My first Blog entry!

Hello!

Welcome to my first Blog entry – it’s taken me a while to get into Blogging, but now that I have, I ‘m going to try and make it a regular occurrence!

If you’ve looked at my profile, you’ll know that my first book is due out in three weeks’ time. Let me catch you up on how I got to this point. Several years ago, I was stuck in a job that I hated. One of the people I worked for had just joined Friends Reunited and was trying to convince me to join up too – I logged on, but found that I had absolutely nothing to say about myself. Nothing of interest compared to the managers, company owners, jounalists, IT professionals, etc that my former school mates had become. So, I decided to write a book. I sat down one evening and I typed and I typed…and came up with a whole chapter. That was seven years ago!

In November 2005, my mam told me about a national competition to find an “Undiscovered Author”. I wasn’t interested as, deep down, I knew I didn’t stand a chance. Now, read carefully, as the next bit is a little confusing: on 31st December 2005 (coincidentally, as well as being New Year’s Eve, it was also the closing date for the Bookforce “Undiscovered Authors” competition), I was clearing out my emails and re-read one from a gentleman called Mark Jones. He was the star of the show Boogie Nights 2 (which I’d seen in Blackpool during October 2005) and I had emailed him after seeing his website in the show’s brochure – I hadn’t believed that he would actually reply himself, but he did. I happened to mention that I had seen him in Blackpool when I was there for my birthday, and said that I was feeling old at the age of thirty-one. He responded, saying that he’d done more since he’d hit thirty than he had in his twenties. I re-read that message, and thought, “What the hell! I’m not over the hill at thirty-one – I’ll give that competition a go. What do I have to lose?” So, minutes before the deadline, I cobbled together a synopsis, attached my single chapter and hit the ‘send’ button before I could change my mind.

I’d put it out of my mind, only to receive a phone call in February 2006 to say that I had won the Fiction category for the North East of England! I couldn’t believe it – I laughed and cried at the same time. The only drawback was that there was no completed book…yet. What you also need to know about me is that I suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome – I look ‘normal’ but spend most of my time completely exhausted, even after a little activity. It’s a hard condition for people to understand. Basically, I spend time in bed or resting, to store up the energy to go somewhere or do something, then following this activity, I spend time in bed or resting to recover from it!!! Fortunately, writing is something that I can pick up and put down when I can do very little else… The rest,as they say, is history and my book, Karma, is due out soon.

From now on, I want to document what happens next. The book market is a very competitive one, and I don’t have money to throw around in order to promote or market my book. How much can one little, sleepy person do to compete with well-known authors and large publishing houses? Well, there’s only one way to find out…