Anna Lickley: The not-so-senseless journey of my novel, Senseless

If you have a good memory, you may recall an article the Limping Chicken kindly published about my writing adventures entitled How Writing Books helped me Find my Voice as a Deafblind person.

I went deaf in my 20s as a complication of having Neurofibromatosis type 2 (nf2) and life for me has always been about rising to challenges and adapting to them.

Losing much of my sight about 8 years ago and being registered blind too bought with it a whole new truckload of challenges. I wasn’t really sure that I’d be able to ‘bounce back’ this time.

Being deafblind and struggling with fatigue led me to stop work and that meant I had lots of free time on my hands. Like many people, I had always had a book I would write ‘one day’ but had never had time to. Writing was going to be the thing that rescued me from feeling overwhelmed by my nf2.

I’ve now written not one but two books. Catch it Anytime You Can, my self-published semi autobiography came out in 2012 and I am delighted and very excited that my debut novel Senseless was published on January 17th 2019 by Unbound.

Since I wrote in the Limping Chicken in September last year, sharing that my manuscript had been accepted by Unbound, I have been on a massively exciting journey to get it ready for publication.

The novel was Crowdfunded and that part was stressful and challenging but also uplifting and exciting to see the percentage funded going up and up. I had some amazingly generous pledges In support of Senseless from friends, family, friends of friends, friends of family and total strangers. Senseless reached 100% funded in 61 days, which is pretty good going and I am so very grateful for such amazing support.

Once funded, Senseless went to edits and the editorial development team at Unbound were amazing. The initial structural editor was a genius and helped me to see how to re-shape/ re-write some parts to make Senseless far better. I felt like I had had a mini- masterclass in how to write compelling fiction.

The copy editors did a wonderful job in spotting dates that didn’t add up, suggesting alternatives for words I overused, tweaking misspellings and dodgy grammar usage.

Such was the success of the edits that the proof reader asked Unbound to tell me that she had, ‘absolutely loved’ Senseless and that it had made her cry.

After the editing, we were close to printing. The most exciting thing for me was having my cover designed as this felt like Senseless finally became a real book rather than ‘just a manuscript’. I hope you’ll agree that the end result is beautiful.

Opening the box of my printed books for the first time was incredible and now I can’t wait for people to read it and share their views and responses to it by reviewing on Amazon, Goodreads or anywhere else. Everyone has different reading preferences so I know opinions will be varied but, whatever they are, I can’t wait to read them!

Hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Senseless is available to buy from Amazon see https://www.amazon.co.uk/Senseless-Anna-Lickley-ebook/dp/B07JCFWGSS/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1544970460&sr=8-1&keywords=anna+lickley+senseless or any book shop (if it’s not stocked, it can be ordered).  

Also on the Unbound site at https://unbound.com/books/senseless/

And check out the Unbound tour: