Almost there...
I am (hopefully) near the end of what has been a long journey – to get published. I started writing The Kismet Pension when my younger son was about three and he’s now twenty-five! It was slow going, partly because I had so little time to devote to it and also because I was learning as I went along and have completely rewritten the book at least twice. Then there were a couple of winters when I was trying to get traditionally published and spent time researching agents and sending out query letters and synopses. A couple of agents showed interest and asked for the full manuscript but when they did not work out, I turned my attention to self-publishing.
Even that has taken some time. Although it is fairly easy to upload a manuscript to Amazon, if you want people to actually find it, there are a number of things you need to do first, such as creating a ‘media platform’ and setting up a mailing list. Thankfully, there are some really helpful authors out there, who share all that they have learned during the process, otherwise I would never have got to this point.
The good thing is that having done it once, it should be more straightforward (I won’t say easier!) to do it again. I have another, quite different book, that is almost ready for publishing and two more that are half-written, not to mention a couple of ideas for books…
I had a week off in early April, which was supposed to be a hiking trip with a couple of days of R and R at the end. We were trying out a new route, called the St Paul’s Trail. Apparently, it follows part of the route the apostle took on a missionary journey through Anatolia, but I hope he did not have to climb the incredibly steep rock face we faced on the first day! I also hope he had better weather. It rained for almost the whole of our second day, so not only were we squelching as we walked, but any views there might have been were hidden behind cloud and mist. As the wet weather was forecast to continue for several days, we abandoned the walking and instead went to Antalya, then to Çıralı. This small town has plenty of accommodation for visitors, but most of it is wooden chalets in fields of fruit trees (a bit like the retreat in my book, The Kismet Pension!) The citrus trees were in bloom and the whole place smelled gorgeous.
Çıralı has a lovely beach, and just round the bay are the ruins of Olympos. This ancient city, founded in at least the fourth century BC, was for a time part of the Lycian League, the federation of city states in this area. I have visited it before – the first time was about twenty years ago when the ruins were half-hidden by forest. Now a lot of it has been cleared and you get a much better idea of the extent of the city, though I must say I rather liked the atmosphere of it before!
Just above Çıralı is a rocky slope covered in small fires that have been burning for more than two thousand years! It is sometimes called Chimaera, after a fire-breathing monster that was said to have been trapped beneath the mountain, though the real cause of the fires is a gas source that leaks out of fissures in the rock and spontaneously ignites. I can vouch for this, as when we went there when my children
Here are a couple of the books I have enjoyed this month:
The Rose Arbor – Rhys Bowen
This is the first book I had read by Rhys Bowen. Many of her books are set in America where she lives, but she is actually British and this one is set in 1960s England, with a gutsy and likeable young woman as the main character. It also features a village abandoned in 1943, when the army requisitioned it for training purposes. I love an abandoned village (we have one near here, and I wrote about one in my short story ‘The Untold Story’ – available if you sign up to my newsletter on my website), so this was an enjoyable read for me.
The Notebook – Nicholas Sparks
Wow – this book was published in 1996 and made into a movie in 2004 so most of you have probably read it – and watched it. I hadn’t done either. It is Nicholas Sparks’s first published book –snapped up by a publishing house for a million pounds – and it is a beautiful love story that manages to be both paired down and yet to cover a lifetime.
I’m aiming for 8 May for publication but you can check when it’s out on my Facebook page (melanieanngilbertauthor).
Hope you had a great month!
Melanie