Two events coincided this last week for me. First I started putting a bibliography on this website to let people know what I have written in the past, which naturally led me to thinking about a book I wrote over 10 years ago – The Loch and whether I should drag the pdf out of the purgatory of my filing system and put it back into Print On Demand. While I was investigating the options, my twitter feed threw up the story of Jaquelline Howett and her self-published book. In short, she got a review she didn’t like on a blog so she commented, attacking the reviewer and then continued to develop the debacle into a flame war.
So now I’m worried, not that I’ll have a meltdown in public, but that The Loch isn’t good enough. The lesson I took from the way it happened is that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. So I think I’ll sit on it for a bit longer and find someone to, at the very least, run an eye over it for grammar and spelling.
Meanwhile, I’m continuing to write the Fifth Warrior. This is a complex beast of a novel that is ostensibly set 500 years in the future. But it deals with the relationships between four warriors who have reincarnated throughout history and fought together. So, the story is told in the form of past-life hypnosis. So far I’ve written the Roman and Dark Ages sections and am pretty close to getting the Crusader section finished off.