Extract from “Brightly Shines the Darkness”

Several people have asked me where they can read an extract from my forthcoming book, so here is the prologue:-

Brightly Shines the Darkness

Prologue – Ninth Cycle, Day the Third, after dark

At Passenda’s suggestion, the most severely injured priests had been brought to one of the side-chambers of the roundhouse where they had been incarcerated, and she was doing what she could to ease their pain. This was little enough; the warriors had taken away her medicine-bag, and there was not even any fresh water to clean their wounds and cool them. She could do little more than cover them with the cloaks and ceremonial skins of her companions to keep them warm, and use her healing touch to soothe their suffering. Two others who were also healers had seen her efforts and come to assist her, but she knew that several of the wounded would die before morning.
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Writing on the Back of the Book

Having got his pictures, Jason is weaving his magic to turn raw images into the cover picture, and I need to decide on the words for the back of the book.  You might have thought this would be straightforward – it’s writing, after all!  But it’s not easy, to give a flavour of a whole novel in around a hundred or so words; to say enough about the story to entice a reader to want to know more, without giving any spoilers; to use a style that is in keeping with that of the book, so that readers know what they are getting, and yet serves a totally different purpose.

So I’ve got three versions of the blurb for the back of the book, and I’m posting them all here on this blog, and inviting you to make any comments you feel are appropriate, either at the end of this post, or on my facebook page if you prefer.
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Judging a Book by its Cover

Once I made the decision to work towards Kindle-publishing a book, it became clear that I would have to learn more about modern technology.  I investigated a number of blogs about writing and publishing, and found Catherine Ryan Howard’s both informative and entertaining (http://catherineryanhoward.com/), and so I bought her ebook, Self-Printed: The Sane Person’s Guide to Self-Publishing, which is very helpful for someone like me, as it takes you step-by-step through each stage of, say, setting up a facebook page as an author, organising a website and blog, and so on.
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New Skills for Old Writers

The trouble with deciding to self-publish a book is that it can load you up with a whole load of tasks that are not writing, and which are well outside my natural comfort zone.
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My Writing Life

I’m certainly not one of those writers who always knew that this was the career for them, who had six novels in their desk drawer by the age of ten, who wrote for their infants’ school newspaper, or had winning stories in junior magazines.  Writing was something I did as and when necessary:  essays for my studies, reports and manuals for work, letters to absent family members and shopping lists were the limit of my not so creative writing endeavours.  So what changed?

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