My second proper post on here, yay! And this is more of an "official", "real" post, now I know what I'm doing with the blog. Well, kind of.
The first draft of my novel "Memento Mori" is finished.
As with the previous half of the first draft, "chapters" 19-33 are now posted as a PDF on my website, and can be accessed by clicking the picture at the right. (Again, it's just over 2Mb, and about 80k words.) If you just want to read and/or comment on the individual chapters, they are all uploaded here: Memento Mori on Livejournal.
I now need to think about getting to work on editing it, so I can publish it, although I may try and get "Good as Gold" finished first. (That, I think, will be my project this November.) It makes more sense to publish that and "Thunder Daughter" first, seeing as they explain a little about certain aspects of Memento Mori (notably, the feared "blood fevers").
I’ve always considered doing illustrated “special editions” of things, but as the photograph below shows, that may end up being prohibitively expensive. (I checked on Lulu’s price calculator, the base cost of a 300-page perfect bound full colour book would be in the region of £42. I’m not sure many people would be willing to fork over that much.)
The delay in making this post did allow me to get this item ready to go into it, however. As soon as the first draft was finished – and that is pretty much literally, as soon as the last word was typed I was formatting it to send off – I got the first draft printed up as a book (via “Lulu”, a print-on-demand service). It took about a week to arrive. I purchased two copies – one for me, to put in my bookcase as a “reward” for finishing it, and one to loan out to people at work; the loan copy is already out in the wild.