Great Big Trumpety Triumphant Fanfare, Please: Dory’s Avengers, Re-released TODAY

Yes, today’s the day I’ve been waiting for, the culmination of a year’s hard tweaking – my lovely sleek new version of Dory’s Avengers is available to buy on Amazon Kindle.

Please click on the appropriate link below to find out more.

UK link     USA link     Australia link     Canada link

A tale of loyalty and betrayal, kindness and cruelty, mystery and discovery, oppression and freedom, Dory’s Avengers is modern take on a good old-fashioned adventure with a great soundtrack, a healthy portion of sport and a huge dollop of humour, all leading to…

Stop right there! No spoilers.

To celebrate this momentous day, I have been out dog walking and chatting with my good friend and fellow author Georgia Rose, creator of the wonderful Grayson Trilogy among other works, and she’s been kind enough to share our chat on her blog. Would you like to have a read? Then head on over … here.

Thank you for joining me today to celebrate my book re-launch. I hope you enjoy reading Dory’s Avengers as much as I enjoyed writing it. And for those of you who have been asking, yes, I am writing novel number two (which goes under the super-exciting working title of New Book at the moment – it does exactly what it says on the tin, I suppose). Finally!

Happy weekend 🙂

Half Centennial

Today I have a significant birthday. Significant in what way? The clue’s in the title.

My mother, who is sadly no longer with us, was a keen writer (with a vivid imagination and a wacky sense of humour, all traits she passed on generously to her children), and she kept a diary so I have a written account of that momentous day in 1966. No, not the one England football fans are still banging on about (because, let’s face it, it’s never going to happen again)…

…which goes glaringly unacknowledged by my football loathing mum (goodness only knows where my love of football comes from), I mean a momentous day from a more personal point of view which took place a few weeks later.

It seems that was rather more significant from Mum’s point of view than England winning the World Cup. (Well, it would be, wouldn’t it, duh!) So fifty years ago this very day, I entered the world (just in time for lunch, of course), and in honour of the occasion I’ve been looking over the past decade and making a list of ten reasons – for me, anyway – why turning fifty is better than turning forty.

Another legacy from my mum is always to look for positives.

Ten years ago, I’d never:

• Written, published or edited a book
• Run my own business
• Driven a car
• Visited the Southern Hemisphere
• Ridden a wakeboard
• Driven a fork lift truck
• Watched my little League Two football club run out at Old Trafford (couldn’t get the day off work last time Cambridge United played Manchester United in a midweek match – ooh, how I love being self-employed!)
• Heard my sister sing in Kings College Chapel (which was an amazing experience, despite the fact I felt like a bit of a chav in my crop trousers and sparlky shoes ‘by Debenhams’ next to the toffs in their Savile Row suits and cashmere coats, and the fact that one of said toffs nicked my programme!)
• Walked overnight from London to Brighton, which was arguably the most amazing experience of my life
• Run a blog. Okay, those who are familiar with the sporadic nature of my bog posting might say I still don’t run a blog, but ten years ago I didn’t even know what a blog was!

As if those weren’t enough reasons for me to grab the champagne and party like it’s 1999 (which, of course, it’s not, otherwise I’d be a fresh-faced 33-year-old), I’m entering my sixth decade (yikes!) with exciting times ahead. My editing business is booming, I’m on the verge of re-releasing a vastly improved Dory’s Avengers (which is available for pre-order on Kindle – can’t resist a bit of marketing, even on my birthday)…

Click image for UK pre-order link

…and the status of novel number two has been elevated from ‘on the back-burner’ to ‘work in progress on the rare occasion I find time to write’.

Bring on the next ten years; I can’t wait to find out what they hold.

Big Fanfare Please – The New Improved Dory’s Avengers Is Available to Pre-order!

Excited! Buzzing! Finally, after the best part of a year’s editing, re-editing, re-re-editing, re-re-re-re…you get the picture, Dory’s Avengers is due for re-release on Friday 30 September 2016. The manuscript has been professionally proof read (yes, I know what I do for a day job, but not even an editor can proof her own work) – many thanks to Julia Gibbs for her expert work, and the cover art is looking fan-blooming-tastic courtesy of James Willis of Spiffing Covers:

I’ve managed to upload the manuscript not only to Kindle Direct Publishing, where the e-book is all ready to pre-order (Amazon UK, Amazon USA, Amazon Ca, Amazon Au), but also to Createspace for those of you who prefer a yummy printed book – thank you to Mary Matthews (aka author Georgia Rose) of Three Shires Publishing for teaching me so much at her excellent self-publishing workshop earlier in the year. Hell, I’m even going to be releasing Dory’s Avengers on Audible once I’ve found the perfect narrator – watch this blog for further news on that particular venture. There’s no stopping me now.

#Iamselfpublishing!

But hang on a moment – wasn’t Dory’s published three years ago? About this time of year, with a book launch and signing sessions and lots of champagne?

Okay, I confess – yes, it was. I’m not going to go into details about what went wrong (mutters dark oaths about vanity publisher dazzling naïve author with false promises); suffice to say, about a year ago I decided to reread my literary triumph and ended up hugely embarrassed by the standard of editing, proof reading and, I have to confess, my own blunders. All the parts I’d been uneasy about but had left in; all the rambling scenes I’d included simply so I could air one amusing phrase; all were there, mocking me and making me want to…give the book a damn good structural edit and re-release it.

And so I did.

I can honestly say I am delighted with everything to do with the revised edition of Dory’s Avengers, and I’m looking forward to sharing more blog posts and snippets from the book on An Author’s View in the weeks leading up to the big launch on 30 September. If you bought a copy of the original and feel tempted to give the sleek new version a try, please contact me and I will give you a free copy, if possible in the format of your choice. If not, I hope you will purchase a copy, love it and leave me a peachy review, but I will be equally interested to know your reasons if you’re not keen. If people are reading Dory’s Avengers, I will be one happy author. You, dear readers, are after all the reason why I write.