Roads to Joy

It’s been well over a year since my last entry in this blog. A good friend has just reminded me of the pleasure I derived from trying to articulate what brings me joy, and I thought I’d return for another moment’s pleasure. I’ve been so busy experiencing a huge variety of joy that I haven’t found time really to reflect on the experience. Mostly, my joy has been involved in (finally) bringing my novel into the world. So that’s my excuse, anyway.

Seven years now in the making, since I started writing in earnest, the whole point of the novel is that joy can be found even when it’s suppressed by the most overwhelming odds against it. So in a funny sense I’ve been working on the point of this blog, even though the blog contributions stopped. And finding joys as the novel developed, along the way.

It’s been great working with the characters who have felt to me as if they’re coming to life through my fingers. Following their motivations, their challenges, recognising what they want, what they need, in their lives, and exploring how they achieve their goals. The novel was, I thought, effectively completed six months ago, when I sent it away for professional copy editing. That was an epiphany, when it came back, all nicely polished and shiny in its presentation.

But I grew increasingly enamoured of the thought that the book should live in an audio world, and I set to to read into my microphone, using Audacity as the editing suite. Between that exercise, and the attention of yet another cohort of early readers, we found numerous things that needed fixing, so that the book was only ‘finished’ a couple of weeks ago, after the recording reached the end. Nothing like reading aloud to concentrate the mind on the finer points of the text.

So now I’m deeply embarked on the search for joy in what is, most surprisingly, a creative endeavour: independent publishing. It was the friendly folks at Alli (pronounced Ally) or the Alliance of Independent Authors, who developed the concept that this enterprise, though challenging, can in the end be an outlet for a creative mind. So it’s proving to me.

Writing under a new pen name, I’m launching The Song Cannot Be Silenced into the wider world on the 10th of September, when incidentally, I’ll be interviewed by novelist Margaret Elphinstone in a session from The CatStrand that will be live-streamed as well as stored on YouTube. I expect the novel to be available in three formats (the eBook version is currently up for pre-release orders on the Amazon platform), namely eBook, paperback, and audiobook. It will be widely distributed, especially by order at local bookstores throughout the UK, Canada and the USA, and libraries too. In the meantime, copies in either eBook or audiobook format will be available during July through the author’s website (AldonLaw.com) by Registration there. Please indicate which format you’d like to receive: the eBook can be emailed directly, the audiobook will go out on private distribution by WeTransfer.

And may joy continue to surprise us all!