Let’s start at the beginning with my first book, Swallow Me, NOW!
Back in 2012, I joined a number of challenges, including the Chapter Book Challenge. This was a challenge in March to write a children’s chapter book, junior fiction, or middle grade book. The goal was to write the manuscript in a month. I joined in 2012 and again in 2013.
In 2013, I worked on a story called Sam’s Solution. This drew on my experiences of being a missionary kid in the 1980s and struggling to fit in at school, and being bullied, as well as my kids experiences of being bullied. I spoke to them about stories they had read at school with a bullying theme and they told me they weren’t happy with the endings in those books. They seemed to have the bully ‘magically’ change schools, or the bully and victim would become best friends, and they didn’t like any of those endings. I asked what they wanted and the said ‘we just want the bullying to stop’, so I cam up with a different ending for the story, one based more in the reality of what my kids were experiencing.
The previous year, I had written the first draft of My Mummy is Evil for a picture book challenge, and the idea of a kid saying her mum was an ‘evil genius’ sounded fun to me, so I wrote a scene where Sam, the main character, blurts out that her mum is an evil genius with plans to take over the world (she was a small business owner with plans to grow her business to take over the world). My kids liked the scene, so I went back to the start of the story and wrote the rest of it around that scene. When it was added into the story, there was editing done so it would fit.
To get the draft done, I used a website called 750Words.com. I would write a chapter each night and each would be at least 750 words. I did this for a couple of weeks, each night printing out the chapter so my kids could read it the next day. If I didn’t have a chapter, they would bug me to get it done as they wanted to know what happened next. When that version was done, I went through what I had written and rewrote it, filling in any gaps.
At the end of the challenge, I sent it to a couple of friends for their feedback, while I read the stories they had written during the challenge.
During 2013, I worked on smoothing out the bumps in my story. In January 2014, I was speaking with Julieann from Lilly Pilly Publishing and came up with a crazy idea. Would it be possible to have a book launch for my birthday in October of that year? That would mean pulling out all the stops and getting this book edited and ready to publish in a few months, especially if we wanted enough time to get the books printed. She said yes! And the process of editing began.
I worked with Julieann to edit the manuscript. As well as being an editor, she was also a teacher so was able to look at the story through a teacher’s eyes as well. Between us, we polished the story. I got Cecilia Clark to draw the picture of Sam for the front cover and one of my children did some pictures for inside the book.
A few months after we started, we approached a school in Queensland and asked the students to be beta readers. We printed copies of the book and gave it to the students for their feedback. One of the questions was a request for title suggestions. I never thought Sam’s Solution was a great title, but it was fine while I was working on it.
The feedback came in and the students loved the story, and they had some great title suggestions, but none really hit the mark. That didn’t stop us, though. We kept moving forward.
Julieann helped me navigate the publishing options and I chose to print through Ingram Spark. One of the main reasons was that I learned from the local library that they don’t purchase books from Amazon, but will from Ingram Spark via Lightning Source, their distributor. She also kept working on the design of the book.
We were all ready to print when we realised we still hadn’t settled on a title! We spoke on the phone and threw around a number of ideas before we hit on Swallow Me, NOW!, from the scenes where Sam is nervous and wishes the ground would open up and swallow her.
At that point, I launched a crowdfunding campaign through Pozible to raise funds to print books and pay for the book design and editing. The campaign was successful, my book was going to be launched.
I had arranged a book launch party with my local library with the help of my parents.
The ebook went live on my birthday, October 3, however the launch party was a few weeks later, on October 25, 2014.
We had done it! My first book was published for my birthday that year.
Swallow Me, NOW! is still available and people are still buying it many years later. It deals with bullying by exclusion, which is something many books don’t include, and has an ending that I wish had happened for me.
You can get your copy on my website and on Amazon in paperback or ebook.
