I was experiencing formatting problems writing my previous blog - it all made sense shortly afterwards. It wasn't the website that was playing up, it was the darn laptop - it crashed a few hours later. This was not the first time sadly - there have been a few instances over the past month or so. But having restored it and got a day's use out of the thing, it threw a wobbly again yesterday evening. Another restore has allowed me to blog this morning but I fear there isn't much life left. A Christmas present to myself is in order!
So it is time to get organised, make sure all the backups are fine, etc, etc. They usually are, but with all this crashing and restoring, things may have got messy, so I need to be sure all is in order. It seems a good time to do this, with the year coming to an end, me taking stock, having spend a large part of 2013 sorting out my work.
Getting organised was the theme for this year. I decided when I was in India during February that there was too much mess around - books which were available that I had written years ago when my skills hadn't been properly developed. I'm still developing and strive to do better - I'm sure all of my books could be improved upon. But some of the older stuff was really poor and either needed to be removed from circulation or revisited to improve. I've pretty much done that across the board and am pleased with the results: re-edited books where the writing was embarrassing; given a new look and feel to the covers; removed some titles that were beyond redemption. All has been dealt with one way or another and a line can be drawn with satisfaction. But there is one glaring exception... Mania.
Mania doesn't need to be edited as such. I read it again a few days ago and was perfectly happy with the work. It's just too short at 7500 words! I made it free because of this but withdrew it as Mania isn't representative of the bulk of my work, so it might have been misleading... I withdrew it, but I haven't forsaken it. Mania is still there - the last book to be dealt with, and the last for good reason. It touches on a period of my life which was painful and destructive - a living nightmare. Writing it in the first place was difficult enough, and revisiting is not really something I want to do. I only touch on the subject matter, and do so light-heartedly - there's no way I could go into the murky depths again and deal with the topic of bipolar disorder properly. It's not my genre anyway. Yet it is written, and I think it is quite good... and one way or another I need to deal with it - to draw a line under the year and be able to move forward.
I know I could put it into a compilation, but I think it deserves better, and it would stand out as an odd piece because there will be no more similar works. Mania has to be on its own.
Perhaps I should just re-release with a clear note about the size in the blurb. One of my earliest books, 'The Pilot's Surrender', was originally the same size before I rewrote and extended it this year as part of 'The Beauville Trilogy'. But despite the low word count, it proved to be very popular - so perhaps it is quality, not size that matters, and I won't get slated for short-changing the public.
Anyway, enough rambling. I'll get organised today and as I do so, my mind will tick over in the background thinking about Mania. It will be faced and it will be dealt with... and then a line will be drawn.
So it is time to get organised, make sure all the backups are fine, etc, etc. They usually are, but with all this crashing and restoring, things may have got messy, so I need to be sure all is in order. It seems a good time to do this, with the year coming to an end, me taking stock, having spend a large part of 2013 sorting out my work.
Getting organised was the theme for this year. I decided when I was in India during February that there was too much mess around - books which were available that I had written years ago when my skills hadn't been properly developed. I'm still developing and strive to do better - I'm sure all of my books could be improved upon. But some of the older stuff was really poor and either needed to be removed from circulation or revisited to improve. I've pretty much done that across the board and am pleased with the results: re-edited books where the writing was embarrassing; given a new look and feel to the covers; removed some titles that were beyond redemption. All has been dealt with one way or another and a line can be drawn with satisfaction. But there is one glaring exception... Mania.
Mania doesn't need to be edited as such. I read it again a few days ago and was perfectly happy with the work. It's just too short at 7500 words! I made it free because of this but withdrew it as Mania isn't representative of the bulk of my work, so it might have been misleading... I withdrew it, but I haven't forsaken it. Mania is still there - the last book to be dealt with, and the last for good reason. It touches on a period of my life which was painful and destructive - a living nightmare. Writing it in the first place was difficult enough, and revisiting is not really something I want to do. I only touch on the subject matter, and do so light-heartedly - there's no way I could go into the murky depths again and deal with the topic of bipolar disorder properly. It's not my genre anyway. Yet it is written, and I think it is quite good... and one way or another I need to deal with it - to draw a line under the year and be able to move forward.
I know I could put it into a compilation, but I think it deserves better, and it would stand out as an odd piece because there will be no more similar works. Mania has to be on its own.
Perhaps I should just re-release with a clear note about the size in the blurb. One of my earliest books, 'The Pilot's Surrender', was originally the same size before I rewrote and extended it this year as part of 'The Beauville Trilogy'. But despite the low word count, it proved to be very popular - so perhaps it is quality, not size that matters, and I won't get slated for short-changing the public.
Anyway, enough rambling. I'll get organised today and as I do so, my mind will tick over in the background thinking about Mania. It will be faced and it will be dealt with... and then a line will be drawn.
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