Noob

My first blog post!  Even though I’ve been employed in computing my whole life, I’ve avoided Facebook, Twitter and blogging until now.  I count that as a success, but it means I’m a social media noob, so bear with me.

My first novel, Reviver, won’t be released until June 2013.  It feels both very near and extremely distant.  It feels near because by then I’ll have finished the second book in the trilogy, and the deadline is never far from my mind.  It feels distant because I’ll be able to walk into any bookshop and pick up a copy, and that seems CRAZY.

You see, even though I’ve been writing since I could lift a pen, I’m a writer noob, too.

Most of my life, I’ve been convinced I didn’t have what it took to be an author.  I’ve dabbled in television, radio, movie scripts, anything to avoid prose.  It took a while before I had the confidence to really try. 

It seems such a nebulous thing, writing.  You make things up and put words on the page.  Right up until the point someone else sees it, you daren’t hope that it’s any good, and you can’t bear the thought that it’s not.

Then one day an agent loved what I’d written.  Soon after, a publisher did too.  Years of hard work, distilled into a novel that people can read for themselves in June.

But as a writer noob, it still feels impossible that this will really happen.

It’ll be interesting to see how my brain deals with it when it finally does.  If you see me standing in Waterstone’s next summer, staring at the shelves and looking bewildered, you’ll know the noob thing hasn’t quite gone yet…