Janet fisher

Today marks a transition for me when I turn the page from writing to marketing. The photo below shows the rough draft of my latest writing venture, Book Five in my Golden Isles Series, Webs of Stone, and a draft of a poster for the launch of my upcoming release, The Shifting Winds. Release date is one month from today, March 1, so I must really get onto the marketing side of things.

I finished the rough draft of Webs of Stone on January 19, then had to read it, once on the computer and once on paper, to get it ready for readers. I delivered it to my first reader yesterday, my daughter Carisa. So today I can focus on The Shifting Winds.

Of course it isn’t quite that tidy. I’ve had to do a few things for the upcoming release before today. I’ve scheduled some events and worked on my contact list. My daughter Christiane put together the poster for me and we worked on it a few days ago. But I feel the transition today, now that I can set the writing aside for a bit.

Friends often ask if I get confused going from one of my book projects to another, and I have to admit sometimes I feel conflicted. There’s such a long lag time between the writing of a book and the release of an actual book you can hold onto, you might write several in between. I have an added shift because I’m writing in two distinct time periods. It’s the same genre, historical fiction, in which I follow my theme, “following strong women through history,” but some of my books are set in nineteenth century America, and some are set in ancient Ireland and Crete roughly 3,000 years ago. Both are periods when women faced great challenges.

When I’m in the middle of writing one, as I just was, I’m really in that world. I have been immersed in the ancient world of Ireland and the surrounding scenes in Britain and Brittany and the Iberian peninsula, absorbed in the lives of my characters. I get a little otherworldly, a fine Irish concept with its myths of the Otherworld. For me it’s like getting caught up in reading a good book and not wanting to put it down. But when you write one it takes a lot longer.

So when I’m in that world it can be difficult to focus on another world, including the one around me. But now the new one feels done enough to let it rest while I turn to marketing of the one about to be released. And I move from the fourteenth century BC to the nineteenth century AD, with occasional glimpses of the twenty-first.

I love to write. I am more a writer than I am a marketer, but I do enjoy the readings and signings, the book talks, the book clubs–especially the book clubs where I can sit down with a group of readers and talk about the nuances of the book because they’ve already read it. I love hearing from readers. Their responses enhance my joy in the work and make it feel worthwhile.

Now I look forward to sharing this new book because it’s a favorite of mine. I’m so glad it’s going to be out there for others to read, and I hope readers enjoy the characters and the predicaments I had fun getting them into.

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