Buying my own name, Ooning update

I bought patrickgarratt.com. It was time I owned myself. Importing from Blogger to WordPress took a few minutes. It’s like living in the future.

I’ve written a third of the next Ooning draft (some 25,000 words), so it won’t be finished this year. I’m very confident of this version being vastly superior to the previous. I don’t care if nothing comes of it in terms of publication. It’s an exercise in completion at this point. I’ve started scoping out editors-for-hire, and I’ll get it into its best possible state before moving on. Ideas for the next book are coagulating.

I’ve yet to fully decide, but I doubt I’ll release The Ooning to Kindle as planned. If agents aren’t interested then I should take the hint. Muddying my future with a sub-standard release would be stupid. In hindsight, the notion of self-publishing was birthed by the annoyance of the last nearly-deal becoming a not-deal. If agents are interested but there’s a problem with the content, I’ll make a judgement. My approach to the process is definitely more robust now, but as a concept I’d never put The Ooning into production again. It’s too “young”. But if there’s encouraging noise from the beta and anything beyond stock rejections from agencies then I may put it out. We’ll see.

That’s my wife holding the axe.