Twenty-one years after first writing her novel, ‘Seeds of Doubt’, Shirley Deuchrass has decided to get it published.

Shirley’s novel was inspired by a school project her daughter had been given about early New Zealand.

She spent about five hours a day for the next year crafting the novel with the intention of creating “a historically accurate depiction of what it would be like to live in Southern New Zealand at that time”.

The novel is set in 1866 and follows the protagonist, Harriet, as she moves from Dunedin to a quartz reef mine in Bullendale, Otago.

Shirley went to a number of publishers with the hope to get the novel onto the shelves but was unfortunately faced with a variety of different feedback.

She was advised to change the entire 85,000 words to present tense, and to add a modern story. Ultimately the assessment and advice from local publishers was that “historical novels are hard to sell… they must appeal to the modern reader”.

The cover photo, taken 21 year ago, features a friend of Shirley’s daughter in period costume at St Clair beach, Dunedin.

After building the characters and refining her story to appeal to a more popular audience, Shirley said she was finally ready to “let it go”.

“I didn’t want to get any older and leave the story any longer for anyone else to deal with and I thought ‘I’ll do it myself’, so I paid for an editor and put it on the kindle.”

Shirley has loved writing since the age of 15. She has had a number of poems published in literary journals and has self-published two other books for local communities.

The difficulty with self-publishing is funding advertising and promotion for the book, she said.

“I would just love it if it was picked up. When you’ve spent so much time and energy writing something there’s just no point having it sitting in the drawer and nobody reading it. The whole idea of writing it was for people to enjoy it,” she said.

The book has been available on Amazon Kindle for just over a week and if it’s successful Shirley has said there’s room for a sequel.

For anybody interested in writing and self-publishing, Shirley’s advice is not to give up.

“Don’t stop learning. Podcasts are wonderful,” she said.

“And read your writing aloud, it’s very important because you become much more aware of what it sounds like.”

Shirley’s book can be dowloaded here.

PHOTOS: Supplied