A year has passed, but what a year!

The past year since achieving the blackbelt in Choi Kwang Do has been pretty amazing one. The training has been ongoing and becoming a Head instructor incredibly rewarding. Both the predlets also gained their 1st blackbelts in CKD too, and @elemming is well not the way too.
I have still been sharing and blogging on Feeding Edge, so it it seems strange to come back to my personal blog, when Feeding Edge kind of is too.
One of the most significant events of 2015 came in the last quarter of the year. A few work contracts had gone away, through no particular fault of anyone. I was sat on holiday reading some books. I read the Martian (before the film came out) and thought, wow, that really is interesting how the technology and science is presented, with great depth and intelligence. That was then met with a flash of inspiration that I would try and write a book, using the technology I know and love, but push it a bit further than we can go at the moment.
In September 2015, I sat down and wrote solidly,  just like any other contract or job, and created a sci-fi novel called Reconfigure, in just over two weeks. There were a few more weeks or fixing the typos, the punctuation and generally wondering how to format it and publish the thing. I settled on Amazon and the KDP Select program. With great trepidation, on Oct 22nd, just a few weeks after having the idea, I published it. Within a few days I had also figured out how to format it for a print edition on CreateSpace, a print on demand Amazon company. I had a physical version of the book in my hand less than two months after starting it. It is a full length 72k word novel too BTW :)
Once that was under my belt, the tricky process of advertising, promoting and asking people to please read it began. I found that there are many fellow fledgling authors doing the same thing. Every little click and download of the book counts in moving it up the sales rank. Review count an awful lot too.
It was almost too depressing to sit and watch the sales figures bumble along, sudden spikes if I made it free for a few days were interesting too.
The story had a natural follow on, and I spent another few weeks in November and early December writing the follow up, Cont3xt. Christmas got in the way a bit and I picked it up again in January 2016 and went for it. I learned a lot from the first one, that I still love BTW, and found a way to pick the better parts and add to them. It is tricky trying to refer back to a previous story without making it essential to read both books in order, and without spoilers, as I have a lot of intrigue and twists amongst the twirling swirling tech.
Friday Cont3xt went live and so I now have two sci-fi novels live on Amazon. They seem to get a good reception from the people that read them, so I am hopeful I am doing something right.
Just to come full circle, the start of Cont3xt is heavily ifluence by the sort of moves and feeling I have performin and studying Choi Kwang Do. Write what you know ? Tech and martial arts :)


I created separate URL's for them
http://reconfigurebook.co.uk and http://cont3xtbook.co.uk
They are available all over the world, wherever Amazon is.

I also created a couple of promo videos describing them
I hope you get a chance to enjoy them