Friday 30 December 2016

All the best intentions


"Resolutions." by MT 23 is licenced under CC by 2.0


I meant to blog regularly. In fact back in the day I was pretty good at sticking to a regular blogging schedule - but since then my life has become crowded with kids, managerial work, the spouse, the cat, the need to binge-watch Supergirl...

Following the completion of my second novella, The Foolish Friend, I let all of the reasons not to write overwhelm me, and it has taken a lot longer than I intended to complete the third book in the Novella series - His Darling Belle. Three months longer, in fact. I could give you a mile-long list of reasons why I didn't do it, and many of them sound really reasonable, but at the end of the day my stall in writing comes down to one thing:

Fear.

I suddenly became crippled with self-doubt about my ability to write novellas, and convinced myself that the only people buying them were friends, and they were doing it out of pity. It didn't matter whether or not I got good reviews, the fact that I don't know anyone in Italy, or the USA, or Australia that might buy my books. Somehow I convinced myself these were fluke reads. The fear that I was churning out sub-par content, that I was a fraud, that I didn't deserve these lovely readers and reviewers, became so real that I was on the verge of quitting completely.

Luckily, I'm in a couple of awesome writing groups. Writers - both traditionally published and indie - that I admired often talked about hitting some kind of crippling wall of fear at least once a year, usually when they hid a complex plot point, or got a bad review, or their sales dipped, or it was Tuesday.  Following their example I kept on going, kept on writing that novella, even though I wasn't brave enough to write on this blog, or put together an email list, or do any of the peripheral activities necessary to be a successful indie author.

Today I got the payoff; I typed "The End" on my newest novella, and sent it off to my beta readers for their input. I've put the cover together and written the blurb all ready for launch at some point in January, I'm putting together the mailing list (which will include a free short story just for signing up - so stay tuned!!), and I've even plotted out a series of blog posts about interesting things and people from the regency period, 

So in short, thanks for sticking with me, folks. I promise it will be worth it!

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