I am honoured to announce that Hidden – The Hidden Saga Book 1 has been made an official selection of the 2017 New Apple Summer eBook Awards in their Young Adult General Fiction category .

It just shows how good things happen when you least expect them to. I entered Hidden into the competition on a whim, never expecting to hear anything more about it, but they liked it. I feel so honoured that a panel of judges have read Hidden and enjoyed it enough to make it an official selection. As a writer, I never set out to write books with the intention of winning awards. That was the last thing on my mind. There were so many other things to know and consider, just so I could write something shelf worthy. Every chapter became a brand new lesson in how not to write and how to edit well. To say that Hidden was the first thing I ever wrote since leaving school, and never writing creatively ever before, it certainly transformed my life. It’s one thing to have a desire to write or even the skill, but that doesn’t necessarily assure success. To have another person read your work and have enough enjoyment from it that you can see that your hunch about becoming a writer was a good idea is very rewarding. To have it validated by a group of professionals, is the ultimate compliment and reassurance that you’re doing the right thing with your life.

Setting out to write Hidden wasn’t an easy task. It wasn’t received positively by everyone around me in the beginning and provoked a lot of mixed reactions, so initially I wrote Hidden in secret. When you tell people you want to be a writer, it can sound to others like a pipe-dream and that’s how it was received, so Hidden almost never made it off the ground in the first place, but I knew that this wasn’t something I could put aside. I had to write. I had to finish Hidden.

Originally, Hidden was only going to be a stand alone novel. I planned to write a horror story, but as stories carry their own life force and become their own entity, they have a habit of taking you off on the path that they intend to go down and not where you intended to go. That’s okay though, because that’s the secret to great stories. The story I have today carries so much more sophistication than the original story, so much so that I’m happy to be led by the words on my page.

I’d like to thank the staff, judges and all other participants who helped to put this writing competition together. You have made all the hard work and years of learning my trade worthwhile.

Serina Hartwell

http://www.serinahartwell.com/

Amazon – http://viewBook.at/Amazon_Hidden 

300 Book Drive – http://www.300drive.com

Trapped – The Hidden Saga Book 2 Coming soon!

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