Category: My Books & Stories

Mongrel, 1

This is it! I’ve just let Draft 2 Digital (the publisher I’ve been with for about six years) know I’ll be serializing it here on my blog. Mind you, it’s not nearly Monday yet in the northern western hemisphere, so I am jumping the starter gun a bit.

And in addition, I said I’d write a post with Ushen’s letter. That’s not happening. It isn’t hard to read her story between the lines, and the details will keep till we meet her again as a grown up woman down the track.

Giving the manuscript another edit while turning it from a print format into an online reading format, I’m laughing about the bits that are already dated. I’ll be interested to hear about you tripping over them.

Rita de Heer, Mongrel, 1Download

Earth Fall, 21

Connecting A to B

Connecting Earth Fall to Meld is not happening. The amount of time between them is out of wack. I think now that the events in Earth Fall took place before anything in Mongrel happened.

Lol, does it seem like I’m talking as though these events are coming into being without a writer’s input? Put like that? Yes, it does. A broad band of muscular storying is growing between Earth Fall and events in Mongrel and it’s not like I planned anything much.

Mongrel was to be part one of a trilogy that in my mind I’ve already scaled back to a twosome. Time will tell. Mongrel resides in the long long tail of indie published novels marketed by Draft to Digital.com.

I had a quick read of Mongrel’s Chapter 26 the other day and thought I wouldn’t mind running my eagle editing eye over it once more. And maybe turn it into an audio file by reading it chapter by chapter into some software and publishing that chapter by chapter.

Which will necessitate taking it off Amazon if I don’t want to get a shirty email, saying I’ve been cancelled, as the biggie doesn’t allow any part of a production it’s selling to exist outside the virtual covers of the item being sold.

Making some friends over on Substack, I got a bunch of links on how to find my voice. Thank you, Aurelian Ashmore. So yeah, I’m looking into it.

Cat Diary, 40

I’ve learned Come and Sit, both of them easy, but does the old woman think I am a dog?

She keeps saying “Look.”

I look everywhere she might send a kibble.

Have I told you I’ve graduated onto grain-free kibbles? That’s mornings, anyhow. She persists feeding me the lesser kibbles from lunch time onward.

Everytime I think I’ve trained the old woman to send a kibble into the direction where I’m looking she screws the lid back onto the jar and that’s that.

Here’s me looking everywhere …

We’ve been working on it for a couple of weeks, I might’ve cracked it 20% of the time and she keeps wanting me to look at her while she throws the kibble.

That’s so labour intensive. I want to be looking into the field when the kibble sails overhead and I can see where it lands.

She started to teach me Look because she kept finding kibbles where I hadn’t found them. What does she expect? That I should sniff them out??

I want to skip Look and go to Lie Down, should be easy to pick up a bunch of food mid morning.