I published The Ice Star on January 26th, 2017. It was the first book I published that ever really sold, and it changed everything.
If you’re familiar with my story around writing The Ice Star, you’ll know I was sick of it. I had rewritten the book, from scratch, at least three times. While the lecturers at Falmouth University thought I was on to something, and I achieved a distinction for my work on The Ice Star (graduating in 2015), I was done. My brain was cooked. And, as I’ve mentioned before, I embarked on what I knew would be a successful writing career based on the conviction that The Ice Star would never sell, and Steampunk was the way forward.
Yeah.
That went well.
It took two months on the Yukon River to persuade me to dust off the latest draft of The Ice Star, and I revisited it on a tiny computer in the canteen of an Alaskan ferry crossing Prince William Sound.
I can’t remember how much I wrote on the ferry, but I finished revamping the story (and The Starlighter) before the end of 2016. I self-published in January 2017, and things became interesting after that.
And Maratse arrived, of course.
I often credit Seven Graves, One Winter as my breakthrough book, but really it was The Ice Star. Maratse is in it – his first ever appearance – but it was Konstabel Fenna Brongaard who forged my writing career.
So this post, and the new cover, is basically a thank you to Fenna, and the readers who bought the book and helped me take the next step on my way to becoming an independent author.
Chris