Looking Back... Looking Forward

I keep a journal--have bins filled with them--and once in a while I do like to look back to see where I've been, and how things have progressed. It's to help me see how I was, back, say five or ten years ago. It helps ground myself so that I'm not getting myself crazy about how I want things to go along more swiftly and be more successful than I am.

In 2007 I was getting small things published in a small quarterly called "Weeds Corner". Ruth Brookshire was the editor and owner of the little magazine out of Indiana. She accepted my very first poem which saw the light of printing ink. After that, she accepted everything I sent her, and I was paid a few dollars for it. It wasn't much, but my words were getting out there and being read.

I was working on my (eventually self-published), book Spell of the Black Unicorn. I didn't know what I would do with it, since I was getting rejection letters from everyone I sent it out to. I did what I swore I would not do. I self-published it. I didn't want to do this, but I had turned 50 and by God or high water I was going to damn well have a book published before I got too old to enjoy the thrill of doing so. I found a relatively cheep deal for this and I had to do all the formatting, but they were very helpful. I chose to go with Infinity Publishers. I payed my $400. and within a few short months I had a solid paperback book with my own designed cover and my own words inside and out. I sold a few dozen copies, had two book signings and had a ball. I still have about a dozen copies left in a box...

And here I am, 2011, my second in the series vampire novel is out now. I'm not exactly rolling in dough. Not rolling very much, actually, but it takes time to get the word out to people who don't know about your book. Promoting a book is not easy. Especially when you have no money to help things along the way. But, at least I didn't have to self-publish these last two books. And I'm not saying I may not ever try to do something in Smashwords, or some such. I'm just saying right now I'm okay with doing things this way.

The thing about getting the second book out is that you've made contacts with people on the first book, and now--because they loved the first one--they are willing to help promote it on their sites and with their efforts and so forth, other people eventually learn about both. It's like a tiny snowball, rolling down a hill. I think.

And I've also published an older short story--which never saw printers ink back about 9-10 years ago when I tried to get it into the pages of a magazine. But I re-wrote it and it was taken and now it is out there with a bunch of other writer's works.

I'm now working on a novella, and hope to get it written by spring and see if I can't send it to the same publishers (Dark Moon), as they take the shorter works. They only take horror fiction.

After that I hope to get the third book in the Sabrina Strong Series into the capable hands of my editor at Copperhill Media, and meanwhile I hope to begin a mystery series. I don't want to lean on just the one sort of genre. I'd like to stretch my writing abilities. I know I have a couple of stories in me and they have to be told in their specific genre.

I write this with the realization that only a few short years ago I had no book published, and now I have 3. I have to pat myself on the back, but I also have to kick myself and work on those things I hope to publish next year.