False Starts and Frazzled Hearts

Day: 303 & 304

Towns / Cities Visited: 199

Countries Visited: 31

Steps Taken Today: 12,734

Steps Taken Around the World: 4,739,130

Write a book, they said. It will be fun, they said. The last time you heard from me, we were just heading back from a minibreak with the express purpose of completing and publishing our dark fantasy novel before we allowed ourselves to head off once more to explore the far reaches of the world. By world, I of course mean Australia, because between the shitstorm that is Covid and the clusterfuck that is Russia starting a war with Ukraine, it just seemed sensible to maybe not stray too far from our own backyard just for the moment.

Now, like the innocent, naïve writers we were at that point, we thought that, although it had taken six years to write our book, it would only take a few months of working on it full time to get the final edit done, and perhaps a month or so to proofread, publish and format. That was almost ten months ago. And you know what, the book still isn’t published. Between editing taking far longer than expected, formatting being a nightmare, and Amazon having the most complicated system ever if you are two authors writing a book together, it’s been one thing after another.

In the end, we found ourselves in a fairly frustrating situation. We were, and currently still are after six weeks, waiting on Amazon to approve our tax information. This is because…