2019 has not been a productive year for the Hopskotch blog. Work-related duties and a tsunami of other unrelated distractions conspired to draw the author away from The Waking World. I have spent long and pleasing hours working on my deck-enhancing tree garden, nurturing my fledgling home-brewing skills and (as an extension thereof) making my own unique ale-bread/sourdough that no one, I suspect, enjoys quite so much as my good self.
Of course, Broken Meadow has never been far from front of mind. Back in October 2018 I signed a contract with London-based Olympia Publishers to bring to market a professionally edited edition of Book I: Hopskotch and the Golden Cicada. At this point, we are limited to a digital eBook version that will run with the freshly minted silhouette-style cover teased late last year (stay tuned for a Book II render coming soon). On sale is scheduled for April 25th, at which point I will have to disable the current eBook edition and redirect all links to the Olympia version. Updates on this and more will appear on my (also neglected) Facebook page as the date approaches.
Getting there
Not unexpectedly, the process of delivering a final manuscript was as laborious as it was time consuming. I'll spare you the detail, but it was late May before I signed off on the final manuscript, and we moved to the next phase: Marketing and Publicity.
Therein lies my core motive for signing with Olympia. It was not about the story, the characters, or even the nuts’n’bolts grammar and spelling (that I was never going to master at professional level). For those who put down coin for the self-published edition, I can assure you the story has not changed. In fact, not a single sentence was rewritten, a testament to the countless hours I invested in search of perfection.
It eluded me of course (who knew that the verb ‘leach’ was spelt differently to the blood-sucking worm?), but not in any way that would diminish the reader experience. So what is the motivation behind seeking a professional leg-up?
It's all about reach. And not that I haven’t quietly daydreamed of it on occasion, but I seek neither wealth nor fame from the series. I just want people to read it. I want children to read it. I want them to be inspired by the running theme: that all people have creative potential, that they should feed and nurture and bring to full bloom their own.
Awakening
In the Author Questionnaire Olympia’s Marketing department forwarded to me was a simple question: What do you hope to achieve from publishing this book? My reflex answer was that I wanted to build both an audience and thereby demand for a hard-copy edition, from there justifying publication of the proceeding books to complete the trilogy.
It was belated realisation that this was only partly what I wanted to achieve. There was a much bigger picture peeking through the curtain. For those who skipped the About page of this website, the trilogy was seeded from a very simple idea: that all people are inherently creative, but that creativity will often need a little help to germinate, sprout and grow into light of day. This spirit of awakening underscores Hopskotch’s journey and steers our hero through every twist and turn and frustrating detour.
Taking The Waking World to a broader audience would be a grand thing indeed, but it need not be all that broad. If Hopskotch can lift just one small chin, then I will have achieved everything I set out to.
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