National Novel Writing Month

November is National Novel Writing Month.  They are sponsoring an authorship marathon, write a novel in a month, 50,000 words (175ish pages) between November 1st and 30th. That’s a lot of words for a non professional, and they press you not to struggle with editing or any of that other hard stuff, focus on quantity and not quality.

This is (for good reason) in line with advice by novelists of note S.King and J.Pournelle that you simply have to sit down and write if you ever expect to be a writer.  There may be some people who are natural authors but most of us have to write a lot of words (in my case ~ a half million) before it comes reasonably easily most of the time.  Which in the days before the computer and word processor was an even larger investment in time and effort than it is now.

At B & N !!!!!!!!

Moon Dreams is now available as a Nook Book through Barnes and Noble !  Also at the Apple Store and at Smashwords.  At Smashwords you can get it in most common eBook formats including mobi for the Kindle.

Cover for Moon Dreams, created by Mark Harris

Cover Art

Finally!

I have worked on Moon Dreams since 2005 as my short book after the epic Across a Sea of Suns and the failure to find a market for Under Seige.  I think that the books are pretty good, people who’ve read them mostly like them if they like the genre but I just don’t have the knack, or the luck, to get an in anywhere.  

So along comes Smashwords and take away that barrier and today I am stepping out to see if I can find an audience for what I like to write.   A lot of the credit for this day has to go out to a broad range of relatives for reading this and other works at various stages and providing input and support. In particular I need to thank my wife and my father for their unflagging support, my wife for giving me the license to go off in a corner and tap on my computer for many, many hours at a time, as well as for reading the drafts and providing valuable insight and support. And to my father for many hours of work editing, fixing my grammar, punctuation, spelling and often the continuity after I had used cut and paste far too aggressively. Thanks to my uncle Andy for his reading and critiquing and the help with some technical bits, many of which didn’t make it into this version but which I hope will rise to speak again in other adventures

Have a look at Moon Dreams at Smashwords, and hopefully coming soon to the Barnes and Noble Nook, the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader, the Apple iPad, etc.