Midnight to Morning...

     For those who know me personally and have been following along on social media, this blog post is a long time coming. For the rest of you, well now you'll know too!
     In the autumn of 2009, after years of encouragement and comments from friends and family, I decided to take my love of writing and start doing something with it. At first, the idea was to use the binders full of stories I had written about one particular character and turn it into a series of smaller books for young adults. However, about fifty pages into it, I was frustrated beyond all measure. It was about that time that I started having a series of "nightmares." They were not the true wake-up-in-a-cold-sweat kind of thing, but they were eerily realistic and deeply personal. These dreams happened night after night for nearly three weeks. I was disturbed by them and told a few people about them. All said the same thing, "You should write about that instead, it sounds like a great book."
      So I did. I sketched out all that I remembered from the dreams - 27 pages full of sentence outlines. After many days spent "day-dreaming" the content order and filling in some blanks, I started. That was in December of 2009. In January of 2011 the first draft of "Midnight to Morning" was completed. It is a long novel and was written to be the first in a four book series. Through the rest of this year there has been numerous edits, a lot of soul searching, research into how to make this dream get onto published paper and more sleepless nights than I can remember. It all has been wonderful though.
      The novel is almost ready for print, and now the big choice must be made. Do I pick a couple of sites that work with large groups of publishers, write a proposal, pay the huge fees to post it for six months and sit and wait? As someone who has only had minor poetry published and has only written a handful of online articles, I don't have much on the "wow factor" outside of the first two chapters that are posted with the proposal. I'm virtually an unknown. The other choice is to self-publish and hope that enough people take interest in the novel that word spreads and enough copies are sold. I'm not very good at talking myself up, but would have to learn quickly in order to sell the heart I've put into the book.
      The decision will need to be made fairly soon and I would enjoy input from as many people possible. Today, I'll be putting links to this blog on the social media sites I'm involved in and linking to blogs I read frequently. In other words, this blog is going live today, even though I've been working on it for a month (see that hesitation thing going on?) Thank you for joining me on this wild ride of life.