Notebooks, Chosen!...

Having gone through my (insane amount of) notebooks, I have now got the three I plan to use for my work:

A5 brown leather: Horror/Suspense.

A5 grey cover/black leather notebook insert: Cosy Mysteries.

Narrow brown leather: High Fantasy.

Also chose my pens:

Pink Fountain medium nib.

Lavender Fountain thin nib (as one of the notebooks has quite thin paper).

I have the re-covered notebooks to use to write drafts in, but these ones I'm using for plans and outlines.

And it's sunny outside.

Ama.x

Aches, Imagination, and The Fellowship…

What-ho!

Had a pretty decent day. It was a day-job day, so I was at work, doing work stuff. 

Once I got home and had tea, I got a groggy head (like the start of flu) so had a nap and used some nasal spray to sort out what I reckon was my sinuses. Seems fine now.

I’ve also torn my back up, along with my neck, by the looks of things. It happens to me all the time (I had a pretty bad injury, where my shoulder blade pulled away from my rib cage. It was a number of years ago, but it plays up from time to time). That’ll take some time to heal up again. I honestly need to find a way to support both my neck and back while I do things. You’d have thought I’d have figured it out already, but I just don’t consciously think about it until it starts bloody well hurting.

Finally starting to think of scenes for upcoming books, without having to push it. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve been able to do that (usually while listening to music of some sort). It was a bit short lived yesterday when intrusive reminders of reality shoved its way in between a battle scene in my head to remind me that our roof needs fixing still. Today, I managed a full scene without any interruption, so I reckon if I keep practicing, I’ll get that ability back again and my imagination should do the work itself.

I bizarrely miss zoning out and having a practical full movie of my books in my mind’s eye.

It’s there, I just need to tap into it again.

For now, I’m going to put the kettle back on a read a book. I’m in the middle of The Fellowship of the Ring by Tolkien. Shock, horror, no, I haven’t read it before. I’ve seen the films, which I love to pieces and own and watch the extended editions at least once a year. The books certainly give some further insight, which is nice. The beginning was a bit of a slog to get into, so I put it down a number of times over the years, but once they got past Bree, the story really picks up and its a great read. I’m surprised how lighthearted it truly is, with the friendship and heroism it portrays with the Company and their journey so far. Even during the tense moments, you ‘feel’ like you’re in good hands with the characters in the situation. 

They are currently off to Moria and Aragorn ain’t too happy, but Gimli is like ‘Ah yes! Off we pop to the underground. Like it or lump it, you blighters’. 

Can you imagine if it was written like that? Hahah! 

…Pretty sure that’s a bit of blasphemy to Tolkien fans. I apologise. I genuinely am enjoying it.  

Now, time for a cup of tea.

Also, I saw some blossoms on the trees today! Spring is coming!

Ama.x

Getting a Grip on My Writing…

Since the start of this year, I’ve been having the worst trouble writing my books.

It’s not that I don’t have ideas. It’s not that I don’t know how to write. It’s not that I don’t have twenty books to work on and get finished. It’s not that I don’t know how to get my books uploaded so people can read them…

So, what is it?

I suppose that’s the age old question for people who write (or, indeed, make any kind of artistry). When I was in my twenties and early thirties, you couldn’t stop me writing. I enjoyed a colossal train of imagination and thought, that I found it frustrating that - at the time - the speed of Word was a few steps behind my typing. 

But, like many, I go through periods of despair and ‘writer’s block’, although it lasted only until I began work on the next thing, completed an edit of my work, or published it (or in some cases, sent it out on submission).

The last few years, which were the end of my thirties, had been some of the worst in my life. I have the excuse that when things like it happen, I can just sit and wallow - as you should, when things like it happen. But the wallowing had been going on for a few years and the beginning of last year (2023) I felt an enormous uplift from rotten luck and tragedy. 

And I wrote and finished a book.

A children’s high fantasy, of which I mentioned a few times on here.

As I work in bookselling - and no, that doesn’t help you get published any more than if you weren’t, NOT ONE BIT, as I am actual proof of! - I started to see a worrying trend in children’s books.

I don’t want to go into it on my personal blog, but it’s safe to say that I don’t include certain topics in my books (as it’s high fantasy and I believe that books should be for escapism) that it wasn’t much of a surprise that I didn’t get any responses other than form rejections and worse, no-reply.

Most of the books that are coming out now (that I often get sent prepublications of) all have certain similarities, let’s say, that if I’m completely honest, I have no interest in reading, let alone writing in my own work. I started to feel like I was reading the same book over and over, and I refuse to bow to pressure to add things in that I don’t want to write about, or believe belong in a high fantasy setting.

With that in mind, and after over a decade of trying with multiple books, I’ve decided that there genuinely is no point in attempting children’s books now. It has slid in a direction that I don’t want to follow, nor do I want to add to the pile that is currently being inflicted on children.

Poor kids, I can’t imagine being given a book with the main selling point that it is ‘heartbreaking and poignant’ rather than ‘fun and adventurous’. Honestly.

Anyway, enough of the rant about that!

During the first few months of 2024, and feeling like I’ve been punched in the gut, I’ve decided to reevaluate my work.

Spending what feels like forever working on children’s fiction (15+ years!), and not getting anywhere other than selling online (13 Paperbacks/18 ebooks across the two that I did publish there. I didn’t do them all), I think I’m going to let it go.

My adult publications are doing much better and I’ve had great reviews (that were not cascaded to Amazon, unfortunately. Damn it!) I think my time is better spent building on that, than on something that never was.

If I take out the children’s sales above, I’ve sold 92 books over the years. Pleasantly, someone bought Phobias this month, which was a nice boost to my moral, I have to say.

Yes, they aren’t the best numbers in the world. But I’m proud of those 115 books overall. If I hadn’t self-published, and went the traditional route, my current total would be zero, wouldn’t it?

So, because of all this self-realising, I’m making a plan:

1, To abandon all my children’s books.

2, To rework my children’s high fantasy and make it for adults (this is going well, actually).

3, Finish more of my horror novellas and bloody well publish them for you all to read!

4, Get my cozy mystery stories planned out and then write them all - these are quite hard, as I want the mystery to do what mysteries do: fun to play along, and still surprise you at the end. It’s harder than it seems. Haha!

5, Write on here more, and stop using social media in replacement of it.

I have come off my socials for a bit, as I found it really distracting. I was spending more time scrolling (and Doomscrolling!) that I was just making myself annoyed. So I’ve chucked it in for a bit.

I have this blog, which allows me the fun of sharing things, without obsessing over likes and comments.

And views.

And follows.

Ugh! Why do we care so much about it? Jeez!

Okay, this is already a long post, so thanks for stopping by.

Hopefully I’ll finish and publish more books soon.

After all, that’s what I’m here for.

And, if you’re wondering, the photo is of a bunch of old notebooks that I’ve re-covered. I hate throwing notebooks away, but I always waste them by filling only the first pages. So I yank those pages out, take the cover off and re-cover them so they feel brand new!

Ama.x