My mother wrote stories all her life. Every year my dad bought her the latest Writer’s Market book for Christmas and she’d spend a lot of time submitting and resubmitting her stories and poems to magazines and publishers. Occasionally she’d get published, more often than not she’d get the dreaded rejection letter. It never stopped her though. She wrote because she was driven to do it. Creative urges boiled in her like a mad sea and she had to find ways to soothe it. She was a painter, a crafter and a writer.

It’s why I wish she was still alive to experience what’s happening in the book publishing world right now. E-readers, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, Lulu… She would be in her element and the ability to self-publish would have delighted her beyond belief.

It delights me too. If you hadn’t guessed, I’m deviating from my usual newsroom/journalism/social media/freelance stuff here to talk a little bit about self-publishing. Like mom, I often feel overwhelmed with the need to be creative. Writing is my favorite thing to do, followed closely by photography and fiddling around with mixing audio loops into serviceable little tunes. A couple of years ago, I participated and actually completed NaNoWriMo (after a couple of failed attempts in previous years) and I’ve been working on that story refining/editing it since then. I will be selling it on Amazon when the editing is done. I don’t care if I only sell copies to friends and family – just the fact that I actually finished it makes me happy.

This is something I never would have tried to do if I hadn’t known I could publish the thing myself when it was completed. Years of watching my mom receive letters of rejection from publishing houses made me a little gunshy. Not now though. We truly live in an amazing time. I wish she could be here too.

Anyway, the book is called Revenants (Facebook, and Twitter), and it’s got elements of things I love. Like zombies. I love zombies. And a heroine with a funky name. And I had a blast making this book trailer:

And while I wait for my beta reader to do their editing magic (Read: wait for my sister to scour for typos and grammar errors), I am occupying myself  by writing (very) short stories and selling them for a buck on Amazon and B&N. Just one up so far called Everything Will Blow which is a story I wrote a few years ago and updated so I could get a feel for the self-publishing process. I have to say that Barnes & Noble is the easier/quicker process. Amazon’s isn’t bad but there are a couple of programs you have to download for conversions/previewing so it adds several more steps to the process.

I’ll be adding more while the book’s being edited, so if you have a Kindle, Kindle app or Nook, and need some quick reads, just search for me on Amazon or B&N! :)