First I want to thank Chris for this wonderful opportunity to discuss my writing, my new novel The Seed, and the genesis of it all.  His posts introducing new authors are incredibly generous of him and so much appreciated.

What can I tell you about myself and my writing? First I’m quite shy and hate having my photograph taken, hence why I am best known in wordpress land as the ‘Dragon gravatar’ – attached here, photo courtesy of the very talented lobsterclaws at iStock.. I love dragons, and this makes a far prettier picture than I would, believe me!

Second, I’m a kind of eclectic writer in a number of ways. My first novel, The Seed, which I’ll talk a bit more about later, is a dark romance. Later this year I’ll publish a dark comedy called Curiosity. Probably sometime the year later I’ll follow up with another novel a bit more in the genre of The Seed. And after that I’ve been writing the first of what is probably going to be a series in a kind of mashup of science fiction/fantasy,’ superhero’ types and comedy. So you might say I’m diverse, or probably more accurately, I’m a confused writer!

On top of that, my blog – www.helenvalentina.com is primarily a poetry blog. I love to write poetry because it’s diverse in form, I love singing and lyrics so I love rhyme, and also because you can write about just anything in poetry and all the rules of genre don’t apply! So maybe I’m just a rebel writer – don’t fence me in!!

So what can I tell you about The Seed?

I did the first draft of this novel over 15 years ago, along with some other works, in a period in between jobs. I wrote less to be published and more just to explore ideas and why we do things, and why we make the choices we make. That’s the major theme of The Seed, underneath the dark romance aspect.

Then I went back to my day job and sort of forgot about writing for years. Last Christmas, on holidays, I bought a tablet to have something lighter to carry than a laptop, and in downloading books from kindle I found the book they have done on self publishing. From there, the rest is history. I dragged out the old novel work, revised it for a world fifteen years later (believe me lots has changed in that time, particularly in the world of telecommunications, so updating was quite a detail oriented chore) and now I’m navigating the world of self publishing.

For this first foray I’ve used the services of lulu.com, and they’ve been fantastic, so I think I will use them in future too. Therefore The Seed is now available on lulu.com.

My ‘Author Spotlight’ address at lulu.com is: http://lulu.com/spotlight/helenvalentina  so you can find the book in paperback and book version there if you are interested.

Soon it will also be on Nook, Apple, kindle et al, and the page on my blog that is reserved for The Seed ( http://helenvalentina.com/the-seed ) will keep details of availability up to date, plus, you can find the Kindle links HERE.

So what is The Seed about? It’s about an artist who is having a series of dreams about what may have been a past life in which she died in childbirth. She’s a solitary figure who has always run away from relationships, and she wonders if it is because her real experience of love was in this earlier life. Then she meets a journalist who claims to have the other side of the dream. So it’s about the temptation to mythologise our lives, to follow relationship cues based on something like a shared dream, and what that might entail. The reader is left to decide if this is a good or bad thing ultimately, once the story is told.

In the romance genre it’s probably close to Wuthering Heights (though not quite that dark) than The Notebook.

I hope this may have intrigued you to look further, but even if not, thank you for joining me in this blog post anyway.