written in the virtual stone

I have a friend who writes poetry almost every day and he posts his poems for all to read. You can go here to take a look... poetry by Ted. His poetry is touching, funny and often very thought provoking. There are times when his words have made me cry or laugh. To my mind this is a sign of a good writer. His words makes me feel something, anything.  It's a brave thing to do all things considered. I know this because I write books and I post them online for everyone to read and it is a brave thing to do too.

Today, as I prepare myself for the colon cleanse and tomorrow's colonoscopy I revisit my own books. I started writing the Daughter of the Empire series a LONG time ago, sometime in the mid to late 1990's to be exact. It was an idea fleshed out by the Imperial Order, an online star wars game club, and developed for my online persona.There were a lot of false starts as I tried to find my voice and it didn't really go much beyond the 1st chapter and an idea.

Then we moved to Switzerland and I suddenly had a lot of time. It began with the concept of blogging, fairly new at the time, and got off to a small start. I didn't share the link and I rewrote several times. Eventually I got past that awful hump I kept getting stuck at and busted through. After that I made the link public. And much to my shock and delight, people read it and some even liked it. The first book was started in 2006.

Now I am re reading book1 and I see the mistakes, the grammar faux pas and so on. I see what I need to fix. One of the things that I learned form doing this online publishing and writing as I go is editing. And I really like to edit. Whether or not I am any good at the whole editing process remains to be seen but I see patterns in the words and I am not afraid to hack and slash the chaff.

Book1...especially the early chapters see a lot of confused tenses and strange styles as I try to find Merly's voice. Now I need to rewrite, which I think will be a lot of fun.

So here I am putting the words out there. I hope that people enjoy them.