening very soon! On Smashwords you can buy books in ever conceivable format, so no matter what e-reader you have, you will find something compatible.

In other updates, after the success of the Mind Body Spirit Fayre at the Speech House Hotel, Yvonne and Gary are holding another Fayre, in Ross on Wye Conservative Club on Saturday the 3rd November from 10am to 5pm. I will be there selling my books, so come along and say hello!

Back to the formatting now, my life is still very busy, and I have today to catch up with my to-do list. Hope you are having a great week so far!

Dec 29 2010

To self-publish, or not to self publish… That is a very good question!

I realised that perhaps I haven’t really explained why I’m self-publishing, or what my novel is even about, and thought it might be a good idea!

First of all – the subject matter of my novel. I dread when people ask me what my book is about, because I find it difficult to categorise – not a good thing when it comes to publishing a book! The title is: The Earth Angel Training Academy. It’s based on the other side, in an Academy for beings from all different realms. There are Angels, Faeries, Merpeople, Old Souls and Starpeople. They go to the Academy to learn how to become human, so they can go to Earth and help with the Awakening. The novel follows several of the characters as they experience the final term of the Earth Angel Training Academy. Anyone who has read any of Doreen Virtue’s books will understand the term Earth Angels, and maybe even know which realm they themselves are from! I will possibly add some excerpts from my novel on here, to give a little bit of a taster.

Now then, my reasoning for self-publishing. I must admit, I initially wanted to publish this book the traditional way, and like I mentioned before, did start sending it out to agents and publishers, and received a few replies. I only did e-mail submissions, I didn’t quite get into the hard copy submissions. I suppose you could say that going down the self-publishing route is me being a bit lazy, and not wanting to bother printing out the first three chapters of the book and sending them out to people, which would be quite true. I don’t really want to go through all of that process, just as I don’t really want to spend all my money on the postage, printing and paper costs! Then there’s the time thing – I’m just far too impatient to wait years, or if very, very lucky, months before finding someone to take on my novel.

In 2007, I self-published my novella – Heaven Dot Com, because at 18,000 words, it was too short to be published by a publisher, and too long to be sent to magazines, so just because I wanted to see it in book form, I published it on the POD site, lulu. Though the quality was good, I wasn’t too impressed with the postage costs, or the high manufacturing costs, so I was pleased to find a different company this year. I re-published the novella, and found that the quality is excellent, the manufacturing costs are low, so I can make the price lower, and the postage is very reasonable. I also like the function on the site that allows people to read a certain number of pages online. So, although I would love to have the benefits of an Editor, Proofreader, and marketing department, I’m afraid that I just don’t have enough patience or stamps to go the traditional publishing route.

Which means of course, that the editing is entirely down to me, the cover is down to my wonderful sister, and the marketing and selling is also all down to me. Which should be interesting. Aside from social networking, I have no actual marketing plan, I may be calling on some other friends in that field to help me out. I also love the book “How to become a famous writer before you are dead.” by Ariel Gore. It has some excellent tips.

I think that’s more than enough information for one post, so time to print out that extra copy, I think!