Thursday, June 2, 2011

Announcement

I am a writer, photographer, and journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm trying to get all my work online, and also upload ebook and paperback versions to Amazon. Here's my current plan.

First, you'll need to go to the Home page (link to the side) to find all the links I'm about to describe.

Trilby Awakes is a new venture into the young adult fantasy genre and a work in progress. I will post a chapter a week until I'm finished writing it.

Cut Off is my second novel, a literary fiction. It is scheduled to be published in August by Ashgrove Publishing in the U.K. You can read the first 12 chapters here, to see if you like it. Consider it a novel tasting. Once it's published, I'll post links where you can buy the whole thing. But if you REALLY REALLY REALLY want to read the rest of it RIGHT NOW, you can email me at pcferg@pacbell.net, and I'll send you the file.

Thirsty Work is my first novel, also a literary fiction. I'm going to post a chapter a week until I figure out what to do with it. Perhaps, like Cut Off, I'll stop after 12 chapters and then post a link for you to buy the rest on Amazon.

I also have lots of other projects, including poetry, video, columns, etc. For now, I will post them on the Miscellanea link.

Confused? So am I! If you have any comments, ideas, rants, complaints, compliments, or suggestions, please feel free to post them here, or email me directly. Please also feel free to press the "like" button on the side of the Home Page, to help spread the word about my writing. :)

What follows was posted June 2 about Cut Off,.

*****

Well, here we are at the first Thursday in June, the month I promised Cut Off would be published. My plan was to upload the digital file I've been slaving over to the Kindle store, and also upload the print file I have so diligently formatted so readers could purchase paperbacks, if they prefer. I wasn't planning on posting any more chapters on this blog for free, but meant to ask you to purchase the book (at a very low price) if you wanted to finish it. Then I was going to send it off to various book review bloggers to see if I could generate some interest beyond my circle of friends. All this was inspired by reading about indie publishers Amanda Hocking and Joe Konrath. If you'd like to indie publish yourself, you should definitely read his blog! (There's a link on the side of the home page.)

But now something has interrupted my plan, as something is often wont to do. The owner of a small publishing company in the United Kingdom, Ashgrove Publishing, has decided he will publish my book in August. He also hopes to convince a small American publisher to do the same. I have no real understanding of what this means, other than that I am not supposed to publish any more chapters here. Sometime this month he will send me his suggested edits. Then I imagine I will make them. Then...voila! I'll be published! I guess that's how it works.

In the meantime, I feel bad for you, Dale McDonald, my one reader (hahaha!). And so this is what I propose. If you'd like to finish Cut Off now, just email me at pcferg@pacbell.net and let me know, and I'll send you the Word file. In the meantime, I'm going to move all these Cut Off chapters to a different blog (there will be a link in the sidebar on the home page) where perhaps they will continue to generate interest until the book is published. I'll keep you posted about publication progress there. And this site, starting next Thursday, will become something new--a sort of writer's workshop.

This is my idea. I've begun writing a young adult novel in the fantasy genre which I'm really excited about. I'm thinking I want to publish a chapter a week here as a way of making me move forward with that project. Nothing inspires like a deadline! I understand that readers of serious literary fiction might not want to read light fantasy, but I urge you to give it a try. It's summer, after all! Alternatively, I could do a similar treatment (weekly posts) for my first novel, Thirsty Work, but as that is also heavy literary fiction, and I'm currently in a light fantasy mood, so I say pooh pooh to that! (Hahaha.) There will be time. There will be time. (Do I dare to eat a peach?)

We will have time for weeping later.

So, let me know what you think in the comments. Or don't. But in any case, come back here next week to read your first chapter of Trilby Awakes!

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