Pumpkins

I could tell you how my fantasy novel is well under way.  Or I could tell you how The Eye ofthe Beholder has had more lovely positive feedback.  Instead, I am going to tell you about pumpkins.

Pumpkins are not easily available in the UK, with the exception of one month.  October. 

Every October the supermarkets suddenly have huge boxes of this wondrous squash, plump and smooth and orange and piled high, ready for the taking.

And what do people do with this, the tastiest of treats?  They carve it into a lantern, and then throw it away. 

So here is my save the pumpkin campaign!

Don’t waste this glorious food!

The flesh can be made into soup, pie, bread, even custard!  The seeds make a handy and light snack.  It can be used in sweet or savoury dishes.

When you get your pumpkin this year, make sure you save the seeds and flesh, and try out a delicious recipe.

Please spread the word, and rescue a pumpkin that is destined to be thrown away!

(Also please buy my book!) 

Save me!

Using Stuff.

Sometimes a blank page of paper can be scary, not because you don’t know what to write, but because you’re afraid of “wasting” the paper.  Perhaps you’ll write something that you then never use, or it won’t come out right, and then that bit of paper is useless.  Write on it anyway.

Here is why:

Once, when I was little, I got some stick on earrings for Christmas.  (Stickers that come in pairs that you can stick on your ears.)  They were great.  Lots of different shapes and they were holographic.  How cool was that?
My favourite shape was the lightning ones.  They were certainly the coolest, and to be saved for the most special of occasions.
Sometimes I would get them out and consider sticking them to my ears, so everyone could be all “Wow, that’s the coolest of ear stickers!”
I never did use them.  Eventually I got to that age where I realised that perhaps holographic lightning stickers weren’t as cool as they may have been in the late 80s.
I probably still have them somewhere.  Perhaps they’ll be back in fashion soon, and if they are, this time, I won’t hesitate to use them.

“I don’t like sci-fi.”

One of the most interesting comments I’ve had since the release of “The Eye of the Beholder” is how many people I know that said they “wouldn’t usually read that kind of stuff” (that kind of stuff being sci-fi), then added on “but I really enjoyed it, and I’ve told such and such to read it too.”

You can probably guess that this is from people I know who wanted to support me, like aunts and uncles, who would not normally venture into the final frontier. 

It got me thinking.  Why do people say they don’t like sci-fi?

Sci-fi is a huge genre.  It covers everything from the past, present and future.  It can be as simple as a present-day world with one change, such as advancement in medical science or robotics, to the grand space operas which take place in galaxies far, far away.

I think a lot of people who “don’t like sci-fi” don’t actually realise that they have probably been watching or reading stories that are sci-fi.  They may actually mean to say “I don’t like stories about spaceships.”  (Which is weird anyway, I mean, who doesn’t like spaceships?!)

Perhaps they just got stung once.  After all, not all sci-fi is great - just as not all fantasy, romance, crime or general fiction is great.  However people are much more likely to have read a sci-fi book, and assume it represents the entire genre, than they are to read a general fiction book and say “Well that’s it.  I don’t like fiction.”

I think most people do like sci-fi; they just don’t realise that they do.

So why not give it a(nother) chance?  You might like it.

I know what I’m doing… honest.

I don’t think I have done as much handwriting as I have this week since I was at school!  I’m nicely filling up my notebooks with ideas, plot points, character bios and maps.  (You all knew I wouldn’t resist drawing maps for very long.)  It almost feels like I’m getting organised.  Almost.

If any of you lovely people are on Goodreads, please do leave a review for Eye of the Beholder, or why not recommend it to your friends?

In return, I’ll leave these inspirational pictures of some aircraft, which were taken at the NI International Airshow here:

 All photographs copyright © Sarah Cosgrove and Stephen Cosgrove 2012

I posted this myself!

I’ve managed to defeat the blank page of doom, and get the first few hundred words down for the fantasy novel.  I have my book of notes and sketches, and I’m fairly happy I know where I’m going with it for now.  One thing I have to concentrate on is not getting distracted by maps.  I love maps, and if I’m not careful, I’ll spend most of the day working out and drawing maps of the world, or just looking at places on Google maps. 

I’ve had more feedback for The Eye of the Beholder.  I’m very pleased to hear that so far people have been enjoying the stories. 

I’ve also had a couple of questions about publishing on the Kindle.  It’s an interesting debate that people are still arguing if being “indie published” is legitimate.  Here’s my two cents on it:

Publishing on the Kindle is fairly straightforward, if time-consuming.  The time-consuming bit is that you need to have edited your work and formatted it to display correctly on the Kindle.  

It is perfectly possible to do this to a professional standard.  After all, the people who do it professionally are people that are good at checking grammar, spelling and layouts.  Before they got that job, they were still probably good at checking grammar, spelling and layouts.  As long as you have someone like that checking your work, you’re good.

You will probably find some spelling errors or mistakes creep through anyway.  That is not uncommon – pretty much any professionally published book I’ve read has a typo in it somewhere that had been missed.  The beauty of the Kindle is that if you find out about these errors, you can update the file to correct them.

 Is it ok to indie publish?  Absolutely!  (Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it!)

There is still this strange taboo about putting your work out there for writers, which doesn’t exist in other formats.  Say for example; music.   Yes, there are some people that will be putting stories up because they got rejected from every publisher for being terrible.  Likewise, there are some that just didn’t get a chance because the publishers thought it was a good story, but wouldn’t make them any money.  And then there are those of us that decided to cut out the middle man entirely and just put our work out there.

 

Why did I do it?  Well, perhaps I am being unfair to publishers, but I couldn’t see anyone taking up a collection of short genre stories written by an as-yet-unknown author.  That doesn’t mean I didn’t think they were good enough; I would never publish something that I didn’t think was up to standard.  But I wanted to get those stories out and let the readers decide if they liked them for themselves, rather than have a third party decide that they won’t for them.

 

I have faith that with the preview system, readers can check out a book, and decide if they want to read it based on the writing.  If a book is good, you can leave a good review.  If it is bad, you can leave a critical one.  Or if you are feeling nice you could contact the author directly with some advice on how to tidy it up.  I don’t think most readers would dismiss a book just because it was indie published; it’s the writing that counts.

Will I go down the traditional publishing route in future?  Maybe.  The one advantage that the traditional route has is marketing.  It’s all very nice my book being up there for the readers to make their own choice, but if they never hear of it, they won’t get the chance. 

Nom nom bread.

It’s been two weeks since the book launch, and it’s had its first reviews! :) Quite a few people are in the process of reading it too, and I’m looking forward to hearing their verdicts. In the meantime, I’m ready to start my next project. This one is going to be a fantasy novel. I do have more sci-fi stories to tell, but for now it’s time to put away the lasers and crack out the swords.

The hardest thing about starting a story is getting those first few pages down. It’s daunting to look at the blank page and think of tackling the entire word count all in one go. I like to have some structure before I start typing, and the best way I have found to do this is with good old pen and paper. It’s a tip that I picked up from an interview with Tim Schafer – just write everything down. I have a pad and I put all of my ideas into it. I highlight what I like, cross out what I don’t, and sometimes a coherent story appears. It can be difficult to do this. I guess most people would have the same feeling of not wanting to “ruin the page” by putting down something that you don’t think will make it into the final draft. But it helps to clear it out of your head anyway.

I’m feeling the onset of autumn this week. Really the weather has been autumnal all summer here, but today it was really dark when I woke up, giving that feeling of the sun not having yet risen. This has caused me to go on a baking spree. I had my first attempt at making wholemeal bread, which didn’t turn out too badly, considering I misunderstood one of the instructions. (It is pretty dense.) I’ll try again soon.

It’s actually one of my favourite parts of fantasy stories. What kind of bread do they have? The type of bread gives you so much information about the world and the character. When they are on the road, are they eating coarse black bread, soft white loaves, or magical sweet lembas? A city lined with vendors selling spiced flatbreads will give you a different feeling altogether than a row of shops selling rolls. (Batches!) I automatically have respect for a character that can bake their own bread and it comes out light and fluffy, because that’s hard to do! They must have practiced quite a bit to get the technique down.

 So whatever happens to the characters in my next story, you can bet that bread will feature somewhere.

The Eye of the Beholder

It's the moment you have all been waiting for!
The Eye of the Beholder is available on Amazon Kindle now!

Take a look, read the first story for free!
(And please leave an (honest) review!)