The Journey of your Muse

The Journey of your Muse

Interfering buggers, they are at times. I have mine stepping into each other’s stories, trying to take control turning a book from a romance into a mystery romance. They really don’t play ball most of the time. If this isn’t enough the characters come crowding into my office and attack me because I’m not writing their story.

I’m not sure I know where I am or what I am doing – author wise. Not that I want them to go away either. The muses have already done that once when I was still in New Zealand. They all went for a Summer holiday in the Northern Hemisphere…Lazing around on their butts, ignoring me and my writing needs. Luckily, I had my publishing to do with various clients along with my Marketing Magazine.

I love working with people. Some of my favourites so far:

J C Christian whose muse was fickle to say the least. We got it in order in the long run with a journey through learning to write what was there at the time rather than trying to write and the brain blank of words. It was a great success to. Once all the chapters were done I put it in order and J C Christian started to edit her full fictional memoir manuscript.

Since that time the book has been re-edited and there will be a second edition sometime in the future. Meanwhile, life took over and the muses went back to been fickle once more and book two…is still been written.

I’ve actually enjoyed working with most of my clients. Another great experience was with Catherine Scythe was amazing to work with and also wrote a fictional memoir. This book was more of a thriller about her husband’s life. Catherine is a wonderful story-teller and during the writing of this book she was taking her Masters in English.  With another continual learning curve due to being a first-time author (like J C) it was great to be able to show them the ropes of how things worked.

The easy part is writing the book

I’ve seen this phrase a lot in my time as a writer and publisher. Though it may be true in the long run for most people, we need to think about what they all know. I suppose it is like people saying Write What You Know! Well to me I’m more like – If you don’t’ know then research it. Anyway, you will find many authors have other experience in life. Some may know Marketing, Editing, Graphic Design – as well as being authors and this is where the Sharing comes in. Grow your knowledge be it with your muses messing things up and not following the format (if you use one – I don’t) To travelling along your writing journey and becoming more knowledgeable in how things work.

It’s what I did and still do. One of my major learning curves last year was with Award Winning Author Wanda Luthman and how to produce a full colour picture book for Ingram Spark. This distributer is totally different from Createspace and Lulu. So different I could have become a nightmare. However, it didn’t and the book looks amazing. One of the things I had to learn was how to use InDesign. Well worth the buy and watching some tutorials. I’ll admit now I’ve still got a long way to go with this learning curve.

Now where did I put those muses…ruddy busybodies they are…never mind the characters making demands on my time!