(Edited to add spiffy new cover design!)

At 3.30am this morning, while putting the finishing touches to the edited and expanded second draft of my first completed work of fiction, my laptop froze, and I lost 5,000 words of creative frenzy. Half an hour of despair followed until, predictably, a youngster rescued me and found the Backup files for the Kingsoft WPS programme; my wonderful son.

So after running the draft through every grammar and spelling checker known to man, as well as the Google docs consistency checker, I’m ready to release my 17K words historical fiction/Sci-Fi novella to the kind people who have offered to beta-read for me.

I’m so excited! And so proud of myself. As usual, I went into the project seriously underestimating the amount of research required; boy, this one was heavy going. The story is set in 1st century AD occupied Britain, and there was LOTS of fact checking, not helped by the cheeky Sci-Fi twist ending.

This story is actually a prequel to one of my novels-in-progress, The Bondage of The Soil; I had the idea of a back story, and thought it would be a good exercise in world building and an interesting teaser to the main story, as well as a good place to start my publishing journey. I plan to self-publish Bondage and this prequel, whereas I want to try the traditional publishing route for my other book in the pipeline, And the Buntings Flew

So this post is just to tell you all, constant readers, what a great feeling it is to have finished a 17k words work of fiction, and to ask for your help; if anyone is interested in swelling the ranks of my beta readers and reading a pre-publication copy of the story in return for some feedback, please do get in touch!

Margaret