By
Cristelle Comby (Guest Blogger)
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1) It’s a lonely job. This may be obvious to many but until you really start it is difficult to fully imagine how solitary the life of a writer can be. Almost every writer needs peace and quiet. This can be difficult to find and your tranquil writing area can be at the mercy of the phone, family and other occupations. Finding the perfect place to write is the first step. However, this will invariably lead you away from everyone you know. It will be just you, your room, a computer and in my case, copious amounts of coffee.
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2) Writing takes longer than you think. You have to write, re-write, re-write again, and probably do that several more times until you and anyone else reading it will be happy. The myth of Jack Kerouac writing his most famous novel On the Road in 3 weeks on one continuous piece of paper turned out to be a lie; it was in fact years; although by then he was a best seller. Even if you can fool people into thinking the writing didn’t take a long time, like Kerouac, it definitely will. Once you think it is ready, someone will probably be ready to tell you your work isn’t.
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3) It’s harder than it looks. You might think that once you have a good story in your head, coupled with the ability to write, you’ll be well away. You might. But you probably won’t. Writers are continuously tripped up by plot holes, unbelievable characters and various inconsistencies throughout the writing process. Gelling everything together into a cohesive whole can be tricky and will require revisions and edits to get the job done.
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4) Unless you have an original idea about wizards, vampires or greying men then writing will almost certainly not make you rich. With royalties extremely low for each book sold some writers choose to self publish to earn more. However, that comes with its own set of financial problems as investment costs when one chooses to self-publishing are alarmingly high. But if you thought it was all bad…
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5) It will make you happy. The feeling that you get after you have your printed book in your hands for the first time – something you painstakingly wrote and edited. Your labour of love. No one can ever take that happy, joyous, feeling away from you. It makes all the pains and aches worth it. Take the word of a writer who has been through it from start to finish.
Blurb
After
narrowly preventing the destruction of Cold City, PI Bellamy Vale
needs a rest. Or rather, he needs a plain and simple vanilla case—no
monsters or otherworldly creatures involved!
When
foreign businessman Eli Smith shows up at his doorstep with a thick
wallet and a request to find his missing sister, Vale doesn’t think
twice before agreeing.
If
he’d known body-hopping demons and smoke monsters came attached to
this job, however, he might have.
Excerpt
So
what if it was mid-February? The way I was feeling that morning, I
planned to sleep until New Year came around again. Hells, as far as I
was concerned, I earned it ten times over. I put an end to a string
of gruesome killings, prevented the apocalypse our former mayor
intended for us, and I’d stuck around long enough to clean up the
mess she and her minions left behind. All that thinking took out the
last bit of energy I had. I closed my eyes, found a way to lie down
that didn’t hurt too much, and let sleep throw its soothing blanket
over me.
And
then someone knocked at the door.
I
groaned at the wrong timing but kept my eyes shut. There was no way
in Tartarus that I was getting back up again so soon. Whoever it was
could get lost.
The
knocking came again.
It
was more insistent this time. I could hear a sense of urgency to the
motion. I forced one eye open and frowned. The sunlight streaming in
from the window was too bright for it to be morning and the angle it
bounced off the floorboards was all wrong. I opened my second eye and
glanced at the clock on the bedside table…Three in the afternoon.
“The
hells?” I muttered, wondering where the day went while I shook my
head to clear out the cobwebs.
The
knock came a third time and I got up, grumbling all the way to the
door. I didn’t bother to put clothes on or to tidy myself up before
opening it. I was clad only in an old pair of sweatpants with a
variety of cuts, bruises, and bandages on full display throughout my
upper body. I hadn’t shaved in a week, and I was sure my hair was a
sweaty mess of brown locks and dried blood.
Who
knows, I thought, maybe the sight of me will convince my uninvited
guest to let me get back to my coma.
If
the man in the hallway took notice of my state, he didn’t let it
show. He was tall and sickly thin under his rumbled three-piece suit.
His pale skin provided some severe contrast with the purple bags
under his brown eyes. He was somewhere between forty and forty-five.
His angular face wasn’t familiar, and my frown deepened.
He
looked like a potential client, the
I-want-to-know-who-my-wife-is-banging type, but they rarely showed up
to my private address unannounced. I made a lot of enemies in my
professional career, not all of them on this side of the border, so
my business card only listed my cell number.
The
suit he wore appeared brand new, but I frowned more as I realized
something didn’t add up. I was no fashion expert, but the matching
of colors between the vest and shirt was off, brownish orange shirt
covered by a purple jacket. Oh, and he wore a tie that matched his
jacket…ugh. The light brown shoes were also at odds with the indigo
blue pants. And there was the smell on the guy. It wasn’t a garbage
smell—I’d been around enough of that over the last month to know
it at first whiff—but there was a smoky quality about it that stood
out.
I
filed the information away for later and looked the man squarely in
the eye. “What?” I croaked, my tongue feeling too thick and my
mouth too dry.
“Bellamy
Vale?” he asked, with an accent that wasn’t from around
here…Middle Eastern, maybe?
I
jerked my thumb at the bell next to the door. It had my name on it.
The
man peered down at it perplexed, then pressed the round button. A
shrill ringing shot out of the tiny plastic box above the door, and
the sound sent sharp needles dancing through my brain. I winced in
pain.
“Yeah—yeah,
that’s me.” I rushed the words out, eager to make the noise stop.
Damn, but my head was killing me. My odd gentleman caller took his
finger off the button to look at me again.
“I
need your help,” he said, “to find my sister.”
I
needed help too, preferably in the form of another round of
painkillers. But that was going to have to wait. I waved my potential
new client inside.
About
the Author
Cristelle
Comby was born and raised in the French-speaking area of Switzerland,
on the shores of Lake Geneva, where she still resides.
She
attributes to her origins her ever-peaceful nature and her undying
love for chocolate. She has a passion for art, which also includes an
interest in drawing and acting.
She
is the author of the Neve & Egan Cases series, which features an
unlikely duo of private detectives in London: Ashford Egan, a blind
History professor, and Alexandra Neve, one of his students.
Currently,
she is hard at work on her Urban Fantasy series Vale Investigation
which chronicles the exploits of Death’s only envoy on Earth, PI
Bellamy Vale, in the fictitious town of Cold City, USA.
Twitter
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Website
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Amazon
author page: https://www.amazon.com/Cristelle-Comby/e/B00EAWEODS
Goodreads
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Amazon
buy link:
https://www.amazon.com/Evil-Embers-Vale-Investigation-Book-ebook/dp/B07MD2Z7ZV/ref=sr_1_1
Cristelle is giving away a $50 gift certificate to one lucky reader. Use the Rafflecopter below to enter.
