Tag Archives: Bleakbourne on Heath

Once you have a book published, the hardest, most difficult part is trying to fit writing the next book into all the other demands on your time. I have an editing job that I work at from 6:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. daily, I write five blog posts a week for various blogs (3 for this blog) I have several novels in the works, and I am my own publicist.

That last part is not going so well, just so you know.

For one of my writing gigs, I am a member of the staff for Edgewise Words Inn, which had been quite fun as I get to explore the creative writing side of my life. I just began a serial there, a medieval fantasy, called Bleakbourne on Heath. The first installment posted September 11th,  and the next will post  on Tuesday the 29th of September. This has been quite fun, as it is a series of short-stories (Less than 2000 words each) chronicled by Leryn, a bard. He is the observer, but is sometime drawn into the action against his better judgement. The first two episodes are a little dark, but episodes 3 & 4 have been far-fetched and quite fun to write.

I have also signed on to edit an anthology for my publishing group, Myrddin Publishing. That has been an absolute joy–the stories that are being included in this anthology are extremely high quality. And the good part of that is, I have wonderful people working with me on the production of that book, Alison DeLuca and Lee French.

NaNoWriMo is approaching–and I am planning to spend the month of November writing a series of short stories, some set in Bleakbourne on Heath, and several random shorts.

But, like every other working person, I also have a home to keep in some sort of order, minimal though that effort is, laundry to do, cooking (yes, even vegans cook) and I try to maintain some sort of communication with our kids and grand-kids–even if it is just stalking them on Facebook.

And lets talk about Facebook, that soul-sucking time-waster from the Netherworld. Many of the events I do are organized though Facebook, and that means I get a lot of email to sift through, while I am trying to accomplish something productive for my clients.

So-and-so, the organizer, encourages everyone involved in the ordeal to post something in a thread:

• But if you do, you will get 200 emails from that thread alone.
• But if you don’t, you will miss some critical piece of information.
• But if you do, you will get 200 emails from that thread alone.

If you are careful when you select which event to get involved with in the first place, these events can raise the indie author’s visibility, and indeed, any author’s visibility. I have done many that were not good experiences, and many that helped sell books.

To that end, I, along with many of the authors I know and a lot whom I’ve never met (over 200) will be participating in the first annual Virtual Fantasy Con in November, the 1st through the 8th.

So far, at least on the participant’s end, it is being set up like a really well-run convention, so it will be interesting to see how smoothly this goes, and how much visibility we will actually gain from this. We participating authors will have the opportunity to take part in many publicity events prior to the actual convention.

The only thing I worry about is how confusing keeping up with all the email and information is. I am afraid I will accidentally not do some critical thing–which is why I am the world’s worst personal assistant for myself.

But it’s a lot of work keeping everything organized. My ‘personal assistant’ is not as good at her job as I wish she was.

Sigh.