I am making progress

Since making the decision to 'go indie' last week I have been firing on all cylinders. Progress made so far:

1. Most obviously, this website is now in a far more presentable condition and ready to host whatever content I need to showcase.
2. I've been putting effort into improving my social media visibility, and this is paying off in terms of more people following my Twitter feed and reading the blog. Of course this means I now have a greater responsibility to keep writing useful and interesting content!
3. I have an editor (Clare at Textsmith) who has agreed to take me on and put the final polishing touches to my manuscript.
4. Having decided against creating my own cover design, I have been making enquiries and getting quotes for professional cover design.
5. As part of my mission to read more contemporary fiction to enliven my diet of classics, I'm most of the way through Sue's new book The Silver Dark Sea, and absolutely mesmerised!

Perhaps most importantly, work is progressing well on my next novel, working title 1848. I have a complete cast of characters--including a few surprises--and am currently in the process of working out a skeleton plot. I always find this a difficult stage in prewriting, as I've usually burnt through the immense energy that keeps me going in the first, exciting stages, but not yet achieved the momentum that comes when I actually start writing draft material. Work seems to be slow on this one, but then again I have had a lot of research to do.

As always, my inspiration is drawn from the places where the ideas grew from in the first place ... the events of my own life, and the remarkable stories I have discovered in the course of my research. At the moment the thing I'm most scared of is that I won't be skilled enough to do justice to these stories. I want to present these forgotten legends to the world in an accessible way, and although I hope I have already achieved that through The Only Genuine Jones, this time the material is more complex, in some respects almost impenetrable.

But I'm patient, and at last things are starting to move.