After a slight delay, publication day, February 15th, is complete. We’ll just say that publication “day” ran for 36 hours. Apparently, paperback books on Amazon KDP require a “special” and more expensive ISBN number. The alternative was to use a free Amazon KDP ISBN but that would have meant it could have only been published on Amazon. Anyway, both the Kindle edition and the paperback edition are now available.
This has been a long road. I first dreamed up with the concept for this novel way back in 2014. Unfortunately, I was in the throes of a very serious and disabling illness and I had no idea how to write a proper novel. I tried to get some friends interested in the concept to no avail. So it sat on a backburner for a while until I was once again very ill in 2017, and, this time, the illness actually inspired me to write the book. It specifically inspired me to create one of the alien creatures in the story amid my musing about what bacteria or viruses would do if they could somehow understand how much suffering they cause: would they continue doing what they do, feeling they had no choice? Would they stop…? stop and do what…? Die? I shall have to write further about that in another blog.
It took me about three months to write the first draft, and I spent only a few months making some revisions. This first version was—in my present day opinion—terrible, though at the time I thought it was at least passable. I had a lot to learn. I never queried it. I instead went on to write another book called Beyond the Empyrean, and in the process I learned the essentials necessary to write a proper novel.
In the middle of the colossal fecal thundershower that was 2020, I made the unavoidable downtime useful and used the tools I’d learned over the previous three years to completely revise When Morpheus Overslept into its current form, with more editing to follow. The nice thing about this was that I was able to insert many of the world-building ideas I had for Beyond the Empyrean into this book. I only briefly queried this version and received a couple of manuscript requests but no offers of representation, so I decided I needed to make something out of all my work on my own. Self-publishing. And that is the version available for purchase today. I think it’s pretty good if I may say so. I hope you will feel the same.
Yours in print,
Michael