Withdrawal of Seeking from Distribution

Hello! I'm in Portugal at the moment and actually wrote this, like, a week and a half ago! Creepy, huh?

Well, as some of you may know, Dying Ember wasn't actually my first published novel. It was called Seeking, and it was published in 2014. Writing and publishing it changed my life and gave me the confidence to keep writing and the experience to improve, etc. - and barely a year later I was ready (I thought) to publish Dying Ember. I'd already done it once, how hard could it be...?

Since I finally published Dying Ember two years late, I've thought a lot about Seeking, how it was written and published and what it meant. After speaking to Lulu, I made the decision to withdraw it from print. This was done formally a few weeks ago, and by the time this post goes out it should have disappeared from distribution as well.

Seeking meant so much to me, and obviously still does. I still love the story, the whole idea of it - but all I've felt about it recently is... Badness. Quite a few copies of Seeking were sold just after Dying Ember was published, and every time that happened I felt uncomfortable. Obviously we always grow and you can't spend your whole life throwing old achievements under the bus in favour of your new ones, but when you feel that uncomfortable with something, it's probably not good to... Let it keep happening, you know?

This isn't the death of Seeking, even if I felt like I was garotting it as I finalised the decision with Lulu to discontinue the first edition print. Really, I've been neglecting it a lot - I could have kept up the Facebook page, I could have promoted it, I haven't even mentioned it or linked to it on this website. I've been trying to sweep it under a rug for the past six months, and that's not something you should do with a soul-child like your first published novel. It's kind of like Red to me now; I was obsessed with it, and when it didn't live up to my expectations I hated it and tried to bury it, and in the past five years I've learned to nurture it again, let it grow into something better rather than curse it for not being enough. I have worked on Red on and off for the past five years, and I intend to complete it and publish it when it's the right time; now, the same goes for Seeking. It's not dead, it's just taking a very long beauty sleep.

I won't discuss the specific reasons I'm no longer comfortable with my readers being interested in Seeking here, but suffice to say I do not feel it represents me appropriately as a person or a writer any more. Again - I'm not erasing it from history out of shame or anything; really, I'm just setting it aside to make it, one day, into something better.

And if you're now disappointed that you could have read another novel by me and didn't get the chance, fret not! Sylvestus is a scant five months away - and trust me, it is far, far better.

Is there anything more trustworthy than a winking doggo?