# “But, oh, my God, if I was somebody I’d be doing it all just fine, but I’m a real late starter so I’m making up for lost time…” # - Nerina Pallot
Well, the moment’s arrived for me, at long last (10 years to be exact!) and I’ve come to the oft mythical place I’ve seen in my head where I’d be in a position to send off a sample of the completed manuscript for my first novel to the potential literary powers-at-be out there… So that’s the hard work over with, right? Well, no, actually, because as I’m constantly finding on this long and winding “Road to Publishville”, the easy bit is over with and now the hard work is probably just beginning…
So now the “Road” in front of me really does fork. There’s potentially three different ways I could go now. The first is one called “vanity publishing” (literally to go down the route of publishing the book myself) and it’s perhaps one that would seem obvious since I’m fairly webwise nowadays, using blogspots and web pages to put my short stories on the Net… BUT, and it’s a very big BUT, my aim with my writing has always been to carve out a career as an author, moving on through various rungs of the ladder as I see it today. And although, I DO use web tools a lot to talk about my scribbles, they are a means to an end and are very much just that - “tools” to get me somewhere – and that is to be represented as a published author, where I might one day be able to walk into any bookshop and pick up one of my own novels…
Well, the moment’s arrived for me, at long last (10 years to be exact!) and I’ve come to the oft mythical place I’ve seen in my head where I’d be in a position to send off a sample of the completed manuscript for my first novel to the potential literary powers-at-be out there… So that’s the hard work over with, right? Well, no, actually, because as I’m constantly finding on this long and winding “Road to Publishville”, the easy bit is over with and now the hard work is probably just beginning…So now the “Road” in front of me really does fork. There’s potentially three different ways I could go now. The first is one called “vanity publishing” (literally to go down the route of publishing the book myself) and it’s perhaps one that would seem obvious since I’m fairly webwise nowadays, using blogspots and web pages to put my short stories on the Net… BUT, and it’s a very big BUT, my aim with my writing has always been to carve out a career as an author, moving on through various rungs of the ladder as I see it today. And although, I DO use web tools a lot to talk about my scribbles, they are a means to an end and are very much just that - “tools” to get me somewhere – and that is to be represented as a published author, where I might one day be able to walk into any bookshop and pick up one of my own novels…