What the hell is going on?

Not a clue. I’ve never written a book before. Will it prove to be a literary colossus? It might… doubtful… but it might.

My hopes are to share a few morsels as I write myself into this literary world, giving background information on my fantasy world. I want to share some ideas on the direction of the novels. It is my hope to keep people up to date with the progress of the books that will make up the Merry Hell series. I also hope to discuss what inspires me and what life at Merry Hell Central is like. Quite lofty ideals, I think you’ll agree. What I hope to avoid is just a random collection of cat videos filling up space of an empty blog as a digital tumble weed rolls by. I will try my best to keep entries current and ‘on point’ but only time will tell.

So, to get things started let me give you a round up of how Havoc came to be. It started a long time ago in a galaxy far…. no wait, that’s somebody else’s story, although the long time ago is fitting. The original idea for the story started when I was at University. I was laid up in bed after spraining my ankle. I was bored out of my tiny mind and suffering mild malnutrition, (I was a student, that was normal). As I lay in bed cursing the patch of mud I had slipped in the day before, I started to let my mind wander. Suddenly, Havoc popped into that empty space. (Again I was a student, having an empty head seemed to be the norm). Where was I? Oh yes, when I say Havoc popped into my head it was a totally different beast, it wasn’t even called Havoc. Only three characters emerged on that first day, Braveheart, Grypp and the Dim Groper. I actually wrote the very first words of Havoc on that first day, in the back of my lab book. Safe to say that none of those first words ever made it into the first draft. For that matter, I don’t think any of them lasted more than a couple of months. 

    By the time I graduated two years later, a miracle in itself, several thousand words existed on a floppy disk, some of which lasted through to this very day. Then came the horror of having to get a job. The process was so hideous that Havoc was driven from my mind. It remained hidden away on that disk at the back of a draw for about four years. Luckily, I suffered another foot injury, (bad for me, good for Havoc). I dropped a large weight on my foot and broke a couple of toes. After work grudgingly agreed to clear my roster of three days to recover, I sat in the lounge of my new flat rooting through boxes trying in vain to unpack. Lo and behold, I found the disk. I slotted it into my laptop and started to read through what I had written all those years ago.  Most of it was rubbish, but some of it wasn’t too bad. With the unpacking forgotten, I started to write again. I finished off a chapter and started to plan out the parts of the book.

    Spin forward several years and happily, with no further foot related injuries, the book had advanced in leaps and bounds. It had grown to the stage where I could no longer hide from the truth - I had to get this thing published or die trying. Besides, friends and family, tired of me going on about it, were likely to lynch me if I didn’t.

    Then came the momentous day, about two years ago. I typed the earth shattering words - ‘The End.’ There it was I had completed my first book. I could now sit back and relax, watching the money roll in. Hardly! Almost immediately the ‘real’ work started. I now think back to the rose-tinted days of just writing. Since then redrafts (five in total), submissions (approx. forty), edit’s (two), graphics (three months), websites, marketing meetings and many, many other excruciating things have happened.

    Early on, I decided I wanted to self publish. Luckily the book took so long to write that the whole digital publishing business had risen up and seemed to awaiting my tome. Unluckily, my decision to self publish meant that I had a very steep learning curve to climb. Without an agent or a publisher to do everything for me, I had to navigate every twist and turn that publishing a book online could put before me. For example, what do you do when you import your manuscript into a program to build the electronic publication version and it turns round and tells you that its written in Arabic. It wasn’t, I can’t speak Arabic, let alone write  it. (Side note - my Dad can though). That tortured me for over three days. It seemed that at every turn a problem, or dilemma, lay waiting to trip me up. Even building this blog didn’t happen easily, if only I’d read the damn instructions!

Anyway, here we are. A nice new shiny website with a nice new copy of my first novel sitting proudly on the digital shelves in cyberspace. Now on to book two - Blast - where the adventure continues… both theirs and mine… What could possibly go wrong?