Rachel Starr Thomson

All right, friends who wanted to keep up with my fiction journey. I am trying my hand at improving novel descriptions. I would love it if you’d give me your feedback on the following descriptions of the same book. Which would more likely interest you enough to read a sample (or even buy the book)?

1.

The Council for Exploration Into Worlds Unseen believed there was more to the world and its history than the empire had taught them. Treating ancient legends as history, they came a little too close to the truth. Betrayed by one of their own, the Council was torn apart before they could finish their work.

Forty years later, Maggie Sheffield just wants to leave the past behind. Memories of the Orphan House where she grew up are fading; memories of her guardians’ murder are harder to shake. When a dying friend shows up on her doorstep bearing the truth about the Seventh World–in the form of a written covenant with evil–Maggie is sent on a journey that will change her forever.

2.

Quiet, timid, and haunted by the murder of her guardians when she was a child, Maggie Sheffield wants peace and healing—not an opportunity to uncover truths so frightening and so vast that they threaten to forever unravel the world she thinks she knows. But when a dying friend gives her an ancient scroll that purports to contain just such truths, Maggie finds the lure of understanding too hard to resist.

For the power that killed Maggie’s loved ones was not human—and she has reason to believe the same power is both hunting down others and ruling the entirety of the Seventh World.

Leaving her hopes for peace behind, Maggie sets out to carry the ancient scroll to the far eastern city of Pravik, seeking the only man in the world who can read it and reveal its secrets. Along the way, Maggie falls into the companionship of a charismatic young wanderer called Nicolas Fisher, who has secrets of his own that he has long been trying to keep hidden.

Together, their journey plunges them into a strange new world of colourful Gypsies and ancient legends, of death-hounds and beautiful witches, of wilderness treks and unexpected love. But the price of truth may be too high: for Maggie, Nicolas, and the rebels of Pravik are tearing at the veil between the seen and the unseen, between good and evil, between forgotten past and treacherous future—and when that veil grows thin enough, it’s anyone’s guess what may come through.

So as I announced in my last post, I am going whole-hog into e-book publishing this year. And the biggest thing for me is that I can do what I haven’t done in any serious way for years: I can write fiction again. In fact, I need to. As the Very Smart People I’ve been reading on the topic of indie publishing point out, writing and publishing prolifically is the best way for a writer to make money and build readership. It is the best way to build an indie publishing business.

If you don’t write, you don’t have product; if you don’t have product, you don’t have a business. Period.

This should be fantastic news for me. By the time I was in my early 20s, I had written 16 book-length manuscripts in various genres. Stories ran through my head constantly, as did words. I love words.

But life is not like that anymore. I go to write, especially fiction, and hear my hopes plinking off the pebbles at the bottom of a very dry well. Honestly, this has been building for years. The only book I’ve written in the last few years, Coming Day, was murder to write. I’m happy with the finished novel, but it was HARD.

Why? What happened–where did all the inspiration go?

I’ve been wrestling with that question for years, but I think I finally figured it out.

I stopped writing.

I decided that I needed to concentrate on promoting my old books before I wrote new ones. I got deep into building a couple of different business, starting running more numbers than words in my head, and just lost touch with the creative half of my brain. You know, the part that tells stories.

So now here I am, facing a new business model that requires me to be what I love being–a storyteller, a wordsmith. And I’m gaping into it wishing I remembered how to be a writer.

Sorry if this sounds a bit doom and gloom. I fully intend to get it back. I know that God created me with “writer” as part of my essential makeup; my bad for dropping the ball for so long. Currently my plan is to do a little editing on some old manuscripts that I never really finished, and then I’ll launch into something new. I’m not sure what yet. But by the end of this year, I plan to have written two entirely new novels. So the creativity is gonna have to come back.

I’ll keep you posted on what’s happening. In the meantime, if you’re a writer, or you’ve written a book and want to write more, take it from me:

Keep writing.

It’s the most important thing you can do.