Upcoming Book Release

After a 4 year hiatus from writing, I decided that I wanted to share NaNoWriMo with my daughter's high school, and offered to come and speak to their high school class about the program, discuss my own experiences with it, and even offer to buy a 'winner' t-shirt for any of the students who met their self-assigned writing goal for the month. (Keep in mind that there are only 16 students there). Anyway, I decided that for NaNoWriMo, I would dust off the 'Osiris' and 'Avalon' manuscripts, tweak and edit the former, and complete the latter during the month and discuss my progress with the students at the school. As fate would have it, we weren't able to get the program off the ground at the school, but I had been so focused on it, that I was supercharged and ready to get writing. That's usually when something goes wrong. In this case, my well-laid plans of edits and rewrites imploded.

Two days before the first of November, a brand-new story idea popped into my head. Keep in mind that I have a set of story outlines that I've written down over the last 20 years or so for at least fifteen or twenty novels, but this one was unique...and quite intriguing. I decided to throw out all of my plans and get to writing the story, the working title of which is 'Mountain Home Alpha'. I wrote nearly 51,000 words and again, won NaNo. I decided during the month that I enjoyed writing so much that I wanted to get my stories out there. Here's where we stand right now:

The manuscript for Osiris is currently in the hands of the editors, and will be back in my hands in a couple of weeks. The week of January 13, I'll get the cover design for the Osiris ebook, followed shortly by the completed paperback and hardback covers. I'm so excited by this prospect because when I originally wanted to publish Osiris, the only way to get published without an agent or directly-connection to a publisher was to self-publish using what's called a 'vanity press'. These, in literary circles, have a bad rap as they are usually expensive, and the writer usually pays high fees and ends up with boxes of books in their closet that they can't sell. The big publishing houses contol(led) access to bookstores, and the internet was in it's infancy at the time.

Fast-forward to today. There are a large number of ways to get a book self-published and get it into the hands consumers directly without having to buy and print a ton of books that you yourself have to sell. With Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Lulu to name a few, you can upload your manuscript for free to their online platforms, and when a customer purchases the title, they either receive a digital ebook, or a printed copy of the book from them - no author-interaction required.

I'll be formally announcing the release of Osiris soon, once I have the manuscripts back and start working on the cover design. Keep checking back for updates!