Katy’s Brief Guide To Writing and Publishing:

- Have ideas in your head

- Convert them into words

- Realise they are not the right words.

- Repeat step 2 until they become the right words.

- Realise that you now have all the right words, but not necessarily in the right order.

- Move the words around until they feel better.

- Become cautiously happy, or at least not actively unhappy, with the outcome.

- Take the collection of words (or ‘story’ as we in the trade call it) and turn it into a book via Amazon, Lulu, Smashwords,  a PDF file, ora dog-eared pile of paper held together with staples and hope.

- Sell it to people.

Some of the above steps are easier than others.

Still, here I am, somewhere near the end of the process, and I present to you:

Fausterella and other stories

There are nine in the collection, of which four have been previously published by ezines/magazines. The title story, Fausterella, is the story of a girl who sells her soul to go to the ball (well, what did you expect?) and the others include the perils of adopting a pet zombie, a village which commits a misguided ritual sacrifice, a puppet shop with a secret, a Yorkshire trip with horrifying consequences, and what happens when your dead relatives just won’t go away.

This is the Smashwords edition – HTML, EPUB, PDF, RTF, any way you want it. And this is the Amazon Kindle edition: Fausterella and other stories. Cost: $1.99, roughly the price of a large chocolate bar (one of the slightly more upmarket chocolate bars, but not anything really posh).

So! If you harbour a deep-seated distaste of or resentment towards me and don’t think I should be encouraged in any of my creative endeavours, I urge you not to do any of the following:

- Buy my book

- Read my book

- Write reviews of my book on Amazon etc (if you like it)

- Post links to my book on Twitter, Facebook, your blog, someone else’s blog, or other social media of choice.

If not, and if you can cope with buying a self-published book (and if not, no problem - hang on and buy my novel instead later this year) then I refer you to the list above for ways you can make me really, really happy. You want me to be really, really happy, don’t you? Don’t you? I thought so.