Deckle-Edged: #IndieApril 2022

Thursday, 21 April 2022

#IndieApril 2022

[Scroll down for yummy book art and links, keep reading for author ramble.]

Hello bibliophiles,

I realise Indie April is almost over and I've not mentioned it at all. I also realise that my blog has turned into a lit review site for all the books I've been reading, rather than writing. I promise that this is a temporary state of affairs - honest!

The reason I've been so useless at blogging recently is because I've been editing the backside off my new novel. It's been languishing in limbo for almost a year, because I wasn't sure how to feel about it and there was a fuckton (technical literary term) of historical accuracy to deal with. Possibly more than any other book I've ever written. I have been stupidly lucky - far luckier than I deserve - to have an academic expert who has given so much of his time to helping me through this. It would be a disaster if he hadn't. But, because he's put in so much time, I felt I really had to try and do the time period justice.

Just a few of the fuckups I had to correct - in ancient Mesopotamia, there wasn't any:

Horses
Money
Ability to read silently

I won't go into any of that now, I am probably going to do a videolog about it because, at over 160,000 words of manuscript and countless rewrites, I've actually had enough of typing.

Thankfully, the beta read is going fairly well so far. It's boosted my confidence rather than destroyed it, and because of the positive feedback, I'm starting to see the story in a better light than I did when I originally finished it. As I keep going on and on about, it wasn't the book I set out to write, or even the main historical character I meant to cover. Because of that, I had a hard time excepting it for what it was rather than what I expected it to be. But, now I see, it does hold together. I can be proud of it.

Anyway - #IndieApril is a Twitter tag every April where indie authors like myself (small press and self-published) brag about the kick-ass stories we've written and remind people to go buy them and leave (five star) reviews.

In 2020 I did a set of blogposts for IndieApril that explored the inspiration behind each of my books. I was going to do vlogs this year, but just ran out of time, but I will probably do those later on, so do drop me a line if you have questions about any of my books, as I'll be gathering those up to talk about.

For now, though, I thought I'd just showcase the gorgeous covers and link you through to the in-depth blog posts about each of them. And please do go leave reviews or star ratings on Amazon and Goodreads, they mean a lot, as does word of mouth if you enjoyed something.