Greetings... And a quick glance on my first book

(Yes, those are numbers and not letters but I like the picture. Btw this picture is from Freepik® )

Hello wanderers of the internet and literature! It is with joy I have opened this blog a few weeks ago, and am announcing the upcoming publishment of my first book! I will reveal the title and cover in due time, for now the manuscript is being corrected (after having been proofread and corrected numbers of time by myself, I asked a professional as a next step in order to have an external look on my book). Also, having having hesitated for a long time between traditional publishing through a publishing house and self-publishing, I eventually opted for self-publishing via KDP on Amazon®, and will explain why in another article.

Now, let's dive quickly into what this book is about, so that you are in the know.

Since it is not published yet, I can't say much about this book and its story, except that it combines many different genres. There is mainly fantastic genre as many supernatural events occur which cannot be explained; it also has romance and psychologic. The idea of this story was really to be placed into the thoughts of the main character, in their perceptions about the world surrounding and their own struggles, which makes the story a bit raw at times. By the way, I wrote a trigger warning at the beginning of my book (therefore I'm taking the opportunity to warn you here also), mentioning that the story dealt with sensitive subjects such as eating disorders, depression and suicide. I have to admit I had a hard time writing it from time to time, to read it again and edit it, especially because as time passed I had become attached to my characters. This is what I find magical writing though: a character is created, we see their personality shaping over time, and I find it marvelous. We come to the point of sharing tears and laughter with our characters, we appreciate them, we love them, we hate them; we admire them or we resent them for the choices they make, but in the end they wouldn't be there if us, writers, weren't there to give them a voice... Anyway, going off topic, let's head back to the subject of that post.

To be honest, this isn't really the kind of novel I would think of writing, when I first decided to become a writer. I was in reality working on another manuscript before that one, one that is a sci-fi fantasy project (much more the kind of genre I like writing), yet I had a lot of struggles concerning organisation over everything: about the continuity of the story, about the coherence of the characters, about my organiztion even to write aside of my studies, then aside of my full-time job! But I held onto it, and I don't like leaving a project unfinished before starting another one, though I had this other project (the one of the finished manuscript that is to be published) that came to my mind, with a simpler scenario and a story that had nothing to do with what I was used to write. This project kept coming back into my mind, a lot, until that, upset and frustrated that I wasn't progressing at ease with my other project, I finally decided to put on hold my SFF project and develop this one. In the meantime, I had greatly improved my organisation in writing and redacted the first draft in a few weeks. Then I read it again and edited it several times, and even translated it to English (no AI, I did everything myself).

Having completed the translation (and its proofreading also!), I let the manuscript aside - I will probably explain why in another post - started working again on my SFF project which first draft is currently finished and resting before proofreading!

That's for the news about the projects to come and to be published.

If you are interested, you can find my Facebook page under the same name (Willow Jenkins) and on Instagram under the name lilibeth_nd_squirrels (nothing to do, but I kept that account private and inactive for years, so now it is active and pro I may change the name, knowing that having other projects, I may not be talking solely about writing on there, it is still in parlay with myself ;) ).

I hope you enjoyed this first article. Please tell me what you thought in the comments. If you are curious about my writing and would like to discover my universe, you can also check out my posts on Substack (at the moment I have only posted in English, but I will certainly post in French too).

Meanwhile, take care and good readings!

-WJ-