The Story Continues

Today I loaded Circle of Fire on to Kindle and it's time to move on. So many kind people have asked me when the second book is coming out and it is coming along but it's going to be a while. In the meantime, some of the characters who didn't play such a large role in Circle of Fire have their own stories to tell, filling in the gaps before the second book begins. I'll let them speak for themselves. Watch this space.

Genre-busting. It's just a story.

I have known for some time that I should be writing a blog but every time I started,  inspiration deserted me and I hummed and ha-ad about what to write. So I told myself what I always tell other writers, start at the beginning.

I was staying on holiday in a historic house in a medieval village in France. As I stood at the window of my room on the top floor (just as Nick does in the first chapter of my novel) I could see across the rooftops and beyond the surrounding forest, to the distant mountains. It was there that the idea for Circle of Fire came to me. Nick is a reluctant hero, a warrior who has turned his back on glory but is then forced to fight a battle between love and duty.

Obviously it took a while longer for the plot to take shape and about a year to write it. I knew nothing about French history and in fact the story I had written did not fall into any period of English history either. I had to invent my own country and give it a history of its own.

As much as I enjoy the fantasy genre, I am not too keen on magic or elves, so there are no wizards or wing-ed creatures. I did have a little flirt with mind-reading, or True-sight as I like to call it but all in all, my world was entirely human and down to earth. Was it then, a fantasy? Was it a history? Neither one nor the other or a bit of both?

Whatever I choose to call it, my novel is cross genre and publishers and agents would not publish it. I decided eventually to go the self-publishing route. YouWriteOn.com made the whole process easy and manageable and here we are. It's just a story. A reader can look at the back of the book and decide whether he wants to read it or not.

I would be very interested to hear from other writers who have similar problems. Perhaps we could start our own 'Just a Story' genre.