Happy Unleashing Day!

If that has piqued your interest, then yay, I’m a better marketer than I thought!

Seriously though, today is launch day over on Amazon of my debut novel, Anti-Virus. I can’t quite believe it! I wrote an actual whole book that people in the world can buy and read. I also wrote a book that has had 5 star reviews on Goodreads! Writing a novel has been a dream of mine (sometimes buried for many years) since I was a little girl (my mum probably still has some of my handwritten stories in the Sideboard of Doom in the lounge). Just a few decades later and I have achieved!

Why blood, sweat and tears? Hmmm, well.

There was no actual blood let in the creation of my novel, but lots of red pen was used, that’s for sure. There comes a point when I need to use paper and print off my writing and read it in a different format. That’s where the bad things that have been hiding on screen tend to come into the light (and boy, were there some bad things!). So yes, red pen made a huge appearance at the editing stage (twice).

Sweat? Definitely. I began writing the germ of this novel years ago and then Life happened. I picked it up again pre-pandemic and finished the first full draft at the end of 2019. I was in edit mode and then doubt set in as the pandemic raged. It didn’t feel appropriate to write a dystopian fiction when dystopian fact was consuming the world. However – Anti-Virus isn’t really about a pandemic, not in the way your typical pandemic novels and films go. So I got over that a few months later and set to work. Sweating receded, and here we are.

Tears? For sure. Of frustration at first because I had wanted this novel to be worthy, to mean something, to honour my dad (I’ve written about that before). But then, as the saying goes, you should write the book you want to read. Using an imaginary force to push something that I wasn’t really feeling (and to be honest, I think it would have come across as a diatribe given the mindset I was in at the time) was a good way of stopping me in my tracks. So after that I got on with the novel that really wanted to be written, and Anti-Virus was born.

And so, here we are. It was hard work. It needed discipline, it needed attention, it needed focus. it was both harder and easier than I imagined it would be.

And it was so much fun.

And I’m going to do it again.

My name is Freya and I’m a write-aholic.