I Do Not Understand Stuffed Vine Leaves

 

I don't understand the concept of stuffed vine leaves.

How do you stuff a leaf?  Leaves are really thin.  I imagine some sort of machine that somehow puffs up the leaf by blowing air into it, maybe air frying it, so you get this puffed crispy leaf that you can pipe food into.

Secondly, leaves aren't something to eat.  We've all eaten leaves of course, and when did we eat them?  As children, when everything went into our mouths to try, and most of it got spat out again.

And vines are long stringy things that Lara Croft probably climbs, or that grapes grow on in order to make wine.

Nothing of the phrase "stuffed vine leaves" makes any sense to me, and particularly when considering something to eat.

I accept that it is a thing, and it's probably quite nice if I ever tried one, but it just doesn't make sense.  I suspect that the leaves are actually folded or rolled (as per the AI-generated image in this post) to form a container for food.  So they aren't actually stuffed themselves. They are not akin to a stuffed crust on a pizza.

All of this is hypothetical, I have no idea of how they are actually made, to my knowledge I've never had one, and if given the choice of stuffed vine leaves or a steak pie for a meal, I am confident that I would go for the pie (provided that it was genuinely a pie ie filling that is fully contained by pastry, and not a stew with a hat as some places serve)

Thinking about it, steak pie is filling wrapped in pastry.... if they wrapped cooked and chopped steak and gravy in leaves, I wonder if that would be more acceptable to me?

I hope you're having a good Easter weekend, and don't forget to check my book out :)

Free ebook! (only available for 44 hours)

 

"Like nursery rhymes and fairy stories for adults... But less morals and more sex and death" - Amazon review

Fancy trying my book?

It's currently available for free via Amazon as an ebook, but only until Wednesday 9th April (PDT)!

Get it now, via https://amzn.to/44lPwTg

Rollercoaster of emotions

 

Anyone else go through a series of emotions for no reason?

Today, when I woke up, I was done.

Didn't want to lift a finger. Could easily have spent the day in bed napping and scrolling TikTok. It felt like I'd forgotten to take my anti-depressants, but that wasn't the case, I've taken them every day since Tuesday.

Since my book launched earlier this week, I've been pushing hard on the promotion.  I've sent out about forty packages to targeted individuals with presents in telling them about the book, I've been doing lots on social media, and I've contacted four hundred libraries to suggest that they buy the book.

As of yesterday, I was on six sales.

Now, there's so much against me. A new author, selling a book in an unclear genre (not a nice definable one like thriller or romance), a collection of short stories instead of a novel, self-published, without  proper marketing, an agent, or big social media presence, has a likelihood of major success of under 1%.  Selling a hundred copies has a maximum likelihood of 10%.

And I didn't write the book to be a massive success - although that would be nice, of course, who doesn't want to earn millions from a book they've published and have a mansion with several staff? (especially a gardener.... not a fan of the outdoors lol).  I wrote it because I've always wanted to publish a book, and the stories in it I like.  Even though I wrote them, they make me laugh.

But still.  When I woke up - depression was significant.

That feeling faded when I received a nice email from one of the libraries I'd contacted, saying that it wasn't a fit for their library (being medical in nature), but they was going to suggest it to another library on campus.  I chilled on Minecraft for a couple of hours, and felt pretty good after that.  And I checked my stats and found I was up to eight sales!

So then this afternoon I went out, and came back, listless and apathetic despite it being spring and there being some actual sunshine around.

And now I'm feeling good - I've had a decent dinner, I've made some more promotional videos, I'm now feeling like I've actually had quite a good day. And I'm on leave tomorrow, so I'm looking forward to that.

Sometimes, with having mental health stuff going on, I forget that it's actually an issue.  Some days I'm powering through all sorts of challenges and tasks, and feeling perfectly fine, and I think it's not a thing any more.

And then some days, like today, you have a spell where you feel like everything is wrong, and there's no rhyme or reason behind it.

But now I'm feeling better :) and I'm very lucky to have this platform to vent on (and those who know me well, I am so very happy to have you in my life - I wouldn't be here without numerous people who have helped me and continue to help me)

Finally - If you haven't already.... buy my book! https://amzn.to/3XBVH1z

What character are you?

 You can now take a quick quiz to see which of the characters in my new book "Norman the Insurance Salesman and Other Stories" you are - I'm Sam the Carrot.... which isn't a good sign 😟

Take the quiz now:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/mikeraven/which-norman-the-insurance-salesman-character-ar-5gb7lk9evg

If you've not bought my book yet, why not pop over to https://amzn.to/3Y8BIrk and take a look?

Book statistics

 

I've been delighted to see that my book sales have increased - yesterday I sold 2 books, while today I sold 3, representing a 50% increase in sales.

Assuming this increase continues at the current rate, by the 3rd of June everyone on Earth will have a copy.

I'm getting a speedboat!

Joking aside, go and have a look :)  https://amzn.to/3FSmErC  

IT IS LIVE

 It's live.

At last.

All formats of my book are available at https://amzn.to/4iG0sj3 and despite mucking up the promotion, I feel good now.

It's been a long road, and I'd definitely do some things differently if I did it again (and maybe I will!), but I'm just so pleased to have the thing out there in the wild.

Obviously if you're reading this, I'd love you, kind reader, to go and buy a copy - and maybe even leave a review on the Amazon website (or post about the book wherever you'd like) - it's very much a labour of love.

If you want to find out more about the book, there's shedloads of info over at thog.uk too :)

Really annoyed

 I'm really annoyed at myself.

I had a plan for publishing and promoting my book ("Norman the Insurance Salesman and Other Stories" - catchy, I know!), which was to make it live at the start of May, and before that I'd send advance readers copy to my targeted list of awesome people, and hopefully that would result in some reviews and some promotion to try to kickstart sales.

All that changed when the other day I clicked Publish on the eBook instead of scheduling it first.

The issue with this is that Kindle don't (understandably) allow you to distribute your eBooks outside of the Kindle Store and Amazon if you're signed up to their Kindle Select programme - which I am.  So while I can still tell people about the book, and give them copies of the sample pages Amazon put on their website, I can't send anyone the full book in electronic format.

I could buy physical copies and post them, but that's an outlay I can't afford right now.  So the reality is that I'm not going to be getting the reviews and the buzz that I was hoping for.

It's bittersweet - I'm really annoyed at myself, because it's my mistake, but also I'm really excited to have my book out live - except it isn't fully live, because of me trying to fix my mistake, the eBook is now back in review status and not actually purchasable, while the paperback and hardback copies are (https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F2884VMF) so I'm now waiting until the eBook is back fully live too and then I can do my promotion. Effectively I'm doing a "soft launch", which in my experience is when someone logical tries to do marketing - and it doesn't work. But I'm hoping that I'm wrong!

It's still fun. Writing a book is something I've always wanted to do, and it feels great to have done it. It's just not how I was hoping it would go! But that's life for you I guess :)

Anyway - expect to continue to hear from me more book-related stuff!

New Website and Book Progress

First and foremost, I've got a new website, it's thog.uk - go and take a look at it if you haven't already.

Next....

See this??

This is a wonderful, wonderful thing.  I appreciate that it isn't that easy to read, but basically Kindle Self Publishing has accepted my manuscript.

I knew that writing and publishing a book would be a lot of work, but I didn't realise the amount of tinkering needed at this stage. There's so much little tweaking to be done, both fixing errors in the upload process but also correcting words and format errors.  It's going to be an iterative process, particularly as I get feedback from beta readers, but I can't deny that I'm impatient and getting tempted just to press the Publish button!

The other cool thing is I've got my cover artwork produced by the awesome Nazia Hameed (https://www.fiverr.com/designby_nazia) which I'm really grateful for.

Nazia came up with 5 different concepts this was great as I really had no idea what I wanted (which is definitely not helpful!)

So, I'm hoping to publish in a couple of months, stay tuned :)

Album Cover

I feel like this photo is an accidental album cover for a northern England indie pop band that sings songs about getting their dole money on time.