Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Writing matters


Aromatic florabundance,
leaves and petals in the sun dance
for the pleasure of the eye while
perfumes waft, inspire, beguile.

Don't worry... I can explain. It has been over a week since my last blog post. It was a week during the course of which I finished the first draft of my latest manuscript. The fact that no more needed to be added to the narrative left me in a writing void, hence the penning of artless couplets. And I do love heavy perfumes, Oud particularly reminding me of the Sandlands as the Eid holiday approaches.

Okay, TheodoraLand! 115 thousand words, about 290 pages in my Word file. And now ahead of me the laborious editing phase. Soon it needs to be ready for uploading to a self-publishing platform. But this time it will not go to Amazon, to be lost among those 600 thousand works which are on offer with the brand-new Kindle subscription model.

This time I shall try my luck with Epubli, a German platform. It is claimed by the Berlin-based publisher that...

"Germany is one of the most important markets for books in English. More than 40 million people living in Germany are fluent English-speakers. They do not only adore British and American television series... they also love books by British and American writers in both original and translated versions!"

Worth a try, given that my new story is set exclusively in German speaking locations, Munich, Canton Thurgau and the province of South Tyrol. Is there perhaps also the irony that my tale got its impetus when the abandonment by the Hugendubel chain of Munich's best English-language bricks-and-mortar bookshop was announced for 2012?

It closed its doors in the beautiful old bulding where bookselling had commenced in 1893 not with a bang but with a whimper. 

However the storyteller in me opted for the loud detonation of a bomb on page one, on the last imagined day of Manduvel Bookshop's existence and much intrigue and mystery follows on the pages thereafter!

(Sorry about the rhyming couplets!)

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