As you can see, the pieces have been picked up and normal service has resumed, so feel free to have a good nose around.

come and buy a book from me

So I took a deep breath and made my mark at the bottom of an expensive piece of paper.

After all the rewrites, tweaks, ISBN numbers, cover designs, the time is almost here and in less than a month I will be sitting atop a pile of shiny new books.

Of course that is when I rely on the dear readers to start buying enough copies for me to be able to pay the printer in September.

Such is the high flying life of a self publisher.

In a week of big announcements comes your opportunity to see the full cover (less barcode) of Sparrow’s Flight.

You must all be getting excited now, I know I am.

Is it plain and simple? Yes it is, but it follows the design of ‘taking chemo on the chin’ and that is a good thing, with a reverse selection of colours this has the makings of a series for KCC.

So, if this has tickled your fancy, feel free to get in touch and put your name down for pre-orders before the official launch day in August. You could be dipping inside these covers before your friends and who wouldn’t want that?

Available day one from this site and with other distribution to be confirmed, who could resist a great read for only $29.99 NZD?

With Sparrow’s Flight due to hit the streets in August I think it’s high time for a fresh new look and this is one of the latest themes to drop on WordPress, so here it is.

Still fitting in time to play around with the widgets and sidebars, but the general functionality is there and as a celebration of upcoming events I may well open up comments in case any of my visitors stay long enough to interact.

Keep em peeled for a sneak peek at the new cover art once it’s all squared away.

The good news is that I am back on the wagon and after courting a few more publishers in yet another round of “We don’t do that kind of thing” I am back in self publishing mode.

Currently negotiating with some digital printers for a short test run, a safer bet than ‘taking chemo’ which was a hefty run on tradional offset. I am pencilling in July as release month and need to secure a fair list of preorders to make the costs work.

Priorities for the short term are to get the cover finalised and order an ISDN. Then it will be time to start canvassing for support by retailers, who I expect are a less timid bunch than the miserable agents and publishers of this green and pleasant land.

It was less than two weeks since I submitted Sparrow’s Flight for consideration, at that time I was pretty happy with myself. I had allowed myself an extra brandy or two and a celebratory evening of BFBC2.

Now I just don’t know, was it good enough? Was it even remotely interesting to anybody else? Would Simon Cowell call it a self indulgent mess?

Time will tell, but now I know there are over 500 entries in the competition and a possible shortlist of 5, I don’t like the odds much. Being somebody that wants to push a quirky and challenging product it may well be an early return to self publishing.

The alternative would be to use the experience and success of ‘taking chemo on the chin’ to get a foot in the door with a real publisher or even an Agent! That would be a shock…

However, being a try hard wordsmith and not a salesman, getting a modicum of my passsion for the new book over is an almost impossible task.

Confidence, great when you have it, crap when you don’t.

It won’t be long before my movie within a book project will be ready to submit, and I’m thinking about how to get some public support.

This is the age of YouTube after all, maybe I need to mock up some teaser trailers and get this thing viral?

Some fake rushes from the set would be good, but I don’t think I could find decent lookalikes for the cast at short notice.

Maybe it will be an open call to the interweb, I’m pretty sure I know a director….time for more thinking.

I have been making progress on the Sparrow project, for the uninitiated Sparrow’s Flight is an action movie genre screenplay I wrote a few years ago. After having the story languish inside my head for many years I got hold of some decent screenwriting software and laid it down.

After a rewrite and a bit of tinkering I dared to submit the screenplay to some London agents. Of course screenwriting agents are just as scaredy cat as literary agents so nobody wanted to take a chance this particular chicken or egg.

Rejection letters soon came pouring through the letterbox, I however still believe in the story of Sparrow and even now in those pages I find scenes that play out better than some of the tripe we pay to see.

Fast forward a handful of years and you know the story; New Zealand, Cancer and self publishing ‘Taking Chemo on The Chin’. That exercise gave me an insight to the process and now as I still believe I have a great story, no matter how cheesey it is, I am reviving Sparrow as my next project.

The book is an explanatory discussion of my history with movies and the writing process for the story, coupled with my thoughts on casting, choice of director and industry snobbery. As an added bonus of course is the full screenplay ready for consumption and hopefully to become a cult hit.

The project will be called ‘The Best Bad Movie Never Made’ I hope it will appeal to more than just movie land wannbees and gain a wider audience. Hell if things got viral a studio might even pick it up, how cool would that be?

Current deadline is to be ready for the end of March to submit to an NZ writing competition, if I fall at that gate I will push on and self publish.

Keep watching the skies, because I’m bringing it on.

Highlights of my first year in print would be:

• The launch event, complete with a local celebrity and Sophie as the magnificent and glamorous hostess.
• Mr Gavin’s overwhelmed response to receiving a personally dedicated book on his birthday.
• Getting to meet some great folks throughout New Zealand’s cancer related society.
• Being able to share my experience with the people that matter and being humbled by their responses.
• Selling a few copies to other countries was nice.
• Finding my book listed by Waterstones.com was a surprise.
• The little burst of excitement whenever somebody I know finds a copy somewhere, in a store or library.
• Having done something to be proud of that I can hold onto is pretty cool.

I guess now I need to try and keep it going, and to that end will pursue some wider distribution now that the verdict is in. That verdict, by the way proves that I was right and the scaredy cat publishers were wrong.

See you on the shelves.

Richard.