A rose, by any other name, wouldn't be my company

I've been The Northern Bard online since 1997, when I damaged a disc in my lower back and had to spend two months under restrictions. So what does one do when commanded to do "NO bending, NO lifting, NO twisting" when one works as a janitor?

In my case, I was introduced to chat rooms, where I met a lot of really cool people who made some interesting suggestions for ways to avoid breaking the doctors rules. One actually sent me to a page that taught me to build my own web pages using HTML. Taking my own poems, which had been published in The North Country Bard column of The Pequawket Valley News, and using a slightly different title for my pages, I practiced HTML by putting my own poetry onto the internet.

Then I finished the novel I started on an old Tandy HX1000, which took three "fresh beginnings" because I kept crashing the second hand computers I was using. I bought a copy of the Writer's Market to find out who was publishing romance novels. I started sending out introductory letters and the first three chapters to all the "big" companies. And when I got rejection slip after rejection slip, a friend suggested a new tactic: ebooks. It seems that a friend of hers right here in our home state of Maine, who was starting a company called ebooksonthe.net, was publishing novels in HTML, selling permission for one print copy for those who didn't want to sit on their computer reading the books.

The rest, as the saying goes, is history, with the sale of ebooksonthe.net to a company in Maryland in 2002, the introduction of Kindle in 2007, and Nook in 2009. Between the introduction of the Kindle reader and the introduction of the Nook reader, my first novel went to paperback, and although I've never made enough to be worth shouting about, the sales have been steady....

So when I wrote a second novel, I offered it first to the company who had been sending me my royalty checks since 2002....and the headaches between my vision for the second book and the vision of the publisher sent me back to my friends with "the grumblies".

When deciding with a couple of these friends that I could have better creative control if I turned to self-publishing, the next discussion was about the name of our "company" - and at the suggestion that I already WAS The Northern Bard, we opted to name the company Northern Bard Publications, whose first offering was the third book in my series, as chronicled here on this blog.....

I'm very proud of our little company, despite the fact that we don't appear to even be recouping the costs of our first offering, much less the second one that will be launching - or is that "relaunching"? - soon. My choice to use professional models for the covers would probably not be considered a good business strategy, but I truly adore the cover for "A Wild Tiger's Heart".  I also truly love the cover for the relaunch of my second novel, "The Tiger's Cub".....

  

The finance director is praying for a miracle - that she'll be able to see enough of an increase in sales to pay off the credit card I used for both the Daniel Sobieray/Patrice Garza cover for "A Wild Tiger's Heart" and for the Derek Yates/Belle Louve cover for "The Tiger's Cub".

The art director has already put the covers for these two behind her and is obsessing over the third project I've put in her lap: a new cover for the book that started it all, "Night of the Tiger". Her only hope is that The Universe continues to respond to my requests for models. She's joking that, since I've finally hit my goal weight and actually could get away with wearing a bikini for the first time since 1997, I should start modeling to pay for the next cover and stop making the finance director have sleepless nights....

And me? 

I'm feeling the pressure to be the editor in chief, rewriting a small part of "The Tiger's Cub" (mostly things that I trusted the first publisher to put in) and the parts of "Night of the Tiger" that were changed so that the pivotal scene makes no sense.

I'm writing short stories that will be getting put together to become a future Northern Bard offering that I've been calling "The Mostly True Adventures of Superburnerman".

I'm working my "day job" as a salesperson at Staples.

And I'm trying to pretend, especially for the two friends who are on this ride with me, that I'm not worried about a little belly bump just above my navel that has caused me to spend at least one day off each week for the past three weeks either visiting or talking to doctors...

Though I am starting to wonder....

The Universe has this way of getting my attention with extreme drama. 

For the first book, it was the back injury. 

For the second book, it was an argument between myself and the doctor I'd been working with for 8 years, so that I was working part time in retail and had lots of "free time" to write instead of busting my hump for 40 hours a week.

For the third book, it was another job switch to a company that has a print shop on site, so I can check the art directors work before we send it to the printers.

Perhaps this little belly bump that looks like it's going to put me back to a "no lifting" situation if it goes to the planned biopsy is meant to get the current work in progress finished before 2016?