Starting to write and self publish

After reading one of Peter Labrow’s blog’s, I thought I would share my experiences so far.

After many years of writing nothing except cheques to pay the bills, I felt the urge to write a story. I can’t remember for the life of me why or what may have prompted it, but what ever it was I am grateful.

I have always been a fan of ghost stories and in particular ghost films. So my first attempt was bound to be a short ghost story which I called Berkley Hall. It took quite a while as it was my first attempt at writing. Once written the difficult bit was letting other people read it.
I first gave copies to my family and got back very positive comments. All said they enjoyed it and returned the inevitable list of typos and grammatical errors which I completely missed.
So, with my self confidence lifted slightly and ego stroked a little, I corrected the errors that I agreed with and went further a field to try and get more unbiased feedback. i.e. friends of friends. Again the comments were positive.

After the first positive experience I wrote another short ghost story called The Tube Home. It was again enjoyed by all with good comments being returned.

So, now what?
Well nothing really. I looked into trying to get them published in magazines but it seemed once they were published by one of them, no one else would be interested. Since they would only pay about £20 per story it didn’t seem worth while so I kept them to myself.

Over a period of time I wrote more poems but because I had put my inner most feelings into them, I didn’t fancy exposing myself for criticism. As a result they were only shared with close family.

Earlier this year (2011) I became ill and brought a Kindle to keep myself occupied while I was recovering. What a breakthrough that was. I started to discover the world of ebooks and self publishing. After many weeks of trying to understand how the whole ebook thing worked, I took the plunge and published my best poems into a short book called Curious Poems. I didn’t sell many, which wasn’t a surprise, but more importantly I didn’t get any damming reviews. Few! Self esteem intact.

Since then I have rewritten Berkley hall into a novelette (now named The Demolition of Berkley Hall) which is selling quite well considering it is not a full novel.

With renewed confidence and the realisation that I can write things that people will enjoy, I started writing a novel a couple of months ago which is going very well. This is a ghost thriller where the destiny of two families is unexpectedly thrust together and they have to rely on each other for their survival.

I don’t know if what I feel when I write is normal, but during the creation of this book so far I have found myself laughing aloud in some of the chapters and crying with sadness in others. I guess that’s a good sign?

Having written the previous stories in Microsoft Word I again started using Word for the writing and Excel for the planning. These are sort of ok, but through one of Peters Labrow’s reviews I discovered Scrivener. What a fantastic package, it has revolutionised my writing. It frees up the mind of having to think linearly and allows you to grow different chapters/scene/sections, which ever way you work, whilst easily generating and keeping track of the story line. I am still learning the package and can’t do it justice in a few lines. If you are interested in it go to http://www.literatureandlatte.com/. The Windows version is still free to use until they release version 1.

Peter if you read this I would just like you to know that you have been an inspiration in several ways and I owe you a beer.