Begin at the beginning, said the Queen of Hearts to Alice. A wise suggestion, but what defines the beginning. The internet is chock full of tales of warning and woe about self-publishing authors who make mistakes, I am not going to regurgitate some generalisations. This is MY story. If you can find something relevant and useful, then well and good.

So where was my beginning in my wild ride through being a self-published author? One evening, I was sitting in the restaurant of this hotel:

Yes, this very hotel. The Holiday Inn at Scotch Corner, on the junction of the A1 and A66. As you might have guessed by the style of the building, a hotel has been here for a good few decades. It has become my home from home in the seven years with my present employer, in a job involving a lot of business travel. So there I was, trying not to laugh out loud at a three way online role play I was writing with one writer from Sweden and one from America who was in Afghanistan at the time. I didn’t feel lonely in the hotel, because of people like that, people with whom I might write and forget my day.

But life is full of bumps in the road, and the online roleplay world is full of drama queens. I broke away from that original group, after I trusted the wrong person. For years, I had had my own ideas for my own stories, stemming from dreams I used to have as a child. Having realised that writing was an excellent way to de-stress, I decided the time had come to put those ideas into written stories. That was the start of Fane Anghelescu, a Hellhound, and of Gavril Negrescu, the Alpha of the Cwn Annwn.

Legends had always fascinated me. Legends and people watching. Humans are not all the same, so I asked myself why should Hellhounds all be the same. I was accused of copying the ideas of the roleplay group from which I had split. However, that individual had a penchant for sex and violence, preferably together. Hardly deep and meaningful. My Fane was much more that that. A Hellhound, so in theory a creature of Hell. Yet, like humans, he was different from the stereotype of his breed. As I was writing paranormal romance, there was bound to be some … okay, a lot … of sex, but, like the violence, I did not wish to make it gratuitous. As for Gavril and his Cwn Annwn, no one else has written a story like mine. That is not boasting, but the simple fact. The Cwn Annwn are the spectral hounds in service to Mallt-y-Nos. My twist was that they were charged with hunting down evil souls for her to judge, but also protecting the innocent. They were also not immortal, thus ensuring that the stories could run the gamut of emotions.

That was the start. A year or so later, I was in the process of trying to publish a fourth book, which was something of a spin off, using the same characters and a few others, but also introducing new characters.

As a result of my interest in the Egyptian pantheon, I decided to create a new character, a lion shifter in service to the goddess Sekhmet, who was both a warrior and a healer. Originally, I planned to make him an Anaesthetist, but I found it a bit difficult to work an anaesthetist in the battle scenes, so I made him a surgeon, at least in this century. As he had been around for a couple of thousand years, being a healer covered a lot of different descriptions over time.

That was when some very annoying problems occurred. When copies of “Merysekhmet” were purchased, it became clear that the wrong version had been pushed out to the buyers. In order to upload a pre-sale, one has to load a document of a similar length to have the same page-count. Unfortunately, it was this draft document which my readers were being sent, rather than the final version. Several attempts later, and it became clear that the easiest solution was to unpublish the book and start from scratch.

Begin at the beginning. In the end, I decided to unpublish all my books from all outlets and go through a laborious process of reformatting. The first book, “Bound”, had been written in role-play format, with alternating character points-of-view. It did not match the other books, written as they were in third person, and I wanted to change that. There were other historical events which I wished to include in “Alpha”. The third book, “Beta” originally included the trial of those responsible for the smuggling ring and was a way of introducing Casimir Gosselin. Things went a bit pear-shaped as we say in the UK, when a co-author decided t9 mess with the storyline. She didn’t appreciate that these were pre-planned (more or less) novels.

This was key, because Casimir was one of the most complex characters I had conceived, and certainly one to rival Fane. Then again, it did transpire that they were related. But if I explain that, then you lose a reason to buy the book. So, nope, you have to wait. If I didn’t include the trial, then how would I introduce Casimir? And he did need to be introduced because events involving both Casimir and Fane were key for “Merysekhmet”, “Toho”, “Medved” and “Ma’iitsoh”.

The upshot was, the continuity of the series was out of sync, and that was bugging me. Ultimately, it came down to the series didn’t feel right anymore. Some might say but if you unpublish, you lose reviews? Well, I never expected to make my fortune from writing. I have sold a few, but not huge numbers, and the only ‘reliable’ reviewer was my pet troll. Time to hit unpublish.

But, I had learnt loads in the past year which I intend to use. So, I will be back. The stories will be the way that I had envisaged them in the first place. And, I shall also make use of some of those lessons I learnt along the way.

In the meantime, you can find snippets and other details on either my Author page or my Hunter’s Arrow page