I can’t believe I did it again.

I don’t know how or why this keeps happening to me, but I always seem to realize that a book in my War of Six Crowns series is done after I’ve finished it.

Last week, I’d decided to renew my focus on Book 3 in order to complete the rewrite. So I reread the whole thing again to pick up all the loose strings I’d left in November, when I’d stopped when my writing had lost momentum.

And… well… the story felt done. It had a rising action. A twist, climax and an ending.

And half of my planned plot remaining unwritten. (Which was annoying.) But since the other half felt like I’d be shoe-horning it into my story, I decided to split the book. Which means that:

1) Book 3 is done. (Yay!)
2) The other half I had planned will now go into Book 4. (Also yay. Rewrite is already prepped.)
3) Revisions for Book 3 will probably involve significant revisions to compensate for the structure being slightly wonky due to me having planned most of it to be the introduction to the other (unwritten) half. (Eh… okay. I can live with that.)
4) I need a new title for Book 3. I had a title, but now the events referred to in the title happen in Book 4. (Sigh.)
5) I’m going to start revisions to Book 3 at the end of this month. (Yay!)
6) The War of Six Crowns will now be a six-book series. I was planning on five books, but hey, the more the merrier, right?

Have you ever been surprised to discover you completed a draft after-the-fact? Or is it just me?

Mayhem in the Air is Here

Gosh. I can’t get over this cover.

From Amazon bestselling and popular science fiction and fantasy authors comes Mayhem in the Air, a supernatural anthology of ten thrilling tales. Meet hot robots, hungry winds and the goddess of chaos. Explore alien planets, purgatorial realms, and a shocking place where people bury the living with their dead. Mayhem in the Air is the second, long-awaited story collection from the dynamic and inventive Untethered Realms group.

“A Strange Penitence” by Catherine Stine – A young artist pays a supernatural price when a drawing trip to North Carolina turns deadly.

“Mass Transit” by Graeme Ing – For Emily, mind over matter is not just a saying, but the gateway to her career among the largest starships built by man.

“A Tangled Weave” by River Fairchild – A TimePulse rips through the Great Tapestry of Life, leaving Earth’s history in a jumble, and Death and Chronos in a race to save the world yet again.

“Corrosive” by M. Pax – In a world ruined by pollutants, Bex sets off to establish a new homestead with her dreamy robotic man. Already farming her plot of land is another dreamy man with radical ideas, presenting new challenges as corrosive as the air.

“Saving Scrooge: A Short Story Prequel to the Saving Marley Series” by Gwen Gardner – Marley is sent from purgatory to save the soul of his old friend. Can he save his own in the bargain?

“The Silent Wind” by Christine Rains – A team of specialists must dispel a mysterious storm on an alien planet to prepare it for colonization. One by one the crew disappears until only a seasoned soldier remains. How can he battle a hungry wind that makes no noise?

“Paper Lanterns” by Cherie Reich: In order to keep his promise to his daughter, Mayor Alfred Merry must betray the woman he loves.

“Chaos. Hope. Love.” by Misha Gerrick – Although Eris is the goddess of chaos, her life has fallen into a nice and comfortable routine. Until someone from her past shows up in her bookstore.

“Cardinal Sin” by Julie Flanders: Beleaguered hospital workers bury the living with the dead in the midst of a tuberculosis epidemic and a seething spirit vows vengeance from the skies.

“The Ark” by Cathrina Constantine -Plagued with memory flashes of fiery explosions and running for her life, Fallon emerges from a drugged stupor to find herself in an airborne Ark, and the earth below is a drowning wasteland.

Elements of Untethered Realms series include these four short story anthologies:
Twisted Earths (Available)
Mayhem in the Air (Available)
Ghosts of Fire (Forthcoming 2016)
Spirits in the Water (Forthcoming 2017)

Amazon |  Google Play | Smashwords

NaNo doubts

Sorry if today’s post comes out reading and feeling a tad… lumpy. I’m currently super focused on my NaNo project, so any other writing is going to suffer.

This could have been my IWSG post, but since I have a bigger writerly concern as well, I figured I could write about this today.

You see… I have sort of started to doubt if I’ll be able to get as far with my NaNo project as I did last year. 2011 saw me writing 25k in about ten days before I froze up and shelved the WiP. But right up to 25k, it was frighteningly easy to write.

This year, though, my story took me by surprise. I thought it would be just a nice run-of-the-mill we-will-prevail sort of dystopian.

Should have known my muse wouldn’t be this easy on me. No. I somehow managed to stumble onto a psychological pea soup. Day one went well, but after that, it feels like I’m writing through wool.

It isn’t the same feeling as I get while blocking, though. I know what has to happen next and every successive scene comes to me easily. It’s just that when I start writing, things are hard.

I think it’s because my female main character has grown up in more shit than I originally thought and her mind’s workings keep making it hard for me to write her thoughts. Hard… It’s actually more like I’m bashing my head against a wall.

My male main character isn’t much better. He’s not quite the idealist I thought he was, so his approach to revolution is sort of… unnerving.

All this adds up to probably the most difficult book I’ve ever attempted. Including Doorways.

Not sure if I can do this, but I have to try.

Have you ever written a story that fought you all the way? Did you make it through to the end or did you give up?

Turns out I don’t need to do both.

Well, I’ve found something rather interesting lately. After all my concerns about writing and editing at the same time, something occurred to me this morning as I woke up.

I’m studying. And I’m editing. Both take part in the same half of my brain.

So of course I’ll struggle with switching over to creativity. Because it’s not the way I’m thinking right now. Yes, I could skip back to creativity if I wanted, but do I really have the time to be diverted by my muse? Uhm…

Not while I’m still a week behind due to a webmaster that I will shoot soon.

Instead, my free hours can be spent studying or editing. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even be able to finish my edits before my exams.

In the mean time, I’ll use any free time I have left after the above to read and refill my creative reservoirs so that I can go mad in November.

I mean, it must mean something that my exam is on 31 October.

Because on 1 November I can join NaNo. ^_^ Maybe this year I might even stand a chance of winning…

Oh yes! And then there’s this…

Anyone else found their planning thrown by the actions/cock ups of others? Who else will be joining NaNoWriMo?

Slow down, girl, you’re going too fast!

Well, I can’t say today’s writing went badly. I wrote almost 3000 words in the end. 

My heart wants to go on, because I am this *pinches index finger to thumb* close to an important event in the story. As in, it should happen in the next scene. 

But, something bad is going on. My heart also wants to rush to the event, brushing past everything that still has to happen before the event can take place. 

So, I’ve let my brain pull the brakes for today. 

Someone once blogged about the fact that the rush was getting to him. That he had to fight the rush in order to let the end of the story do the rest of it justice. 

I have to admit that I used to think that he was over-reacting (if you’re here, guy who wrote about this, I’m sorry), but I’ve started to feel the stirrings. That knowledge that I am the closest I’ve ever been to a real completed novel. 

I say this, because I’m over half way now at 46k words. The Doorways rough draft was only 42k words. 

So, yeah, completing this rewrite is going to be a major accomplishment. And I want to have been there yesterday. 

Because of that, story elements might get lost. Because I will get ideas for subplots that I should add in (i.e. more scenes from Darrion, Gawain and Ward’s view point.) If I leave those scenes for the edits, I’m almost guaranteed to forget them. And they’re important, not so much to only the story, but they set up the next three books. 

So I can’t just leave them alone and rush to the end. After all this time of fighting to keep all the strings in hand, I can’t afford to slack off on them now. I can’t sell out on myself now, when things are picking up and racing to the end. 

I need to keep control over the Beast. 

So… have you ever gotten to the second half of the story and felt the urge to rush to the end? Did you? Did you regret it? Or did you get stuck in the middle? (I hear that’s a common affliction among writers.) How did you get out of it?        

Will I make it?

So! I think I got something of a surprise just now. 

I was going to write the following:

My writing application, yWriter has a daily word count target tool. It takes the amount of days I have left, the total amount of words I want to have down and the amount of words left to write and calculates how much I have to write every day to get to the target. 

Yes. Like NaNoWriMo. Unlike NaNo, I have to write *checks* 2205 words per day to finish in time. 

…

…

…

Hey wait. 37k. 37 days. 

I checked the tool and realised that for some reason, the date I set as the goal was 10 April. #headdesk# 

But… this is an excellent surprise. 

1012 words a day feels distinctly doable. 

The finish is so close I can taste it. 

Squee! I think I might be able to finish before 30 April. Sorry for those of you who were wondering how this would end. 😉 

I just had to share the joy. 

So. Anyone else got a surprise today, good or otherwise? Any other news? I’m dying to know. 😀

CLICK!!!

Hi all! Just a reminder to come check out tomorrow’s installment of GPF.

So… yesterday went about as swimmingly as the one before. (Insert cringe here.) Despite all my efforts, I just couldn’t get myself to write. Finally, I decided to just do some character chats or something to get my mind to work creatively.

I ground out two hundred words in an hour and a half.

And accidentally deleted every. damn. one.

At which point, I lost it completely (sorry twitter peeps).

As a way of escaping, I decided to go read up a bit on one of my favorite websites ever.

Everyone, repeat after me: TVTropes.org. It was originally about television tropes (hence the name) but eventually, the wiki expanded to include all sorts of other media. I love it. Want to read about the Mary-Sue or the Marty-Stu? Or deus ex machina? Or tropes by genre? Anything, it’s there. With examples.

It took me about thirty minutes to start wanting to write, but I didn’t. I just kept reading tropes and went to sleep. This morning, I woke up an hour early and started again. I must say, it felt as if I was writing against resistance, but hell. I’ve got 970 words down so far. I’m starting to get some form of direction again, but that joy wasn’t there yet.

At about 08H00, Devin kept me company via Skype… Eventually, we were starting to talk about what I was busy writing. At that stage, I wanted to introduce James to one of my baddies, but realized that the baddie I wanted to introduce him to (the one whose life was extended by a book) is not exactly the type that would keep him alive…

So on this topic, Devin and I went on to discuss how JK Rowling did it.

My mind did a double take and kind of asked my muse: “Wait… What?”

There was this sound of the gears of my creativity engaging… The sudden rush of ideas that flooded my brain was astounding.

And I got it.

What?

It, people! IT.

That thing that will lead the entire series from where I am now to the end. The very end. And every book in between.

It.

Small word.

Huuuuuuge knowledge to have.

Now I have that rush again.

So… I’m going to go write it all down while I still remember everything.

Have you ever experienced what I am completely failing to describe? How did it feel?

I’ve gone and taken the plunge…

I have told many of you before that I have killed my internal editor in the first draft. It was a wonderful time. I could write with wild abandon and just not care about the quality, or gaping plot holes. Or characterization issues.

Or whether my story makes sense to anyone else.

Except, like the Mummy, the bastard just won’t stay dead.

He came back with a vengeance that would make Imhotep himself proud.

Remember that sand storm scene?

That as about the scale of the force of the self doubt that hit me last week. It ground my writing to a complete halt.

Fact is, I get scared terrified of the scope of the story that I’m telling.

Wouldn’t you?

I have five Main Characters, currently three stories (of which one remains unmentioned but vital), and hundreds of strings that have to remain firmly in my grasp until the end of the fourth (perhaps fifth) book.

It’s so bad that I can’t even put down a specific plan for what’s going on. I have to leave myself general reminders.

Oh yes… I forgot to mention that the story has to make sense to someone with no concept of the back story that stretches back more than a few thousand years…

Not to mention….

I think you get the point and I’m winding myself up again. Suffice it to say that never once have I referred to the story as the Beast lightly.

Anyway… The realization also hit me that I had no idea. As in, I have no idea if my story even made any sense. I had spent so much time working on it that I lost any objectivity that I might have had.

So, I have officially started my search for crit partners… I have even e-mailed a few people who are looking as well. Still, I think that it will be most unfair to go looking elsewhere only when I have you guys.

Therefore, I ask: Any of you looking for a crit partner? Willing to step into my scary convoluted mind? If so, please contact me at mishagericke@gmail.com (mishagericke(AT)gmail(DOT)com).

Rewriting

Hi all!

Firstly, a big welcome and thank you to all of the new faces that have joined up recently. I hope that you enjoy it here.

Just want to remind you all to contact me for a GPF slot. And remember, you need to please be a follower before you can post. I need one more blogger for the third week of February. If you are interested , please contact me at mishagericke@gmail.com (mishagericke(AT)gmail(dot)com).

Thanks to everyone who have shown interest so far. This is going to be awesome.

Then, I have finally joined twitter. So if you want to see my convoluted ramblings, go follow me @MishaMFB. I will follow you in return.

Finally, I am sorry for my absence yesterday, my Internet went fuzzy because it was the end of the month.

Back to the blog.

When I opened this post, I realized to my horror that I have no idea about a topic.

Luckily, it didn’t take that long for me to realize that I have mentioned almost nothing about my progress.

So how am I doing?

Well…

My rewrite and first draft coincide only on the first chapter. The rest have been shifted, deleted and added to within an inch of their lives. In fact, I am finding very little of my original work that is falling into the pacing and structure as I envisaged it.

Good side to this is that I haven’t been this excited about the story in a long time. The cleaning up has done wonders for the book and the plot holes are slowly being filled or removed.

So far I am absolutely loving the rewriting experience, although it doesn’t really offer the same sort of exhilaration as creating something from scratch. Yes, things are substantially changed, but it still comes from a story already written. But it is especially gratifying to know that the story is getting better now.

I must say that there are some issues with the structure, but it has already been improved this time around. Hopefully I will sort out the rest when I start to edit.
Will I make my 30 April goal? At this rate, I’ll make it by the end of February. On the other hand, I’m not sure if I can maintain the rate at this time though, since we have guests again. Still, in exchange for seeing these wonderful three people, I am willing to finish a little later.

What about you? Any of you rewriting? How are things going for you? And for those who are editing, querying and creating?

Resistance

It’s official.

My muse is just plain contrary.

I decided to take a break from Doorways and started working on Guardian. As soon as I finished writing the scene I wanted… The plot outline occurred to me, weaving James and Ward’s story back into the plot as I intended all along.

I must say that I am thrilled by this. But why couldn’t I just have done it while I was still in the “strike while the iron is hot”  mood?

That said, I might take a break from writing in general for a short while. Maybe just until January.

Even though I’ve been quite productive these past few days, it feels as if I’m wringing my already over wrung mind for whatever ideas I might have left. It’s just not a fun feeling to have. Especially not when I’m doing something that I love.

I actually had a headache after I wrote only 1000 words.

Maybe I shouldn’t push myself. But as I said. Now that I am contemplating taking a break, I feel that draw. That intense desire to sit down and start crafting a story. Whether it’s an old one or a new one.

So I want to write. I really do. So why then do I feel such a resistance when I am writing?

Have any of you experienced something similar?