Hello, and welcome to my new home.

Many variations of names were tried out here, but in the end I just chose my official middle name, Melusine, as it is quite unique all by itself. And it has literary roots, quite fitting for an author website. Just know that it’s a rather famous name, a tough one to live up to, especially in the nude. Not that I have any ambitions in that direction.

What this website is about is me as an AUTHOR. There, I said it. An AUTHOR!

If you’re now going to say “But isn’t that a bit preposterous?” you are absolutely right. Because authors are people who write books that other people buy. Seeing as I haven’t sold a single book, it’s all a bit premature.

But what I HAVE done is written a book. Sort of. I’ve written and written and written and corrected and written again, until I was thoroughly sick of the whole thing and did not want to see it again, ever. Or at least not ever until it was a pretty little thing that I could put onto my bookshelf. So I sent the manuscript off to a few editors, and now I’m… waiting. I’m not even trying out for any big league publishers, because I don’t deal very well with rejection (I once cried for a whole day in 7th grade because my teacher said I could have provided more detail in my research project about Afghanistan), but even plain editors, it turns out, need time. They’re not just going to jump all over your manuscript and have it back to you within the week. In fact, they’re probably, at this very moment, working on SOMEBODY ELSE’S GREAT NOVEL and really don’t have any time for you until after Easter.

I was told by an authority in the field of self-publishing (Catherine Ryan Howard in Self-Printed: The Sane Person’s Guide to Self-Publishing, if you must know) that in order to sell my book, I’ll have to promote it. And not just promote it once it’s actually out there for sale. No, I need to promote it RIGHT NOW! Please know that this is absolutely killing me. I HATE to talk about great things I’m going to do, some day, when I haven’t actually done them yet and haven’t made sure they’re absolutely perfect.

Since I now find myself with a bit of extra time while an editor is looking at my book, I figured I might as well use it and start on this promotion thing. The first step of which was to design this very website as a future home to all my still-to-be-written books. And it better be pretty-near-darn-perfect, because I’ve spent WAY too much time with it. I spent DAYS picking and discarding one WordPress theme after the other. I spent a whole week trying to figure out what to call it, which got me sidetracked in the most interesting (but not very productive) ways. Then I was in danger of getting lost in the world of Photoshop until the next presidential election, trying to come up with the perfect header image. Here is one tip for you should you contemplate making your own author website: Find someone who can do Photoshop and contract the header imagine to them. It will be so much better for your sanity. And if you’re now going to go all nit-picky on me and inspect my header image carefully so you can point out all the not-so-clean edges, I will have to kill you.

So what’s the mystery book called, you might ask? Well, slight hurdle in STEP #1 of Self-promotion: I don’t actually know. I can’t think of a good title for it. Or, actually, I might think of a good title of it, if I wasn’t bent on finding the perfect title for it. It’s my first book, after all. I don’t want it to be BOOK WITH LAME TITLE JUST FOR THE SAKE OF PROMOTING IT.

What I WILL do is tell you what it is about. But that will be another blog post. Stay tuned!