Fragments News and Cover Reveal

Fragments: Essays and Philosophies, my first book, is finally finished and almost ready for publication. It’s been a long time coming, and a lot of work to get things just right. In the past two weeks, I’ve been formatting the manuscript for the paperback and for Kindle, and creating the cover art. At first, I wasn’t sure if anything I could create would come close to what I imagined the book would look like, but I’ve worked hard to research and create a design that I’m happy with, and hope that people reading the book will be happy with. I’ve enjoyed the challenge, even though aspects of it have been frustrating – such as working on creating a formatted manuscript in Word and converting it to PDF with the formatting intact, correct page numbers, and no extra blank pages where there shouldn’t be any. The Kindle formatting was easier – working with a plain clean manuscript and using Kindle Create to format headings and so on. I’ve definitely learnt a lot in the past two months.

Fragments is a book of essays about identity, life, and thought. It weaves together five sections of essays, each dealing with an overarching theme, meditating on subjects as diverse as body positivity, being deaf, how to cope with anxiety, living with cats and an ode to the works of Jane Austen. The thread holding these fragments together is a search for what it means to live in the world as it is now, for meaning, purpose, belonging, and strength. Fragments is a book that aims to inspire, console, inform, and empower the reader to live a wholehearted life.

For me, it has been hard work, but rewarding with some of the feedback I’ve had from beta readers and friends. I hope that if you’ve been waiting for this book since I first announced it, that it lives up to your expectations. If you like what I write about here on my blog, then Fragments is very much in keeping with the themes I explore.

Currently, I’m aiming for Monday 29th October as the release date. The Kindle version will release then, and if all goes well with the paperback set up, then they will both be released on the same day. The Kindle version will also be ready for pre-order at the end of next week.

Without further ado, here is the cover for the Kindle:

And here is the paperback cover:

I’m looking forward to sharing more news with you all about the release of Fragments, and look forward to getting back to blogging after a long absence!

‘If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.’ – Ray Bradbury.