Postcards From Across the Pond

I am within striking distance of the end of The White Feather, Book VI in The Talisman Series.

I know it’s a bit early to light the victory cigar, but I’ve only got three easy chapters to go, and I could have, if I’d had time, finished it by the end of this weekend, However, I was singing on Saturday, I’m singing today, and tomorrow, and Tuesday, and Wednesday. So, yeah, maybe next weekend.

This book has been a right slog, but I sorta knew it was going to end up this way. For those of you who don’t know, I wrote these books—all eight of them—starting in 2013 and ending in 2020. My method was to write a first draft of a book, then distil an appropriate children’s books from it. Don’t forget, my G-boys were toddlers when I started, so the target audience was always changing.

When I got to The White Feather, in 2018, they were obsessed with the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, by Jeff Kinney. Wanting to give them something they might appreciate, I took my rough (very rough) draft and turned it into an approximation of a Wimpy Kid-style book. The result was satisfactory, they got the traditional “Book from Granddad” for Christmas, and I moved on.

Unfortunately, the mess I left behind was, well, a mess, meaning I basically had to re-write the entire novel from the ground up. I started it on the 12th of March this year, roughly two months behind my original schedule—which I considered fairly good timing—and should have had it done and dusted by the 23rd of June. But here I am, nearing the end of December, with three chapters still to go. And don’t forget, this is just the second draft (the first, actually) so there is much work to be done even after I type THE END.

The most frustrating thing, however, is this note I wrote to myself at the end of the messy first draft:

I’m pleased I had the foresight to write myself a note, but putting it at the beginning of the first chapter might have been a better idea.

All is not lost, however. Despite being a slacker, I will have this version finished soon, and the revisions and formatting done by the end of this year. And that, in itself, will be a victory.

And despite having fallen so far behind my original schedule (the entire series was supposed to have been completed by now) it is not all bad news.

Stalling the series this long allowed me to experiment with trying to have the books traditionally published (spoiler alert: they won’t be), and that, inadvertently, led me to GetCovers (thanks, Kathy) and a modified method of re-releasing the series. More on that in another post—first, the covers:

I always tell people I made them myself, but in truth, I spent £150 on this first cover for The Magic Cloak:

Not willing to spend £150 for each of the eight book covers, I reverse engineered the image and made my own covers from that. I think I did a pretty good job, but even I have to admit, the further I got away from the original, the more homemade they looked. A copy of a copy is fine, but a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy begins to look a little ratty.

GetCovers charges £35 per cover, which is doable, and they do a stand-up job. So the one niggle I had concerning this series has been overcome, and things are looking up.

In summary:

That, by my calculations, puts me just this side of Good, and I’m happy with that.

And, as a bonus, it’s raining, which means we aren’t taking our traditional Sunday morning walk around the Nature Reserve, and I can write instead.

I’d better get to it.