This is my first blogsite and don’t know if I am doing this correctly.

I am new to blogging but find the whole concept interesting. I published my first novel this summer. The Legend of the Swamp Witch, available at Amazon.com in paperback or Kindle. It is a story I made up years ago as a campfire ghost story. When I was thinking about what to write as my first novel, I thought of this one. I sat down with my laptop and wrote the bones of the story as I had always told it, but only had about 12,000 words. How do I get this to a novel length manuscript? There was a witch who cursed a swamp in 1858. It is 2014.People have been hunting for this supposed treasure for a century and a half. So I added short stories of some of the men who’d searched for the treasure and encountered the curse. I took the story and the area it is set in through the years 1867, 1898, 1922, 1945, 1975, and to the present. I had to kill off about fifteen characters. You really have to be creative or a psychopath to kill that many people and keep it interesting. I have not decided which I am yet.
The Legend of the Swamp Witch is my very first published manuscript and I did not have an editor. I am on a fixed income and editing is very expensive. Please excuse any mistakes on my part. Like any other craft, practice makes perfect. I am currently working on what I hope will be a 3 book series about young women drawn into prostitution in the 19th Century Old West. I am calling it The Soiled Dove Sagas. I hope to have Book 1, The Ruby Queen published around the first of the year. More about that later. Thanks for dropping in.
Lori