Garden Palace - Book update

Garden Palace

 

For the last five years I have been writing my first novel as a side project /hobby.

It began whilst working at a major Sydney icon where I was an usher and a tour guide and between shifts or during boring performances, my mind would wander and imagine setting a story within the walls of the building.

My first attempt at making this idea into a real book was met with many challenges and many threats as I was still an employee of the place that I had set the story in and like my main character, I seemed to attract a fair bit of controversy for my actions and inability to keep my views hidden. The main concern of the organisation however was the use of what they considered to be trademarks such as the shape of their building in the artwork and even the name of it had a trademark. Facing legal action if I kept the book on the market, I decided to pull it from amazon.com and do a complete rewrite of the story to relocate it to a building that won't sue - thus, the Garden Palace was born.

I decided to leave the job as well as I wasn't a cat and 9 lives had I not.

Well we have all moved on since and after two years of research and totally rewriting the damn thing, I have just recently completed the final edits - which is a personal triumph given all the other non-related struggles along the way.

So what has changed apart from the setting?

* Period - original book's building opened in 1973, Garden Palace opens in 1979
* Building status - original book's building is still operational - Garden Palace is fictitious (phew!)
* New Chapter - Prologue split into three parts - The original Garden Palace, The NEW Garden Palace, and The re-opening of the new Garden Palace.
* New artworks - Nana Sakata has created 15 brand new designs that will be incorporated into the book including title pages for each of the 13 chapters, a book title page, and a brand new cover. (the picture on this blog is chapter 11)
* New characters and development - whilst the main characters are unchanged and the general synopsis is the same, I have created new characters and used the rewrite to develop the existing characters further.

Whilst the Garden Palace in my book is a fictitious building, it is based on a real Garden Palace that was built in 19th Century Sydney neighbouring the Royal Botanical Gardens, which sadly no longer exists. I will share with you some research on the original building over the coming weeks.

I am not expecting to have great monetary success with this book and it would be a dream for it to be good enough to be picked up by a publisher, but at the very least I will be able to submit it very soon for publication and purchase as an eBook on amazon.com - hopefully over time it can find an audience to warrant the creation of the next two books that I have mapped out for the series.

The book series titled is Garden Palace and book one has it own title 'Devil in Disguise' It's a very easy read and is just over 200 pages long.

Stay tuned for more details coming soon.