Hello Blog World!

Hello everyone out there in the Aether that is the internet!

This is my third attempt at blogging. I tend to get distracted and lose interest after a while, but I'm serious about this now.

Why am I serious? Well, it all began with a hobby that turned into an obsession. If you haven't guessed from the clues I've blatantly plastered all over this blog, that would be writing. I am a self-professed geek, and so I tend to write Fantasy. In fact, I have written Fantasy. Four books of it. It wasn't meant to be four books, it just kind of happened that way. How did it happen? Well, that is a story in itself.

(Cue harp music)

Once upon a time in a strange land called Australia, a six year old girl would sit by the window and daydream. She grew into a fourteen year old girl who would sit by the window and daydream.

In those marvellous flights of fancy, the young girl stumbled across a character. He was a dark, brooding sort of man with a bad temper, but a good heart. Suddenly all her daydreams revolved around him.

Deciding that it might be something to write down this man's misadventures. Every time the girl had a daydream, she wrote it down. It didn't take her long to realise that all her short stories could be put into a time-line and so she did just that.

After several dozen failed attempts to make sense of a larger story, the girl gave up trying and instead went to Canada and started university. Five years later, she had a degree in Ancient Cultures (Archaeology and Prehistoric Anthrolpology).

Through all this time, her daydreams persisted and so she continued to write her stories down in sequential order. Slowly the short stories began to coagulate into something much, much bigger, until at last she had a firmly set storyline and she began to think that she should turn these stories into a novel.

That's exactly what she set out to do. On July 31st, 2009, she typed the last words of her first ever first draft of her manuscript, and then did a happy dance. She titled the piece "The Great Man" and started researching publishers. In her research, she noted that most manuscript submissions were to be no more than 100 000 words. She did a word count. 407 429 words. She had the equivalent of four books in her first draft of her manuscript.

So now her challenge was to cut and chop and rearrange her manuscript into four separate novels. She is doing that to this day.

That girl is me, and I have been dreaming of being a published author since I graduated university. It was a slow dream that sort of crept out of my obsession with this character and his story. So far I have completed the first, unedited drafts of three books in what is now The Great Man series:
Book I: The Third Prince
Book II: Lord of Horses
Book III: Overlord

The fourth book in the series is yet to be completed, but I do have a working title:
Book IV: Prince of Darkness

This blog a record of my victories and failures, my fears and frustrations and my ultimate hope that a publisher will find my work worthy of putting into print.

How cool would that be?