I did it! It’s real and in my hands! I still can’t believe it!

Fantasy! Mystery! Slice of life!

Explore an alternate world where magic and science go hand in hand. Aelfraed a soon to be detective, and currently over stressed university student is having a very bad weekend.

Expect: Worldbuilding, characters out of their depth, family drama, supportive and distinctly less supportive family, murder, deception and the beginning of an arc of self discovery for our protagonist!

Buy it here: A Curiosity Piqued – The Last Straw Novella – Masked Emerald

Paperback and E-book are currently available, give me a couple more weeks and there will be an audio book version if that’s more your speed!

Want to hear about the adventure of chaos that was getting this thing out over the last month then look below the cut!

Editing takes longer than I thought that’s the first thing I’m taking away from this. Definitely leaving more time for that with the next book. I had meant to be done before going away for my birthday (oh man that was a chaotic adventure all on its own) instead it took a whole extra week after I got back.

Finally I got it sent to print only for the layers on my cover to go really weird on the proof. Loads of extra lines and the layers were out of order. It was weird but we worked out how to solve it.

Then just to add to it there were delays with the printing, however the company I was getting them printed with was great in getting some to me for the first of my Xmas markets. So 50 books turned up half way through the market and it really brightened my really cold day when I saw them. I had been so worried but they looked great! I was grinning all day after that and full of excitement.

Then I learnt something about E-books… or at least that PDFs from word are messed up when converted to Epub. Tiny images moved all over the place, chapter breaks not where they were meant to be and the text in general was a choppy mess. So I’ve spent the last two days throwing the text back into Scrivener to output on their Epub compile and then just adjusting it a little in the editor. Basically don’t trust software did it right, check it.

Today the rest of my print order arrived and now I have to find somewhere to store the boxes of books. Had a little scare when the second big box was badly bashed on arrival but the smaller boxes inside were fine so all good there. Its strange to think that all this is my book!