The 12 Days of KristenMas are here!

The 12 Days of KristenMas are here! Warm the cockles of your heart this festive season as the Kindle versions of The Tao of Kristen is now on sale at all Amazon locations. Click on “purchase” above or visit your local Amazon store. Don’t delay, because once the sale is over, it’s over!

Launch!

This Friday, on November 29, 2019 (aka Black Friday), The Tao Of Kristen will launch first on eBook, with the paperback edition to follow in December 2019. The launch marks the end of one journey that started way back in 2014 (although the origins of the novel were from well before then) when I first started writing the novel. I remember I write it in fits and starts, writing certain scenes up north in Muskoka to see if I could tap into the energy of the novel so I could capture it right on paper. I walked the road that Kristen walked that long, lonely night so I could imagine what it must have been like from her perspective. I laboured many a Friday night in the local coffee shop eager to dive into the next scene, desperately wanting to turn images I had in my head and emotions flowing through me in something palpable on paper.

I still have a printed edition of the entire first draft of the novel (it cost a whopping $80 to get printed at Staples), the one I went meticulously over with a pen crossing out and underlining certain words. I was so proud to just finish a first draft that I figured $80 was a present to myself. Editing a novel is in many ways tougher than writing one because the fun part of writing is in the creation of it all, whereas editing is truly grunt work, but I reminded myself that editing is all about perfecting the images I had in my head and properly conveying them so that one day, the reader too could see and possibly feel what I felt writing it.

There were many times I had doubt I would ever finish this project but there was something inside me left me unsatisfied because it was still an incomplete work. So sometimes, after a few months of leaving it be, I would dive back in and continue to edit…and edit..and edit. Then proofread.

Friday is the end of one journey and the beginning of another: the release of the book into the public sphere where I can no longer simply call it my own creation, since it now belongs to the world. I’ll admit it is both exciting and scary at the same time. However, I think back to reading about Heinlein’s Rules before I even started this novel. They are six simple rules that I will share with you now:

  1. You must write.
  2. Finish what you start.
  3. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order (Broke that one!).
  4. You must put your story on the market.
  5. You must keep it on the market until it sells.
  6. Start working on something else.

So here I am, about to finally jump to Step 4 and you can be sure I will adhere to Step 5.

Step 6?  We’ll see.