Again, I owe thanks to the wonderful Joanna Penn of The Creative Penn for showing an interest in TimeSplash, my time travel thriller, and in me and what I’m learning about publishing and promoting my first novel. This time it’s because I had the considerable good fortune to be interviewed by Joanna for her fascinating podcast series. You can find the podcast of the interview here:

Podcast: First Time Novel Publishing Experience With Graham Storrs

I’m beginning to see why Joanna’s podcast series is so popular. You can pack an awful lot of information into 30 minutes of conversation and, with a skilled interviewer, like Joanna, and a garrulous interviewee, like me, you can cover a lot of ground.

So, if you’re a newbie writer, or someone who feels they are taking forever to break into publication (like I did) you might find something interesting in there; about what publishers want, how to balance writing with publicising your book, what networking is all about, what agents and publishers need from aspiring writers, and many other topics we covered.

You might even hear something about TimeSplash.

At first, it seemed far, far away in the future. Then it began and seemed to go on forever. Now it is over and it feels just like yesterday. The TimeSplash Virtual Book Tour has come to an end with a spectacular 6 part wrap-up interview with Andy Shackcloth. And, now it is done, I’d like to say the most huge thankyou possible to all those amazing and kind people who hosted me during March and April. It clearly was not possible at all without the generous support of them all. So let me list them, one more time, in blog tour order:

To see the actual posts, visit the Blog Tour page which has all the links to all the posts.

I had a lot of fun with this – far more than I expected – and I hope you guys got something out of it too. Thanks to everyone who followed the tour and visited all my great hosts. I would be fascinated to hear what you thought worked well and what didn’t, any thoughts you might have on how the tour was set up or executed, and especially if anything in the tour inspired anybody to buy a copy of the book.

Something wonderful happened to me today. I looked at the Web and there was a story by Steven Odhner, called ‘The Deep End’, set in the ‘world’ of TimeSplash. And not just any old story. A really good one, with a brilliant premise. Anyone who has read TimeSplash should pop over to Steven’s blog and have a read. It’s free. Even if you haven’t read TimeSplash (yet!) you should take a look – I believe it will stand up on its own.

And I love this line from the story: “Froboz had no respect for the bricks themselves – he liked to point out that the original was quite literally a brick and did the job just fine.”

There really can’t be a more flattering notion for a writer than to think your work inspired someone else to do something creative. So thank you, Steven, you really made my day.

And, while you’re all here, I’ve got to remind you that Andy Shack’s Comings and Goings is up to Part 3 of a post blog tour wrap up interview that the two of us conducted behind the scenes as the tour unfolded. If you haven’t been following it, here are the ones you’ve missed:

Part 1 of the Post TimeSplash Tour Interview.

Part 2 of the Post TimeSplash Tour Interview.

Part 3 of the Post TimeSplash Tour Interview.

Sonya Clark, author of urban fantasy novella, Bring on the Night, has very kindly joined the blog tour and interviews me today on her blog. Much, of course, is revealed. Sonya has just had a short novel, Mojo Queen, accepted for publication by my old mates, Lyrical Press. You can read all about it while you’re over at her blog. One of the fascinating developments that e-publishing has led to is the increasingly frequent publication of sub-novel-length stories, particularly novellas. It used to be the case that these were almost impossible to find a home for.  Their growing popularity suggests that there was always a market for this length of story, it was just that the economics of paper publishing didn’t suit it.

Astute blog tour followers will have noticed that I seem to have jumped past Ruzkin’s spot, denying him his moment of glory. The reality is that we are working on the technology needed to record an actual spoken interview, and we’ll do that as soon as we work out which hole the plug goes into. Computers, you know, are never easy.

Shock revelations on Little Scribbler’s blog today. I stopped there on the TimeSplash Blog Tour as planned just to say how much fun I thought writing was, but in the comments section, the true reason we write is revealed. Consider the two pictures below. On the left is me before TimeSplash was published. On the right is my author photo. Now that I look at it, it is obvious, publication really is all about getting the girls – and it works!

I’m so encouraged by this exciting revelation that I will be querying agents with renewed vigour for the rest of the week.

Before

After

Those of you who have not read Kristi Thompson’s blog ‘How Did You Get There?’ are in for a treat. Kristi describes it as the Internet’s first BlogCom--Part Blog–Part Sitcom. I came across it when the two of us started stalking following each other on Twitter and it is a delight, not only for Kristi’s wry and whacky humour, but for the quality of the guests she manages to attract.

Somehow, I managed to wangle an invite – I think it’s an affirmative action thing, I’m the Token Australian – and my interview is up today on her blog. If you’re wondering whether you can stand another author maundering on about his need to bring the plight of South Africa’s displaced millionaires to the attention of the reading public, don’t worry, I hardly get a word in. Read my interview, then trawl through the archives, There is some very funny stuff there.

When Janette Dalgliesh, my blog tour host for today, asked me to do a piece about ‘turning points’, I knew exactly which particular one she had in mind. However, on reflection, even in just the writerly side of my life, there have been so many. Mostly they have stemmed from decisions I have made that have spurned or deferred the idea of writing for a living, or of attempting publication. The decisions began early and kept coming throughout my life.

I didn’t always see them for what they were at the time, but hindsight is wonderful at cutting through the haze that surrounds us in the present. It would be easy to regret choosing so much else instead of choosing to write, but what would be the point? Given what I knew and what I valued, I made the best decisions I could. Given the very good place in which I find myself, who is to say I could possibly have made better decisions?

So thanks to Janette for provoking all this reflection. It is far too easy to avoid taking the time to pause and look back.