As much as I love writing it’s not always that easy. You might think, well all Steve does is settle down and tap away on his laptop and hey presto, there’s a new blog post. The problem is that when I settle down in front of my laptop, the ideas don’t always come. Not only that, there is always the temptation to scroll through Facebook or to search for more things that I didn’t even know I wanted on eBay.

A lot of the time I think of something to write when I’m either in bed having just woken up or driving my car. What I do then is tend to write the blog or story in my head and hope to reproduce it when I’ve settled down in front of my laptop.

Looking at my little WordPress site I thought perhaps it’s about time I produced another book. I’ve had a sequel to Floating in Space in my head for a long time and I have started it. The big problem is that although I’ve started it, it doesn’t seem to have the same length as the original, it’s more of a longer short story which is no good at all. Too long for a short story and not long enough for a book.

When I became rather disenchanted with the idea of a sequel I did have a number of other stories in my head so I started writing those down and producing some short stories. Most of those I publish over on Medium.com but there are a few I’ve published over here on WordPress. In fact a few are available to download just by clicking on the download tab above.

Now I seem to have quite a few of those stories, so I thought about putting them together in a book, after all compiling a book is much easier than writing one, isn’t it? Actually, when it comes down to it, it isn’t that easy after all. I collected some of my stories together with some of my poems and then added in a selection of my blog posts. Then I had to format and index everything and finally after months of changing things round I felt I had finally got it right. The next step was to get it published.

I looked at quite a few options for self publishing but I ended up going back to what I think is the easiest one, Amazon. I uploaded my manuscript, checked and changed it a few times and finally ordered my proof copy. A quick look through that and I soon identified various problems so it was back to the manuscript, correct that and upload it again.

Over on Canva.com I created my cover then realised a sort of margin had appeared from somewhere so I had to edit that and then upload it again. Almost as soon as I thought everything was ok, some other issue would occur, A correction might have moved a new chapter to the next page so the contents page had to be revised. The text looked too bunched up so I spaced it out a little which meant another revision to the contents. Yes, I thought compiling a book rather than writing a new one would be so easy but in the end it wasn’t. A lot of that was due to me thinking I had mastered the intricacies of Microsoft word when actually, I hadn’t.

Then of course I thought that when I published I would automatically get a Kindle and a paperback version together; oh no, that would be just too easy. The Kindle version required its own manuscript too.

I thought about the title for ages and finally chose Timeline because it sounded like a good title for an anthology and also as it’s the title of one of my favourite short stories featured in the book. The only problem is that there seem to be a whole raft of books called Timeline available on Amazon including a particularly popular one by Michael Crichton. (Don’t bother with that one, try the one written by me!)

Take a look at my download page where you can download two of the stories from Timeline absolutely free.

Anyway, I’m happy to say that Timeline is now available as a Kindle download or as a traditional paperback from Amazon. I hope you will enjoy it.

Click here to go straight to Amazon.