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Welcome to my website!12/2/2018 Well, here it is - my very own website. For a writer, starting a website is more like a first step than a final step, but it feels like it's been a long time coming just to get to this stage. Over the past year, I've slowly moved away from a life in the restaurant industry to begin pursuing a career as a freelance writer. In April, I quit my job supervising a burger joint and began to work in earnest on the book project I have been working on with Sarah Jackman since the beginning of 2017, Sleeping With The Material World. Despite spending my whole life dreaming of being an author and going to creative writing school, the prospect of writing a full-length book was daunting. I've always been more inclined to start a project than finish it, and the various novels I've attempted to write - from the mystery story I started when I was ten years old to the existential mess of a book I started in my novel-writing class in my final year at university - have all petered out somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 words. Sleeping With The Material World has been a chore, but despite some hiccups I've stuck with it. We now have about 2/3 of a completed manuscript (along with a blog) and hope to get a full draft completed early in the new year. But true to form, I haven't been able to keep my mind focused entirely on one task, and when an email showed up in my mailbox in early May offering a $3,000 prize for a kid's story, I went for the carrot. I started writing some gibberish about the back alley behind my childhood home where I used to wander, wondering what kind of secrets might be hidden in the litter. After several months of writing, re-writing, editing and revising, those scribbles transformed into a 10,000-word story about a 12-year-old Mexican boy who loves basketball. I submitted the story to the contest, and lo and behold - it won the prize! Unfortunately, as I soon discovered, winning a prize is a great first step to success (and to a starving writer, the rent money doesn't hurt), but success doesn't come all wrapped up with a bow. My book was published, but how were people going to find it? The writing was easy - the marketing and publicity, that was the hard part! Even though I've recently started to do some work in marketing, the idea of marketing a book is still foreign to me. Gaining publicity for your first book is like interviewing for your first job - book reviewers only want to review books with potential sales numbers, but getting sales is contingent on publicity and reviews. Not unlike basketball, it's easy to look at the system and say it's rigged in favour of the tallest players. So I created this site as a first step - if not a final step - towards developing an online presence for Running The Point, Sleeping With The Material World, and any other projects which might come my way. (By the way, it's no accident that I'm starting this website right before Christmas - Running The Point is the perfect Christmas gift for the kid in anyone's life who loves basketball but hates reading.) So welcome to my site! Poke around and stay awhile, and if you have any questions about my books, projects or services, throw me a line over at the contact page. Cheers, Simon
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