“Overcoming my Fears to Write a Book”
by Glenn Gamble
I never thought I would write fiction, let alone write five books at the time of publication. Author Teresa D. Patterson suggested that I write fiction after reading my daily blog on MySpace. I thought she was out of her mind. In fact, I laughed at the notion that I would be writing some make-believe story, but she tricked me shortly after. One day, I spoke with her on the telephone and she told me that she was working on this book entitled Ex-Boyfriend, and that she wanted my insight on how a young obnoxious office worker would come across when hitting on a beautiful woman who was over 10 years his senior. Of course, I had no problem offering my help to ensure that the character came across as realistic as possible. Being the ego driven person I am, I thought that this would lend more credibility to MySpace blog; which had become a collection of my thoughts on dating at that time of my life. Once the book was finished I said to myself “that was a lot of work, but pretty fun.” That’s when I wrote A Thousand Chances.
At the time I wrote ATC, I was very nervous because I didn’t know what I was doing; to simply put it, I was an amateur. I had no idea why I should write an outline, I didn’t understand my own writing style, and I wasn’t sure if I could write a book by myself. Then I began to question myself. “Can I write a book that people will actually like?” I wasn’t sure of the answer, but I plodded along, and wrote at the seat of my pants. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Three weeks later, my first book was completed. A Thousand Chances was ready to hit shelves, until I ordered the books. Selling them hand to hand and trying to get them into bookstores was a more daunting task than I realized. As a result, several print copies are still sitting in my mother’s garage in boxes that were never opened. I gave up writing.
Then two years later, my friend Teresa D. Patterson told me that she uploaded her backlist on this Kindle thing, and she sold a bunch of books. I witnessed her own struggle to sell books years ago. I was proud of her. Knowing an author personally who makes a living doing what she loves to do inspired me to start writing again, but where do I begin. First of all, what’s a Kindle. Second, how do I format for the thing. This was scary stuff to me. Instead of focusing on what I found intimidating, I went ahead and put together my first story in two years, Bon Appétit. Once I was done, I sent it off to an editor, made the suggested corrections and I read the formatting guidelines for Kindle. With a little trial and error, I was able to upload my first Kindle book. Then a few days later, I did the same for A Thousand Chances and uploaded it. After that, I’ve been writing a bunch of stories and publishing them on Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords.
So how did I overcome my fears? I just opened up Microsoft Word and started writing. I found that once you face your fears, you realize that you really over-magnified the thing that you feared.
Glenn Gamble is the author of A Thousand Chances, Bon Appetit, Escape, On the Run, and James. All of his books are available on Amazon Kindle http://www.amazon.com/Glenn-Gamble/e/B002BMGSVK and Barnes and Noble Nook (link) and Smashwords (link)
He also encourages you to go to his website http://www.GlennGamble.com.
