HUGE Announcement and I Need Some Help

Okay. Deep breaths. Those of you who stopped by on Wednesday have probably seen this already:

 

It was supposed to be just one quick taster to tide you over.

But. You know how I kept saying things haven’t been falling together right? How I would just keep plodding along until things did fall in to place?

Well. They have.

Just not in the way I’d expected. Which is why it took one unexpected royalty payment from my former publishing house – more than a year after I got my book rights back (Although, that wasn’t their fault. The Post Office of South Africa was on strike for most of 2014. I kid you not.) to make me realize that it had.

To illustrate:

I needed to find a way to learn how to format my books and got given an AMAZING step by step guide. (More on this later.)

In my time off, I’ve basically been editing. So basically, I have one round of edits left to make sure the continuity is kept constant, followed by proofreads, which will probably happen in pen.

ISBNs I’ve had since last year.

So all I needed were the covers.

Well. The one you saw. Now, I present to you:

Which means that, except for nailing down the back of the book copy, I basically need to decide on my release date. 

Ahem. *Cough* July 31 *Cough*

Seriously, then, I really need exactly one thing: Your help.

Unlike last time around, I’m giving myself three months to set up my blog tour, marketing etc. And I’m thinking of doing the set-up differently.

To make things easier for me AND you… Please see the pages above. Blog Tour, Cover Reveal and Review. Inside will be a linky list and an explanation of what the entry entails. Don’t worry. No selling or buying of souls just yet.

You’re welcome to enter more than one activity, if you’d like.

So what do you say? Anyone want to help?

The Vanished Knight is out next week. HEEEEEEEELP!!!

Yeah… The time has come, ladies and gentlemen! I have a release date, and it’s much sooner than I expected.

In fact, I’d like to launch The Vanished Knight by 15 October (projected release is 4 October).

For me to make a bit of a splash, I need your help. I know this is super short notice, but I literally found out thirty minutes ago. The delay between finding out and posting this was caused by me picking myself up from the floor.

Because I know that your schedules are super full, I’m doing it this way: I’m letting you decide when you’d like to do the post. If you can help at all, please let me know in the comments:

What you’d like to do. I’ll do: guest posts, author interviews and character interviews. You can also request an e-copy of my book for reviews, or simply my cover and/or blurb to post it on your blog.

When you’d like to do it. Anything from 15 October to 31 January works for me.

Contact details. I need to be able to contact you.

Thanks in advance to everyone who’ll help!

Sometimes, I need to rearrange the furniture in my head.

Ever since I’ve gone and set my goal, I’ve realized that I needed to change my approach to writing.

I still pick what I want to do and when, but I pretty much always need to do something.

Fortunately, there’s a lot to do. To illustrate. This is a long term list of  everything I want to get done so far:

Concept

StW

Wo6C4

Wo6C5

ES2

ES3

ES4

ES5

ES6

ES7

ES8

ES9

BvB2

CiC

DD

CaA?

HM

SS1

SS2

Draft

VD

P

MDtS

RH

Rewrite

Wo6C3

BvB

ES

O

Edit

Submit

Publish

Wo6C1

Wo6C2

Every single one of those highlighted abbreviations stand for books I want to write, edit or publish. The red, yellow and green show me my priorities. Green’s what I’m doing at the moment, yellow’s what I want to do in the near future and red’s for things I want to do, but that can or must wait for a bit longer. Either way, my list is growing.

In the past six weeks, I’ve added three more ideas to the list of concepts: HM, SS1 and SS2. SS1 and SS2 are two books in a series. I dreamed something that’s kickstarted a concept the night before last. Usually I just ignore my dreams, but for some reason, the more I ignore this one, the less I can think of anything else. So I gave in and SS is now a concept I’m trying to actively work on. In between my rewrite to BvB.

At least, now that I’ve decided to put more thought into the concept right now, it feels like it’s letting up enough for me to finish the rewrites. Phew.

Since I know some of you will want to know what the abbreviations stand for:

Wo6C is for The War of Six Crowns. So Wo6C1 is in fact the book I’m in the process of editing for publishing. (Remember to help reveal the title! I even made it easy for you.)
BvB is for Birds vs Bastards, which is just a working title for my high concept urban fantasy.
O is for Otto, the main character in the dystopian I wrote for last year’s NaNoWriMo.

The others… well… Guess you’ll have to wait and see. 😉

Do you also keep track of what you’ve worked on/are working on? Do you also feel the need to shift some priorities around as you go?

Where have all the query writers gone?

I need some help, please. After tomorrow, I have no guests for my GPF features until the 29th.

I don’t like that at all. Do you?

I didn’t think you would, because you’re awesome.

But you know what would make you even more awesome? Volunteering or getting someone to volunteer to write one post about Querying and Submission. It doesn’t have to be a how to. I’m just as curious to find out more about your experiences out there in the battle field. What DO you do with your rejection letters?

Or has traditional publishing and indie press publishing gone extinct since I checked the last time?

Please please please!

I’ll even throw in a crit or beta read to the volunteers, should they need them…

EDIT: All June Spots have been filled. Thanks so much, everyone! If you wanted to volunteer, though, there are still a lot of open spaces for these months:

July: Inspired
August: Challenged
September: Self Publishing and Marketing
October: Scares
November: Keeping track

Please read here for more information and contact me if you’re interested.

Time Issues

I feel so guilty that I haven’t been writing a YATT post in such a long time. And it’s rather stupid, because a lot of my Tuesday posts were YA related. Sigh.

Still, going back and adding the badge feels like cheating, so… here I am, still feeling guilty.

AAAAAAaaaaanyway.

I’m really starting to miss when I was still in high school. Wow. There was a phrase that I never thought I’d use.

But no, this isn’t an attack of nostalgia on my part. I’m not missing the hanging with friends, or all the other things that people miss about that time of their life.

No. I miss that I had A LOT of writing time. I mean, six hours at school? With me finishing the homework before the class was finished? Yeah… writing…. writing… writing… writing.

Nothing to do in the afternoon? Pht. Write.

I almost want to cry at the amount of writing time I wasted.

Especially now, when my writing time has taken a huge hit. See, my quiet working days aren’t quiet any more. So there goes eight hours out of every work day. And then there’s the fact that I’m exhausted when I’m done working. Two hours more. Six to eight for sleeping… Three for eating with the family. Two a night for random non-writing activities… That adds up to 23 hours. I have one freaking hour to write. Per day.

That is unacceptable.

Un. Ac. Ceptable.

I am going to crack.

And soon.

Where do you create time to write? I’m already at the point of changing my sleeping patterns to fit it in. I’m even *shudder* pre-writing my blog posts. I really don’t want to dump non-writing activities because that will make me a hermit, but I already dropped one because it was wasting writing time. Any suggestions?  

A Call for Help

Young Adult Teen Tuesday is a meme hosted by the wonderful Sheri Larsen to showcase all aspects of creating a Young Adult Story.

So… Although I am one of the original participants, I can safely say that I’m far from a regular one. Which makes be feel bad. But today, I have something that’s weighing on my heart.

Something, involving my YA Fantasy Epic, Doorways. See, my one crit partner extraordinaire  won’t be able to critique the ms anymore, because he’s about to release his own book.

And that left me with a bit of a problem. Because I have a little more than 100 days left to finish the story… and now am needing a cp whose core strength lies with copy editing.

And who made me laugh. Even though he was so brutally honest that it stung sometimes.

And I need a cp like that if I’m to have any hope of finishing on time. I did start looking for cps and came up with a promising one, but she’s still drafting, which is something that I don’t want to interrupt with my editing. So although I will definitely be her cp, I can’t get the work out right now.

And I’m really really scared of just putting my baby out there to for a stranger without a familiar face to read.

So here I am. Asking begging you. If you are getting to the point where you want to send your work to be critted and you’re good at copy editing other people’s work, please please please think of me. If you want, I’ll ask my other cp’s to contact you so that you can see that I don’t only take without giving in return.

Okay… begging aside, here’s a bit more:

Doorways is the first book of a four book YA Fantasy epic. But I’m willing to crit almost anything except erotica and too dark fantasy. So period novels, thrillers, procedurals, sci fi, romances, fantasy etc all welcome.

My strengths: characterization, world building, plot, voice, pacing.

I need: someone strong on copy-edits, who are honest, but who knows the difference between critting and being critical. Someone who can start within this week.

So if you are that person, and you need a person like me or you know such a person that you can vouch for, please contact me at mishagericke(AT)gmail(DOT)com. Thanks very very much in advance!

And… because I am so very grateful that you read all of this, if you need a crit and don’t suit my profile, put your needs, strengths and contact details in the comments section. Who knows? Maybe you strike it lucky. X