I have been getting my teeth in a tangle whilst taking the first teetering baby step towards my Literary Domination of the World. I want to set a new genre for women travel writers. One where we dare to venture where no woman has ventured before and keep away from safe paths and society groupings of women wearing crocs. One where self analysis matters less than Technicolor poems shouted by the roadside and meals shared by the light of a fire in the desert.
I have to say that as a reader I am bored of most female travel writers. And which is why in true kiwi Do It Yourself  style and taking the advice of some poet I met on the road between two countries, I have managed to give birth to two e publishing ventures on the Smashwords website.
The recipe for self publishing is pretty easy. First you must write your story. Since I have taken many breaks from living my life in order to put the last little adventure onto paper, I actually have quite a few pieces that I had prepared earlier. Then there is designing the thing, formatting the document and then figuring out a cover. Since any small excitement or stress gives me hot flushes now and brain fag, I decided to farm those two jobbies out and concentrate keeping cool. Jeremy Taylor did the covers and donated my first payment to some a womans potato planting project in Peru and I found a competent  Kiwi woman, Pat Rosier to do the really hard work which was to format the document so perfectly that the Meatgrinder at Smashwords didn't spit it back at me in chunks.
Since then it's been pretty plain sailing. Now all I have to do is to promote the books and hope that people like them!
I would of course welcome feedback and reviews so the first ten people who respond to this posting get a free copy of Chasing Shiva.
This is all part of the carefully designed strategy to actually sell some books and so therefore encourage me to load the rest of the stuff I have written onto the website and begin to work steadily towards my next leap in Literary Domination of the world and look at Print on Demand publishing. Not to mention the more subversive and gritty   strategy to have enough money in the bank to pay for my first sent of dentures by the time I may actually need them which should be in a year or three.