Today, I'm delighted to host a guest post from Colette McCormick about her writing life and her novel Things I Should Have Said And Done, which she has recently published as an independent author.
Over to you, Colette...
Colette writes...
THINGS I SHOULD HAVE SAID AND DONE started life as a spark of an idea one evening in Newark as I was getting ready to dinner with a bunch of colleagues before a meeting the following day. What would happen to the family I’d left back in Co Durham if I never made it home? A pretty random thought but it wouldn’t go away.
It took a couple of years to get it to a stage where I was happy to send it out to publishers and agents but no-one would take it on. There were plenty of compliments about it but I just couldn’t find a home for it. I had a serious health scare in 2013 and when I was recovered enough to work on it, I decided to knuckle down and try again. I liked the book, I believed in it, I just had to find someone who thought like I did.
In January of 2015 I sent it off to a publishers and was thrilled when they offered me a contract. I was a proper writer now and I had the three-book deal to prove it. They weren’t one of the ‘big’ publishers but they were a publisher and they had been willing to take a chance on me and for that I will remain eternally grateful.
Sadly, things don’t always turn out the way that you want them to and at a later date, I decided to get my rights back and publish my books as an independent author.
The traditional path hadn’t worked for me so I decided to go it alone. It makes sense for me because no-one knows the book better than I do, and I was doing most of the promotion myself already.
The self-publishing option is not an easy one because you are the one in charge now and it is vital that you adopt a professional approach. With a publisher you send your book and they arrange an editor, the typesetting, the art-work and all the other things that go along with getting a book onto a shelf. Now I am the one arranging all of those things. The upside is that I get to choose who I work with and I’m not restricted to the publisher’s choice.
I loved the original version of THINGS I SHOULD HAVE SAID AND DONE, but I think I love this one more. I can’t really explain it because it’s always been my book, its just that this time it feels more so.
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Thank you, Colette, for writing such an interesting guest post, and sharing your journey to becoming an independent author.
Things I Should Have Said And Done
‘It is only after death that life can be fully understood.’
Ellen’s life is over in an instant when a drunk driver comes out of nowhere and hits the car that she is driving.
She never knew what hit her.
But Ellen in only young, she isn’t ready to die and there are loose ends to tie up before she can move ‘beyond the light.’ Luckily she isn’t alone, she has George to look after her. He’s new to the job and his methods aren’t exactly orthodox but together they set about dealing with Ellen’s issues.
There is Marc, the man that Ellen still loves. She watches him struggle with life as a single parent as she herself struggles with the realisation that Marc needs to move on without her. There is Naomi, the child that Ellen left behind, the child that becomes Ellen’s link to those that still live. And there is her mother whose life is falling apart.
Ellen looks for ways to help and with George constantly at her side she learns that even though she is dead, she is not helpless. There are things that she can so from beyond the grave to influence what happened in the world that she left behind.
No-one ever said that being dead was easy.
If you would like to purchase Things I Should Have Said And Done, please click on the following link:
About Colette McCormick
Colette was born and raised in Sheffield but now lives in North East England. She has had a wide range of jobs from ledger clerk to school dinner lady and lots of things in between but in 2001 she found her calling in the world of charity retail. After working for CR UK for 10 years she now works for Barnardo’s and while it’s a job that she loves, writing is her real passion. When she is not working or writing there is a good chance you will find Colette, baking, gardening or walking the dog in the beautiful countryside that Co Durham has to offer. She has been married almost forty years and has two grown up sons.
To Find out more about Colette, please click on the following links.