Sheryl Lee: Work work work

You'd think being an author means that you write books, right? Maybe once that was how it worked, but not these days. I have spent the last few days fiddling about with Amazon things. I've created an author profile, apparently a good thing to do. That took ages because it also meant that to link this blog to the page I had to figure out what the RSS URL for this page was. This meant first I had to figure out what an RSS feed even is. Turns out it stands for Really Simple Syndication.

According to the web, everyone knows how to find their own RSS URL because it took me hours to find a page that explained in terms I understood - please, no tech talk - how to do it. And of course once I had figured it out it was indeed really simple. (It's one of my pet peeves - why do computer people drown the layman in tech talk when the actual process is very simple. Is it to justify those exorbitant fees?) So now this blog is viewable on my author central page, along with the twitter feed. Yes, I've had to become active on twitter. In truth, I really don't know how that's going to work for me because on twitter I'm pretty much twittering away to myself. But I'm dutifully doing everything I'm supposed to be doing and twitter is one of those things.

I also have an action plan, for future growth as it were. All the 'how to' pages say that to raise your profile on Amazon, apart from the twitter, facebook and author profile thing, you need to write and publish lots of books. Well duh...

But taking this a step further I thought why not write a couple more short books and get them published. But they can't be random books, they have to tie in somehow to the bigger books I'm working on. The first wee little book, How to Train Your Human, (link here - http://www.amazon.com/How-To-Train-Your-Human-ebook/dp/B00NMOYE8A) was 'written' by Sabrina. Sabrina is my rescued street cat here in Egypt. Sabrina also features in the werewolf book, Zora's Dawn. She's not exactly as she is in real life, but she's the inspiration for the character. She's going to be in all the books in the series.

So the next book which I published yesterday - using those publishing skills I learned with the Sabrina book - is 'written' by Amadeus, (link here - http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NVCVQ7U ) Amadeus is my other rescued street cat. This book is about his experiences coming to live with Sabrina. But there is a section at the end talking about street cats here, and the need for programmes such as that run by the Blue Moon Animal Shelter. They also have a clinic and they will vaccinate and castrate any street cats brought to them. The Blue Moon and its owner Monique are the subject of the non fiction book I'm writing concurrently with Zora's Dawn.

So weak though the links may be, both of these books have a connection to the bigger books I'm working on. I'm going to publish a third book too, another short one. This one will be a compilation of photos I've been taking of the street cats here. There are thousands of them, all over town. Well no doubt they are all over Egypt. There is beauty to be found everywhere if you look for it. Even a pile of rubbish will have a pair of gorgeous green eyes set in a furry marmalade face peeping out of it. Look closer and you will see the beautiful street cat, and probably its family. Egyptian street cats are descended from the oldest breed of domesticated cat in the world. Tests have shown that they have the same DNA as mummified cats from ancient Egypt. They are living history and I truly feel they deserve to be seen.

So what about the first book, Blank Canvas? (and yes, link here - http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Canvas-Sheryl-Lee-ebook/dp/B00KE7URKM )
Well it's doing ok, but not brilliantly. I remember my first rejection for this book, some years ago before I decided to self publish it. The agent was from a large company in the UK and she wrote me a personal and quite lovely rejection letter. She said that she loved the book and she loved my writing style, but she felt the subject matter would not sell well. I guess she was right, I guess the subject of child molestation is one that most would prefer stay in the closet with all the other skeletons. But I'm still proud of this book and I still hope people will buy it and read it.

And Zora's Dawn? Well these last two chapters are very important and have proved difficult to write. I hate reading books where there is a loose thread the author has forgotten to close off and I don't want to be one of those authors. So I'm going right through the book from start to finish, not with my editing cap on but with my reading cap on. I'm looking for loose threads, and for unnecessary and distracting passages. Then I will write the final chapter and a half, and then comes the editing. I also will write the prequel which I think will be only about 20 000 words. After all that is done it will be time to finish the book about the animal shelter.

So I have a lot of work to do! And this totally wasn't going to be the subject of this blog, truly. I sat down to write about the difficulties of communicating here where almost everyone speaks english only as a second language. The specific difficulty I planned to talk about is that people who have english as a second language tend to know the most common dictionary meaning of words. But of course the english language is full of words that have many shades of meaning depending on context. So what I mean often becomes lost or confused as the Russians/Germans/Swiss/Dutch/Egyptians try to apply the only definition they know of a word and get the wrong meaning. But that will have to be the subject of the next blog :) :)