Write a Blog, a what?

‘Mum, you’ve got to write a Blog’. 

    A ‘Blog, what’s that?’ I reply and as the eyes roll backwards into my eldest daughters head she explains it’s a sort of diary. So this is it, my thoughts and feelings on everything not just, 'The Tessellation Saga, Prophecy’s Heir.' Even though I am proud of it and it’s been published on Amazon as an ebook and I’m as nervous as a kitten, will people like it? Will they come to love the characters (well some of them anyway, could anyone love Toby?) as much as I do? Will they even be able to make it through to the end?  Like the title, the book is a long one. Well, to begin with it was just called ‘Work in Progress.’ It began like this…

    

    My nephew Max had written a book for a competition and as he knows I read avidly he asked me to read it. I did and liked it so I told him so. We discussed his book for a while and he suggested I write my own.  You would have thought that I came home and immediately began to write but being a busy wife and mother and working shifts at London Heathrow, full time too, time itself isn’t always a commodity I have a lot of. Anyway a few days later I found myself ‘bookless’ something that never happens… I have bookshelves in every room in my house, even in the loo! I also raided my son’s room to see if he had anything new but again was disappointed, so rather than chew my nails I sat with him and told him what Max (my nephew) had said. We then began a discussion of what would make a good book. So really from the notes I jotted down as he and I talked, ‘Work in Progress’ began.

     

    I always knew the hero was going to be called Gideon; I’ve always liked the name and have a dear memory of a cartoon goose on the TV called Gideon, it made my daughter Derry, cry every time she watched it. Wicked mother, I hear you say, but she cried when the short cartoon finished and because she wanted more.  The chapter where Gideon was born was actually the first chapter I wrote. When it was finished I sent a text to my son Simon and told him that Gideon had arrived, (silly really, anyone reading the text would have thought the baby real.) Then, ‘OK’ I thought, ‘how come a woodsman just happened to be nearby in a large forest when the young girl and her unborn baby lay dying.’ So the chapter about Jedadiah Green happened along, Blue, the wolf, was at first incidental as I happen to like wolves. Then the chapter about, why the young girl, (Gideon’s mother) was running wildly through a storm lashed forest with silk slippers on her feet and in fear of her life from soldiers? So that’s when I wrote the chapter about Lydia’s father King Gath.   Do you see where I’m going? Tess 1, as a work in progress was exactly that from the start, because I almost wrote the first part backwards!  Toby came to be initially because again, I liked the name. My daughter was expecting at the time and Tobias was ‘on the list’ for a boy. I hasten to add when her son arrived he was called Hendry; the name Tobias, or Toby had a very different feel by then! Strange isn’t it how one can be influenced by a few words on a page.

    I have to add I've had to edit Tess 1 again myself as the company I paid to proof read and edit did such a bad job. Perhaps I should ask for some of my money back!  So my apologies to the folks so far that have brought it before I edited it myself!

     Got to go, need to do the ironing!