As you may remember I started writing an experimental novel. Why it’s experimental? Because I can’t write a regular novel, or at least that’s how I feel. Being autistic I have problems with imagining how people may react in various situations and I think my characters were rather flat sometimes in my first novel I wrote and published in Polish around 15 years ago. That’s exactly what gave me not very favourable review that was meant to be part of the book’s promotion!

At least I now know working on character’s development is not going to help but I love the process of creative writing and the word play. Also, as English is not my native language I need to accept I will always have some difficulties with it. So I had a think and I decided I need to focus on what I do well and find ways to make other things into feature and writing experimental novel came to my mind.

It will be somewhere on a shorter side (a novella rathen than a novel) and I’m around half way through. And now I have this problem; that is an autistic thing, I believe: I feel like I need to decide right now what I will do with this novel after I finish it. Looking for traditional publisher takes time and may not be successful. Some publishers reserve a year for a simple ‘no/maybe’ answer and even after ‘maybe’ I could still hear ‘no’ at the end for various reasons; and one of them could be that I won’t be able to respond to hidden meanings in the publisher’s communication.

I am an impatient person and also I know that only when I ‘release’ my work (that means I publish it somehow) I will be able to start working on another. Self publishing on Amazon is so easy but then being found there is difficult as there’s so many books.

Hiring a book marketing expert is also an idea but then I think, why should I spend money on something that may be not successful enough; I also like the idea of offering my books free of charge on a particular day of the month.

Also, don’t you think that hiring a book marketing expert would look like, well… the book is possibly not very good? This is my perception that could be caused by the fact I was brought up in Poland and didn’t see a single ad till I was 11.

I really feel like I need to decide the route I’m going to take with this novel to be able to finish it. I think I’ll ask John to talk it through with me. He’s very good at going through my various problems. I think I should pay him for life coaching.