A Pleasant Surprise

The middle of last year I self-published my first book The Story of Silence, I did it mainly to get the five free copies CreateSpace were offering if you won NaNoWriMo. I spent six months editing it, rewriting chapters, changing characters, etc, before publishing. It was a long road. But never once did I think people would buy it and read it, I thought the only people to read it were my friends who I lent my copies to. Two weeks ago I was proved wrong. Random people I have never met before are buying and reading it.

I had been looking at the paperback sales, which were zero. Then for some reason I decided to look at the Kindle sales. That's where I discovered over 40 people had bought copies of my book.

My reaction to see the sales was 1. my jaw dropped, 2. my breath stopped, 3. my heart seemed to stop 4. everything seemed to stop while I digested this news. Gradually life returned to my limbs enough for me to search further into it to see whether what I was reading was correct. It was correct but it's taken me these two weeks to actually believe it to be true. I never really believed that people were buying it even after I saw the sales because there were no reviews on the Amazon.com page. My thought was that if over 40 people had bought the book, like the sales said, then surely one of them would have posted a review of what they thought. Then last night I had another look and I noticed that I was viewing the Amazon.com.us page, but people had bought my book from the Australian page. So, I found that Amazon page and looked at my book and low and behold there were 3 reviews! That made me believe it was all true.

It's really an amazing feeling to know that something you worked really hard on, but never believed it would sell, sells. I don't know if the people who bought copies of my book on Kindle found out about it from my blog, or if they even read this, but I want to thank them all so much. It means a lot to me. And to those three people who posted their thoughts of The Story of Silence I want to thank them too. They were all great to read, two were positive while the third wasn't quite so much. However, the non-positive one is the one I hold dearest. As a writer, I cannot improve if no one ever points out the problems. This person did and because of it I can improve, and that's what I want to do. So, once again, thank you all so much.

April Camp NaNo complete!

April Camp NaNo 2014 is done. It is the 1st of May today, the first of a lot of things, I think for American's today is the first of spring? If I'm totally wrong then please excuse me, I'm just thinking of the May Dance. Or is that English? Just ignore me here. Moving on.

My goal for this camp, my first ever camp, was to write 20,000 words, and complete two of my stories. One turned out to be a novella instead of a short story and the other is still incomplete. So out of my goals, I hit my word count with a shining 20,008 words, completed my novella, wrote a poem, and also wrote a whole new short story. My play is still incomplete and I will focus on finishing that later sometime. On all, what I managed to do in April, I'm happy with everything.

Camp was an interesting experience, totally unlike November NaNoWriMo in every way and feel. It had a completely different air about it. The air wasn't good, it weighed all of us in my cabin down and out of the twelve I was the only one to hit my goal.

I will not be returning next year, I've decided virtual camping is not for me. My cabin was a big disappointment, I am sorry to say, but that was all due to the fact that people underestimated how busy life is. My fellow campers were all upset about not being able to finish, but it just wasn't possible for them to finish. There is an option to leave your cabin and they will put you in a new one, but just as I decided to leave the chat slightly became active and I felt it rude to leave. And then it stopped being active and by then there was no point leaving because camp was almost at a close.

It may have been a disappointing camp, but I'm still glad I participated in it. It was a new experience and I'm mostly all for new experiences.

I am hoping that I will see my fellow campers this November, of which I will be participating, I have a very interesting story idea in mind that I want to write, unless things change and I can't write it, and I hope that they will all be able to complete their goals.