First Book Tour

The Other Side of Town just had it's first book tour.

A BIG thanks to everyone who reviewed my book this week or took part in the tour for The Other side of Town. I was so taken back with the kind words regarding the content of the story... Another 5 stars, wow!!

However it appears that the cover is not very popular with people. I loved it when I first saw it, because of the sad eyes of the women on the front. I guess it spoke to me in some way. I hope the cover doesn't put people off reading it. I will have to be mindful of that in the future, although it's difficult to please everyone and get it right. Opinion is a strange thing, but I'm always happy for constructive criticism, it helps us learn and grow.

Thanks to everyone for their continued support.

A Duvet Day

Now, if Sally would come out from under her duvet and mentally move on from her estranged husband, rather than tormenting herself with the past, she might find that she has a very bright future.

Grief is a funny thing it pulls up all sorts of emotions . So may be I shouldn't be so harsh with her, when all she wants to do is drink wine and eat chocolate. Her daughter Zoe the psychologist in the family has some ideas to help. Once Sally embraces the idea she finds a passion to write.

Uncle Shaun helps out

Today was about Sally reflecting back on the day she visited with her uncle Shaun.
He went into some detail about her fathers early life and career as a photographer and she knows he's alive and well, but will he want to see her or want her in his life.

She has his name, his address and telephone number, all she has to do now is find the courage. Feeling she needs family support she's decided to share her news with the family before writing to him.

Reflections in the making

Hi Everyone I've been in procrastination mode for too long. I've promised myself to make more effort with my blog and through I might just walk us through the process of my new Book Reflections. My aim is too give a regular update of the story line as it unfolds in the hope that you might enjoy my thinking around the characters and that I might stay focused. 

  

This week I dusted off the computer and got back to Sally, the heroine in my next book, Reflections. Yesterday I thought she had a soft spot for Roland Leriche, the interpol agent, whose reopening the case of a stolen painting. She's still trying to deal with her fathers death and doing a fair bit of "Reflection" but when Roland knocks on the door her heart skips a beat. I wouldn't call this book a romantic novel but theres always room for a little flirting, once they've solved the mystery and once Sally moves on from her need to write everything down. Her need to document everything about her family is the way she copes with her emotions, during a difficult time in her life. The stories and family skeletons have already come out of the closet but her reflective writing shares the stories with us. 

At the moment it's till a bit of a mystery even to me, so lets see where the story takes us.

party time

Well this was the photo that I chose to use for the launch of Eleanor Smythe. The girl scrubs up Okay. The hardest thing for me to do is to promote myself and my book, it is so much harder than thinking of the story in the first place. So I've decided that I will have to call in the people who know how to do that stuff. Today was another first when I started my twitter page and couldn't work out how to put a tweet on. Now it should make me feel sad that I'm two steps behind the times, but it makes me laugh. When I speak to friends about the struggle I have with all this technical stuff, I'm sure they think it's a bluff, but it is for real and I'm fine once I learn which buttons to press The other problem I have is thinking of what to say about myself, then. Although I'm beginning to feel increasingly comfortable about revealing parts of my life. The photo above was at the beginning of an evening out, when we attended a charity dinner/ dance in aid of the local volunteer fire fighters. Once my dear friends had encouraged me with a glass of wine or two I became quite relaxed and ready to party. Give me a dance floor and music and I'm away into a world of craziness. I know how to enjoy myself that's for sure. I can dance all alone with out anyone around me and I'm not at all self conscious. I dance as if I'm alone with no one looking at me, and I don't tend to worry about what others think. For me dancing frees the soul, a bit tribal really.

Lessons learnt.

This week has been manic, first excitement when Suzy Turner and I spent the day going through every full stop on the manuscript in preparation the publish on Kindle. Then anticipation when I pressed the send button and had to wait for the book to go live, which it did later that day. Over come with excitement I made the mistake of trying to tell everyone, which I guess was quite a natural thing to do. Then this morning I decided to down load a sample from amazon, and am I glad I did because I saw mistakes that had been corrected looking up at me. Shock and panic struck, all I could think of was the fact that others were going to see an unprepared copy, how sloppy and how unprofessional. Then I thought about the fact that people may have downloaded it, I felt so bad and didn't have a clue what I should do about it. Suzy being my mentor was the first person I contacted but of all days I couldn't get in touch with her, suddenly I had the unrealistic thoughts that hundreds of people could be looking at the book while I was panicking; not true of course. At the time of my panic I had an email from JB Johnson who a book reviewer and promotor, who better to pour my heart out to. I was soon reassured that these things can happen and that it could all be sorted out with a bit of tweaking.  

Once my personal Wonder Women was on board things began to unravel. We unpublished the book and set about finding the error, which seemed to have occurred during the process of copying from open office to the word doc. What we had failed to do was preview after we'd made the changes and switched from one to the other. For me a massive learning curve to check everything, then check and check again. We can't trust just because it looks okay to the eye. These computers have hidden Gremlins and probably some of the Trolls from Suzy Turners YA fantasy books.

Good news it has now been republished and I'm just waiting confirmation. I will check it out again before I get excited and put it on face book.

Happy Days xx

A fresh start

The last post the I wrote was under very sad circumstances and looking back I found it hard to believe how much time had passed. So loads to catch up on, but trying to play catch up can be such a difficult thing to do. It would be fair to say that life seemed to stand still for a year after DJ died, I wasn't reading anything and definitely couldn't concentrate on writing or being creative in anyway. In many ways I just wanted everything to stop but of course it doesn't, life just keeps moving forward whether we are taking part or not.

A change came for me early hours one morning, I couldn't sleep and decided to open my kindle at a book a friend had recommended, Waking the Merrow by Helen Rigney, I just loved the character Evie and could not stop laughing at the way she was portrayed; worth reading. I just couldn't put the book down and was hooked again on reading. In August 2014 just over a year on from DJ I decided to write again. Instead of going back to my previous manuscript Perceptions, I decided to write something very different and new.

A fresh start needed a fresh story one that had been bouncing around in my head for some time. It's primarily a story about two families with additional characters that bring the story to life giving it twists and turns.

When tragedy strikes, the lives of two families are torn apart. Although the families live on opposite sides of the town the members of both families experience the pain of grief, betrayal and deception.

Everything becomes clear and is revealed when a specialist team of police officers are deployed from London to the town of Millbrook, investigating an international criminal, Yakov Volkov, who they suspect to be carrying out illegal activities in the area. 

I wish I could say that I worked diligently everyday for hours but I didn't. I picked it up and put it down depending on my mood or the time I had. I found myself writing just for my own pleasure and to maintain a positive attitude, however as the story began to unfold I actually believed it had some mileage and decided to take it bit more seriously. Once I had finished and beta readers had gone through the manuscript I decided to have an editor on the case. The feed back was positive and encouraging even with the corrections that seemed to glare up at me from the page. I tried not to be fazed by the red marker and became increasingly determined to complete the task to publication.  We now have the finishing post in sight. The book is with a final reader, it will be out there and I will officially be an indie author, how great is that. 

COMING VERY SOON :