Back Home to Sherwood Park

Last weekend I headed home for my Mum's birthday and I also snuck in a reading at the local library while I was at it. This was a joint venture with fantasy author J.Y.T. Kennedy, who is also with Dragon Moon Press, and lives just outside of my hometown.

J.K.'s novel Dominion, was released in 2005. The protagonist of this story is a woman called Gilna, who completes her training as a perfumer just before her village is ravaged first by plague, then by an unstoppable invading army bent on conquering everything in their path. Gilna's skills allow her to administer medicines through scents, and alternately, deadly poisons. As a healer and survivor of the plague, Gilna is deemed useful by the invading Kurathk, and is kept as a servant to the tribal leaders. Her need to survive within her captive state battles with her guilt over assisting her peoples' sworn enemy, until she determines a way to use the power and influence she garners from her new position to manipulate the Kurathk. Although she is terrified of the dreamworld, help comes from that ethereal dimension, as Gilna plots to destroy the Kurathk through their growing dependency on her.

Although many people had told us they'd seen the article about the event published in the Nov 2nd edition of Strathcona County This Week, there was a small turnout. The atmosphere was pleasantly relaxed, where the audience munched on home baked goodies (and my store bought cookies) along with some tea or coffee. Some of my friends from elementary and high school turned out, as well as some of J.K.'s writer group buddies. I finally got J.K. to sign my copy of her book, and had the chance to sign a few of my own. That was the nice thing about this set up; everyone who showed up had a genuine interest in the books.

Internet Book Promotion Video

Whew! It's finally done. It took us about three weeks of planning and arranging when and what to do, but we finally have a video for promoting The Longevity Thesis on line.

I've sent the final file to Gwen for final approval, just to make sure all's well before I post it, but I think for the most part, it's finished.

We spent the better part of today recording the music, and then I merged that audio file with the voice clips we recorded two weeks ago. It's almost midnight, and I've just finished fitting the video images to the sound. This was way more work (and fun) than I ever would have expected.

Here's a picture of us hard at work in my little office:


Many thanks to all my friends for their support and help!

What happens AFTER you've written the book?

**Note: An updated perspectives entry can be found here.**


After putting so much effort into transforming a nascent story line into a workable plot, then developing the characters and having to either coax or threaten them into following said plot, it seemed almost insurmountable to then repeatedly rewrite the novel in workshop after workshop until it was polished to shiny perfection. As a first time fiction author, I had read many articles and book chapters on how I should not expect any publisher to look at my manuscript without it being as close to perfection as humanly possible. In comparison, shopping around for a publisher seemed easy, as I was lucky enough to attract the attention of Dragon Moon Press on my third try. I was prepared to go for at least ten rounds in this arena as well, since this was what all my previous reading had led me to believe. Well thank goodness for Gwen Gades!

I've also read that first time novels rarely find a huge readership, and a new author would be lucky to sell a thousand copies or so, most likely not getting much recognition until he or she has written at least three books. This notion was underscored by the comment made by R. Scott Bakker at Con-Version 22 last year. When he was contacted by the convention organizers to appear as a guest author, his response was, "Are you sure you have the right R. Scott Bakker?" He did have three published novels at the time.

So here I am, nervously waiting for my precious baby, The Longevity Thesis, to be printed this September. Seeing it posted on Amazon.com was really a shock to the system. All of a sudden it's real, and every particle in my being wants to race up the incredibly steep learning curve of book promotion. I'm ready to go, but where do I run?

Looking around, I see that another Dragon Moon author, Scott Sigler, is really making waves. At the time I'm writing this entry, his book Ancestor, which just came out on April 1st, has an Amazon.com Sales Rank of #1,506, and is sold out. Dragon Moon is scrambling to print more copies by mid-May. Obviously, I think I've found myself a role model here. Investigating how Mr. Sigler does what he does has left me staggering and feeling overwhelmed. He has built up a huge fan base through podcasting, handing out freebies and blogging, not to mention continuing to be a prolific fiction writer. This was all before he had the novel out. Until last week, I didn't know the difference between a plog and a blog, and had to clumsily wade my way through it. My notion of podcasting was limited to the explanation given by the "Ask a Ninja" series on YouTube.

Ask A Ninja: What is Podcasting?

Clearly, I've got a lot of work ahead of me, but I wouldn't trade it for the world. I can finally say, this is my world.