Following my Dream!

Image by Patty Maher

One of my lifelong dreams has been to publish a novel. To publish many novels actually.

When I was young I started reading as many books as I could get my hands on. It didn't matter how many books I was reading I never needed a bookmark. I could be reading seven different books and know what page I left off at on each one.

I loved reading and it seemed to be natural to start writing too. When I was about nine years old I started writing my first novel.I was definitely not a publishable work by any means! But it was a chapter story and I still have it somewhere.

Between that day and my senior year in college I continued to write chapter stories. Mostly for myself though when I did share them with others they expressed a genuine interest. In college I would email chapters to some friends and they would end up begging for the next chapter as soon they'd finished the one I had sent them.

Writing was not only fun but it was a great outlet. If I was feeling angry or disappointed I could write my feelings out in the form of a story.

Once I had graduated from college I gave up on my dream. I hadn't studied writing and I didn't particularly enjoy my English classes. I felt that creative writing courses stifled my creativity.

Life became busy and I partly forgot and partly didn't know if publishing a novel was in my future.

Recently I've rediscovered my dream and I have been busy writing my novel that I am going to publish!

I've been busy and I've been very happy! It is exciting to be pursuing my dream and also doing something that I love!

I've even been enjoying the time that I've been spending researching what it takes to publish a novel.I've decided on self publishing because there are sooo many options and you can't beat the pay. I've discovered that even if you do get accepted by a publisher they take at least 80% of the profits and you still have to do all of the marketing for the book! Insane!

I am excited about Amazon's KDP Select program where you allow them to have exclusive rights to your digital books (not physical books) for 90 days. There is a lot of opportunity for big time exposure because they are by far the largest book seller on the planet.

I will be posting more about my upcoming novel so stay tuned!

Oh...and I'll get back to posting about homeschooling topics after the summer as well. We will be starting kindergarten in the Fall with my oldest so homeschooling is going to be a bigger priority than it has been up to this point.

PS: My 5 year old sees a light saber in the picture above. I'm wondering if anyone else sees it! :)