Celebrate the First Novel!

 

Here's the best post of all: about my first book

Summer Sieges

All of her life, Beren has taken orders to the defend the castlekeep, first from her father and then from Lady Treasach. Then the Watrani Horde with their Gitane Witches came and broke the siege.

To save a magical crystal, Lady Treasach orders Beren to gather a small party and they flee through the under-veil to the mountains.

But the Gitane Witches continue to track them.

With the help of a disenchanted Prica, the warrior Storr, can Beren protect the lady and her magical crystal? Or will she fall to the Gitane and the Watrani?

Fetch it here.

--- --- --- --- ---

I dared myself to enter self-publishing, and I did it with this book.

That may be part of the reason that I like it so much.

It's not the first novel I completed. Not even the second or third. It's not the first fantasy. It is a story that I struggled with until I understood exactly what I was doing with the character of Beren, showing someone who followed orders until she realized that self-determination would be all that kept her and her group alive. She broke a lifelong pattern at that point, and thereafter she also pursued her attraction and love of Storr. 

People often say that the first books we write are most like ourselves. The main characters in those books are mirrors of us.

Well, yes, and Summer Sieges fits that. In that respect, Beren is like I was at the time of writing the novel, years and years ago. Her struggle to break the chains was like my own struggle.

My writing reflects one of those chains that I broke, choosing indie over traditional publishing.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. 

In 2013, while I was crocheting--which puts my brain on automatic and allows it to spin other thoughts, I realized that I had lost touch with so much that I loved.

As much as I loved crochet, I loved something else more. Writing. The spinning of stories.

Over the years, though, my job had beaten me down, sucked away my creativity, demanded my mental energies.

That had to stop.

The mad rush of life and traumas in life had kept me from seeing it. That summer of 2013 gave me a chance to slow down and think and consider.

I thought about writing, about all the manuscripts I had submitted to traditional publishers in the past, and about the good rejection letters that I had received before life got in the way of submitting my writing. (That sounds strange, doesn't it? Good rejection letters.)

I planned a new drive, a new impetus. Yet I hesitated. The same gatekeepers still controlled the traditional publishing business. How would I venture into my writing without publishing through the major publishing houses?

That fateful night in 2013, a new thought emerged from my subconscious. This new thought altered those plans. It turned me away from traditional publishing. My brain had had time to put two thoughts together: writing and the new Kindle.

In the autumn of 2012 I had purchased my first Kindle. At some point I realized that some of the writers in the Kindle Store were self-published. A few were unprofessional (bad covers, badly edited, badly written stories), but the majority of indies that I read had published great manuscripts with few errors and excellent stories.

Then, that late summer of 2013—yes, I know I’m slow—in my decision to return to writing, I vowed to ignore traditional and pursue the indie route (breaking those chains!). I counted up manuscripts, picked one, and settled into a re-read to discover that I would need to do to bring it up to speed.

I also researched self-publishing. It couldn’t be as easy as it looked. It was AND it wasn’t. I would need a cover designer—that search took 18 months. I would need to learn formatting—easy peasy since I understood the ins and outs of MS Word, having grown with the program since the early 1990s.

I was smart enough to realize that I had divergent reading interests which meant I needed to have divergent writing genres with their own pen names. Thus, my three pen names were born.

Summer Sieges wasn’t the novel I picked to publish first. It became my first published novel because of the lengthy cover design search and needing to write a third book for a series under a different pen name, to have all three of those books published at once.

Summer Sieges became my self-publishing test case. 

Could I do it? Would it work? I did, and it did—on this day in 2015.

My writing was launched.

This fantasy novel is still one of my favorites.

And it's hard to believe this date is the 7^th anniversary of my writing business.

So I celebrate!