Heather Lawson's Blog, page 4

A Question For You

I’ve been mulling over self-publishing one of my novels for a while now, and I’ve finally settled on publishing my novel Ashlyn and the Lost Prince using Createspace. I have a question though.

Createspace offers editing services that I think Ashlyn would benefit greatly from – the only problem being that it would cost me somewhere close to £1,000 to get it done. I don’t have nearly enough money to make that happen. So, I guess the question is, do I put off publishing Ashlyn and save up to get the editing done professionally, or do I edit myself (and get it proof read by others) and publish it quicker?

I did a sort of revamp of the cover tonight. I first wrote Ashlyn in 2009, so it’s been sitting around my hard drive for a while. I made a cover for it around 2010 I think and I liked it at the time but after getting a back cover sketch done, I felt the front cover needed a bit of a boost. Just because I’m so proud of them, I’m going to post a before and after below :

Old Design

New Design

Which one do you like best? Personally, I’m leaning towards the newer one – it fits more closely with the story I think. Now the long slog of editing begins (again), and I get to try and make Ashlyn into a coherent and readable novel. It’s actually in not too bad a shape, it’s just badly written right now – or at least I think so. It’s never properly undergone a full edit yet.

We’ll see what the night and all of tomorrow holds for me in the editing department.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, my 500 words a day is not going well – I haven’t done a single word since I wrote that little piece on day one. Oops …

Out of Practice

Well, yesterday was a bit of a fail. I think I only managed about 384 words before I gave up. It has been a long time since I used to write every day and obviously I’m out of practice. I’ve cut my daily goal to 500 for the moment just to work my way back up to 2,000 a day like I used to do. I think I’m still stuck in editing mode since I’ve focused so much on the editing side of things for the last six months or so.

Does anyone have any writers block busting ideas? How do you get back into writing after a long period off?

Day One

So today marks day one of my attempt to write at least 1000 words a day. I’ve opened up my WIP The Answer, which is sitting on around 7k at the moment. Instead of picking up where I left off, I’ve decided to rewrite the section I’ve got and then continue on. So, The Answer will hopefully be the first of many novels completed this year.

For the curious, here’s a (very bad) synopsis of The Answer:

Bill Harwin is a scientist living alone, investigating the mysteries of a locket. When a young girl trespasses on his property, Bill finally finds the answers he’s been looking for, although they weren’t the answers he was looking for.

Okay, I did have a better synopsis typed up somewhere but I just searched for an hour and couldn’t find it so this is all I can remember. It will have to do unfortunately. I last worked on this story in 2011, so I have kind of forgotten what my initial plan was. The fun of not knowing is getting to rediscover the story as I write it again.

I have just under an hour before I have to leave for work so I think I’ll leave the writing until after work – or maybe during work, I have a tendency to write on post it notes at work so we’ll see. I’ll stop rambling now.