From all appearances I dropped off the face of the Earth back in May and in a manner of speaking I did. I've been writing as "Cotton Nightie" since December 2012 and so far written around 500K words of fiction. I created this personae to practice writing and publishing, and it has served its purpose well.
While I take my writing seriously, I never expected anyone else to. Over the last year and a half, I've sold a couple of thousand books, gotten few good reviews and ratings, and felt the satisfaction of seeing my books on sale along side other authors. I'd have been content to just keep writing, but something happened last month that changed things up a bit.
I think pretty hard about writing and sometimes write articles or editorials on topics that interest me. I did an interview that was read by a professional author who asked to read the manuscript for my first book, The Other Half. She put me in contact with her publisher and they offered to work with me to edit and republish it with a new title. We ended up rewriting a third of it, completely changing the ending.
It came out last month (June 18th, 2014) under my new pen name and spent a few days in the top 10 on Amazon's bestseller list. Weeks later it's still in the top 100 on a few of the sub-genre bestseller lists. With close to 50 reviews, the rating on Amazon is running at 4.5, with 25 of them five-star ratings.
I'm still trying to get my head around everything that's happened. Obviously I'm planning on writing a sequel to that story now, but I've got other stories that don't really match the tone and theme I'd set there. Up until now I just wrote what I wanted because I was writing for me. But now I've gotten actual fan mail, for fuck's sake.
I'm trying to decide what to do with Kate's Journal and my new novel Night Flight now. Kate's Journal will stay where it's at for now under my current pen name. At some point over the next few weeks I'll have Night Flight revised and ready for edits. I may try to submit it under yet another pen name before I return to writing the sequel I have to write.
I'll start posting updates on my Night Flight rewrite progress as soon as I stop giggling about everything that's happened.
Cotton