My time being a full time author is coming to an end.
Last year, I had a certain situation at work that put me on medical leave with insurance. That insurance has now expired, but I don’t think the location based issues have been fixed.
The hard choice of returning to these problems while keeping particular long term employment benefits as opposed to another job, that might not offer the same options is a real consideration. Falling back to a one income household until writing contributes to the bills could be trying on so many levels.
One book doesn’t pay the bills.
We see writing as a teenager who uses your phone, computer, internet and all your spare time, all at once. Our teenager, Jayne was born on paper and moved over to the document application on screen in 2018. The fiery red-head lives with us every moment of every day, while we take walks, on holiday, even joining us in the shower and in our sleep. Jayne is our main character from our books, Burn the Sky.
It’s about time that teenager gets a job and starts earning their own money.
Did I slip up there? Books you say? – Yes, we have now sent off our final of Burn the Sky to the publisher for their edits before we have our say on the changes. It is still early days in this process, so no release date yet, but I’m looking forward to seeing what sort of cover they present us.
With Part1: Hope, the cover was so much more in your face than we ever thought a cover could be, and to start with, we didn’t like the decision. The conversation with our publisher went something like this –
Us – We don’t like the cover.
Publisher – For the reasons you don’t like it, it’s going to stand out in the sea of covers.
Us – What were the other ideas you had?
Publisher – Think about it for a few days. We still have time to change it.
24 hours later
Us – Oh wow. We can understand what you mean now.
For those of you living in the Brisbane area, you should see Amanda and I around a little bit more. I have been combining our social medias together, joined a local author group with a few locals and hopefully sell more books through organised events.
Selling more books comes back to being able to write more as a full time author.
I recently finished a 10 week residency at the Queensland Writers Centre and walked away with about 50,000 words into the book that follows Burn the Sky. I’m biased, but I think it flows well and sounds great. Now Burn the Sky Part2 is complete, my co-author, Amanda has started with her initial comments in chapter one.
I’m still working through the middle of the book with my first round of edits, and hopefully finish that soon, so I can begin structuring book 2 of this next series.
In the mean time, we still have to look forward to the 1-2 week dash of editing/reading/editing the editors work when the manuscript returns from the publisher.
There is now a catalogue page where our books are listed in order of to be read, and links for buying the books.
(https://leebreeze.com/available-catalogue/)
If you have read our first book, we are on GoodReads and Amazon and we would love to read your feedback, so we can improve for the next books.
Don’t forget – Good feedback leads to better writing.
Next blog, I’m thinking of writing about how we learned the processes, language types, and 1st to 3rd person.
The featured image is inspired by the act of authors turning coffee into stories. Thanks Rima Kruciene on Unsplash
Lee Breeze - Science Fiction Novelist 