The fact that my friend Jane (who actually coincidentally features along with her blog as a non-appearing cameo in the book) has read bits of it at various points along the way, and that we’ve talked bits of it over in great detail and she likes it, doesn’t actually help in taking away the fears of the writer.

Angella Graff is somebody who I have got to know only after she reviewed my last book with no prior knowledge of it, and loved it. As well as writing books herself and doing book reviews she also offers editing services to other Indie Authors. Although by the time she read Mr Tumnal, she knew a bit more about me than before she was still coming to my new story with no prior knowledge of what the book was about or what I was trying to achieve. At this point of time there isn’t even anything so much as a synopsis to go on! (note to self: must attend to this…) So, imagine my delight when I read:

I really loved your style of writing, it’s different from your first book, but not so much so that you seem like a different author, which I love.  It gives a different flavor to your writing but doesn’t give that sort of writing culture shock that some people experience when reading a totally different genre.

I guess this is draft two of my story. Draft one would be in the handwritten original in the the three leather-bound volumes and draft two would be the process of typing it up, and then the rough pass that I did to sort out any inconsistencies. It does seem that that draft is actually a very clean draft though, from the sound of the beta read…

Mr Tumnal is a very interesting story.  It plays out as a character piece, the character living the life he always wanted at the same time interposed with the life he really has.  When these pieces start to come together, his life gets crazy and random.  The prose tightens up about 20% through the story, so you start to get the ideas that there are two simultaneous stories happening.  It’s very organic and reads very well, though the early chapter work might benefit from a little more tuning, this way even though you’re not sure what’s going on, you don’t feel so completely lost.  I think the best way to do this is add a few touchstones during the real/fake scenes so that the reader can empathize a bit earlier.  I think the heavy focus at the beginning to the music and its importance is a little overplayed.  It is a huge part of the story and plot, but it might serve to be touched on a little less frequently.  Overall there’s a delicate balance and interplay working here, and any and all edits need to be done carefully.  I would have someone focus on bridging and connective text to make sure that the ideas move from one piece to another to help reduce the feeling of being adrift.

I’m now decided that its time to further go down the route of becoming something more akin to a professional author… and get the work content/copy edited as being the place to really find out where the story is not working. This is altogether, very exciting. I feel like Mr Tumnal’s curious little tale is finally going to emerge into the world in the not to distant future.

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The child Hocking began telling her own stories before she could walk. She was forever inventing make-believe worlds…

Haven’t we all done that? So many stories that they blend in the real life of the writer…

At 12 she had already begun to describe herself as a writer and by the end of high school she estimates she had written 50 short stories and started countless novels. The first that she actually completed, Dreams I Can’t Remember, was written when she was 17. She was very excited by the accomplishment, and printed it out for friends and family, as well as sending it to several publishers.

“I got rejection letters back from all of them. I don’t blame them – it wasn’t very good,” Hocking says.

Ruins of the Old would be my ‘early work’ I guess. At the time I was really proud of it, and looking back there’s some interesting, original ideas in there, but its completely unpublishable. Flyht too, I have a soft spot for the Peter Pan-inspired tale of a Regency girl in a 21st century world with the gift of flyht – its the story that got a very nice, genuine, rejection from the publisher’s of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials that showed that they had read it, and liked it, but that it wasn’t for them. Its a letter I still have, and made me see that I do have something, but I can completely understand now why they couldn’t take it.

When I began to read back The End of All Worlds, after almost two years, I thought that I might feel the same way as I do now about Flyht, but aside from the present tense thing (which is now resolved), I don’t feel like that. The book still has something. And this is good.

On that day, Hocking made her book available to Kindle readers on Amazon’s website in her bid to raise the cash for the Muppets trip. Following tips she’d gleaned from the blog of JA Konrath, an internet self-publishing pioneer, she also uploaded to Smashwords to gain access to the Nook, Sony eReader and iBook markets. It wasn’t that difficult. A couple of hours of formatting, and it was done.

I’ve made a few eBooks now, and I concur its not that hard, although I would say its more than just a few hours work. It’s also a process that makes you realise how bad some of the ebooks that are available are. For instance, its really not that hard to put table of contents and chapters in. I know. I’ve done it. So why can’t they? I’m going to have to look into this Smashwords site as it would be good to get the book onto other devices not just the Kindle (I am a bit concerned though that on first investigation you might have to just upload a Word file and not an ePub – that’s not good!), and also have a read of Konrath’s blog.

And what about the hours and hours that she’s spent since April 2010 dealing with technical glitches on Kindle, creating her own book covers, editing her own copy, writing a blog, going on Twitter and Facebook to spread the word, responding to emails and tweets from her army of readers? Just the editing process alone has been a source of deep frustration, because although she has employed own freelance editors and invited her readers to alert her to spelling and grammatical errors, she thinks her ebooks are riddled with mistakes. “It drove me nuts, because I tried really hard to get things right and I just couldn’t. It’s exhausting, and hard to do. And it starts to wear on you emotionally. I know that sounds weird and whiny, but it’s true.”

In the end, Hocking became so burned out by the stress of solo publishing that she has turned for help to the same traditional book world that previously rejected her and which she was seen as attacking.

I don’t see self-ePublishing and, as they call it in this article, legacy publishing as mutually exclusive. What self-ePublishing does do is do for writers what MP3s have done for musicians. In the face of an ever more competitive world, where publishers only take safe bets, it allows authors to try the market and get readers, get a following, and for publishers to realise what new writing there is out there. And yes, for writers who make that decision it is hard work. Writers want to write, they don’t want to the production, the marketing and finance, but like all those musicians and bands before them, increasing numbers of them – of us – are prepared to get their work read.

Hocking’s editors on both sides of the Atlantic point to the deal as evidence that traditional and solo digital publishing can live in harmony. “There’s a lot of talk about publishers being left out of the loop,” says Jeremy Trevathan, Macmillan’s fiction editor. “But this whole thing is an opportunity for writers and publishers to find each other.” Or as Matthew Shear, publisher of St Martin’s Press, puts it: “It’s always been the same since the days when people self-published from the back of their car – cream will rise to the top.”

I do find it a bit disingenuous for publisher’s to talk like this. It does strike me that a publisher’s job is to recognise good books and to publish them, and that this is a new, and lazy, approach to publishing. They carry on with safe-bets and they wait for writers to establish readerships before picking them up. It shouldn’t be this way. Publishers used to be braver, and they should continue to braver. Yes, they can still pay massive advances to celebrity authors if they like, but maybe not-quite-so-massive advances so that there’s room to publish short runs of lots of new writers in the knowledge that some of them will fly.

If The End of All Worlds does sell, and yes it is an if, will I take up a subsequent offer from Penquin, or Bloomsbury, Fouth Estate or some other publisher to be published by them, or will I think, hey that’s validation that I can do this and get a print run of paper books out there? That, is a question, that only time can answer…

In the meantime, I have now been through The End of All Worlds to mark up all the final corrections to the manuscript. That is, with a little help from my friends… Hrmm… :-\

What I ended up with, after I culled it from the clippings file (a not altogether unwieldy process discussed earlier in the pages of this journal), was a document of some 53 pages of corrections to make. It is a somewhat time consuming task to go through the novel in Word to make those changes, but effective none the less. What I must remember though, next time I go through this process, is to highlight more than just the words the or is or are, etc…

Helpful? Not.

I’ve found out this year that actually Twelfth Night is generally believed to be the night of the 5^th January (although not exclusively so. Also, the Twelfth day of Christmas is variously said to be either the night before or after Twelfth Night and so could be said to be the 5^th or the 6^th. My post titles clearly say day anyway so I reckon I’m safe, and the decorations are all down so you can’t get me on that either!

I finished downloading all my edits from my recent read through of The End of All Worlds from the Kindle today. Annoyingly all notes, highlights and clippings end up in MyClippings.txt file and so I had to though it and remove all bookmarks, highlights and notes from every other book I’ve made notes on along with every article I’ve ‘clipped’ from The Guardian. Very frustrating. Must make mental note to feed this back to Kindle and Amazon. Surely its not beyond them to have a book/publication put it’s clippings and notes in its own text file?

Anyway, job done, I’ve now got a 53-page document of final corrections to make to go through. Umm… I’ve done the first page. Only 52 to go…