Publishing a book

This is my latest book that's going out in the next few months. So I thought that for a few posts at least, I'll walk you through some of the things that I went through to get to this stage.

I normally write Military style Thrillers, but for this novel I did something different, I wrote a historical fiction with a heavy Military influence, so that's probably a good way to go with this post as it was something that was totally new to me, and yet quite familiar.

Where to start?

One question I get flummoxed with, but I see quite a bit on the net, and especially on Facebook goes something like this, "I want to write a book, but don't know what to write, what should I do?"

Rather than try and explain what I think they should be doing I'll try and explain how this book came about.

I love history.

I'm a history lover, and am fascinated by most periods in history, that was the start, but not all of it. I also enjoy researching genealogy, and have been trying to trace the family history.

"What if you found out that we were rich landowners, and lost everything sometime in the past on the turn of a card?" I can still remember my Dad asking that question to my uncle (actually he was my great uncle as he was Dad's uncle) but that didn't stop Uncle George. 

That was back in the seventies, but I didn't take up the mantle until a few years ago.

"What's in a name?" 

That's where the story of The Last Centurion really starts. Ours is a strange name that wasn't too common in England, it's far more common in the USA and Australia, but we had to have come from somewhere, right?

Uncle George always thought that the name was Norman and came over from Normandy with William the Conqueror, but some research I did (when I finally got around to it) said the name went back further and is actually Saxon in origin, and we probably came from a place by the name of Hesse in Germany right back just after the Roman Empire started to come apart at the seams (some of my old mates would be saying, "Knowing you, your ancestors probably bloody well caused it!").

"Write me!" was all I heard after coming across that tidbit, and I just couldn't stop.

How did things develop from there? Well, you'll have to wait for the next post to come out to find a bit more.

Bye for now.

Lawrence