It took a couple of days longer than I'd planned, but Discord's Child and Discord's Apprentice were finally unleashed as paperbacks from CreateSpace and Amazon last Monday (3rd April). There was a last minute hitch–the discovery that moving one little hyphen had had a knock-on effect throughout a whole chapter. I could have left it, I've seen other novels with words hyphenated across pages, but once I'd spotted it, I would never have been happy knowing it was there. Anyway, the paperbacks are now on sale and I've set up a Facebook page for The Exiles of Ondd too. Whew!
    When preparing a manuscript it can feel as if you're never going to get through it. The same thing applies when you're struggling to finish a first draft. It's really tempting to give up. At least with formatting a manuscript you already have something concrete to work on. With first drafts it's harder, because the work's still in your head. Unless you have a deadline, it might be a good idea to set it aside and work on something else for a while to allow yourself to view it from a distance and give new ideas a chance to arrive. The problem it that you might get so much distance that you never pick up the work again.
    Don't feel that you have to write down the whole idea from beginning to end. Brainstorm everything you can think of, and it will become clearer how to group things together and what order to put them in (I find spider plans helpful). Write down the snatches of dialogue, odd sentences, characters and scenes that pop into your thoughts without worrying about how they'll fit together. In fact, there's no reason why a story shouldn't be told as a montage of different forms depending on the subject and the intended publication (if you have one). What you have at the end of it all might not be beautiful prose, or even coherent, but at least you'll have something to play with.
    There's a quote, I think it might be by Dr. Johnson, but I'm not sure, that says: to have written is heaven, but to write is hell. Sometimes writing can be a grind, but you'll feel so much better when it's done, so keep plodding on.