Last stop!

Hey everyone!

Today marks the end of my official blog tour, although I have been invited to a few more blogs over the next few months. Just want to say a huge thank you to everyone who’s hosted me, and everyone who’ve supported my tour over this past month.

Also, I want to thank all of you wonderful people who’ve decided to give my books a try, be they reviewers or people who bought my books.

I can’t even measure the amount of gratitude that I feel toward all of you.

Since everyone is so interested in my self publishing journey and I’ve been praising the process so much, I thought I’d finish off with a bit of balance. So for today, on Annalisa’s blog, I wrote about the less than wonderful things about self publishing.

Hope to see you there!

Misha

Just a quick thank you! (And a please help)

Sorry for not posting yesterday. I completely lost track of time editing.

Today I’m away from home, so I won’t be doing anything long. Just want to give a shout-out to everyone who commented over the past two days with tips and links for writing a synopsis.

Thanks so much!

X

P.S. Since you’re all such awesome people, I want to ask one more thing. For some reason, the Fridays of 2 and 9 November just haven’t been booked. It’s really a shame, because its been a lot of fun and I want to see the November ending on a high point. Please please pretty please? 

The theme’s so easy. Keeping track. It could practically be about anything writing, or lit world related. 

If you’re interested, please mail me at mishagericke(AT)gmail(DOT)com.

Officially, my goals for 2012

Since this is the last Friday of the year, I thought I’d handle the New Year’s admin now. If you want to see how I fared with the 2011 “guidelines”, you’re more than welcome to go check out my other blog, Taking Charge of My Life.

Without further ado, my goals for 2012:

Writing:

I want to finish Doorways before 30 June.

I will query Doorways on 1 July.

I want to finish the WiP2 rewrite by 30 September.

I want to finish the Don’t Look Back draft by 31 December.

I want to finish at least one draft of the musical libretto by 31 December.

I might want to look at Guardian again.

Reading:

I want to read more (crit partners’ manuscripts don’t count).

I want to read Shakespeare, Austen and Martin.

Life:

Auditions, auditions, auditions.

I want to master at least intermediate cooking.

I want to spend more time designing.

I want to brush up on my French and Mandarin (at least one of the two) and take another language.

I want to take classes in a musical instrument. Either piano or guitar.

I also want to get out more next year. Cabin fever never did suit me.

Since I achieved four goals in 2011, I want to achieve six in 2012.

So that’s me for the year. I hope you enjoyed my blog as much as I enjoyed all of yours.

Before I sign off, I just want to say cheers.

2011 was more than a little bumpy, but your support made it much easier to get through the year. Here’s to 2012. If it’s the last one, know I wouldn’t want to spend it without you. If it isn’t, thank goodness, because then I’ll see you for 2013.

See you on the other side. 😉

I now interrupt regular posting…

Hi all!


Take a look at the about me section at the top.


Yep. I’ve finished the rewrite. Doorways is now officially clocking in at 87 k words.

I DID IT!!! ^_^I’m thrilled by the fact that I’ve come so far, but just thought to share this moment with my blog-friends.


So… To those of you who gave advice when I needed it. Those of you who bolstered my flagging morale with your constant support. To my crit partners.


I would mention names, but I’m afraid that I’d miss some of you, so I’ll do a shout out when I’m a little less keyed up.


In the mean time. To those of you that know who you are.


THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!


Love you all lots! X

Where I go all soft and fluffy…

Hi all! Just wanted to brag a little. I got TWO awards this past week! Thanks Marjorie and David. I will be passing the awards along some time this week. 🙂


So… I just want to state:


Theresa. Yesterday’s blog was NOT about you. Even if I did sort of post it two days after your giving my work a crit. It was completely not a hint for you to take a flying leap to… well… use your imagination. 😉


Person’s referred to don’t read my blog, somewhat sadly, I might add. But of course, far be it from them to do research into the things they criticize.


Aaaanyway. That isn’t what today’s post is about. Although yesterday’s post did get me thinking.


Writing really does help, doesn’t it. Even if (rarely) my perspective on an issue remains unchanged, at least I got my feelings out there in a more socially acceptable way. As supposed to… say… slashing tires, keying cars… slapping unknown strangers, or breathing like Darth Vader.


But… blogging helps a lot more. Because yes, it is the exact same as writing on a piece of paper. Except for one major difference.


Any old piece of paper won’t give me comments.


Because, ladies and gents, you really made my day yesterday.


Other times, you guys sympathize or give advice and/or support. It sometimes helps me more than you can imagine.


So, for everyone of you that has ever commented on my posts:


THANK YOU!!!


And for the silent masses (yes, check my stats when I log in after I checked comments. Every. Single. Time.), you guys and gals make me happy just to know that I’m reaching other people. So: THANK YOU!!!


I might have started highlighting people, but for the purposes of what I wanted to say, I think I will do that at another date and hope that you uber special people know who you are. (You! The one that’s staring at the screen. Yes you too.)


Love you all!


XX

We made it!

Morning all!

I got a bit of a beating from my economics yesterday (which is why I was absent) and am not quite up to capacity at the moment, so today will be admin related. Sorry for this, I promise that I’ll be back on previous form by tomorrow…

I nearly screamed when I opened my account today.

We made it!

Thank every single one of you so much for following and bringing this blog to life. Every single one of you is beyond awesome!

So… As of next week we will be celebrating. But how the week will work depends all on the response from you guys.

I am going to need as many questions as you guys want to ask. They can be easy or hard. My challenge will be to answer them as honestly as possible. But (and I know that people of such great taste needn’t even read this request) please keep it clean. 

Then, I need Ms. L.T. Elliot to please let me know if it’s OK for me to use her name in a composition – since she is my lucky 100th follower. Incidentally, for those of you that don’t know, her blog, Dreams of Quill and Ink is stunning, so please head over there and check it out.

Finally, I would like some post topics please. Yes, you the follower get to tell me what I have to write about. I would just love to see what comes out of this exercise, so please please hit me with them.

I can’t wait to see what happens next week.

Then… By some interesting twist of fate, I won this award at just the right time…

Thanks so much Quinn!

The rules of the awards are as follows:

Thank the person that gave me the award. (Done :-P)

List ten things that I love… Oooh let me see. In no particular order.

1) Chocolate
2) Chocolate mousse
3) Chocolate cake
4) Chocolate flavored milk.
5) Chocolate cookies. Any type will do.
6) Hot chocolate.
7) Hot chocolate that cooled down.
8) Chocolate flavored ice-cream.
9) Fererro Rocher and Lindt chocolates – which are in a league all of their own.
10) Melted chocolate.

Done.

And finally, I have to pass the award on to up to six people. At this point, I will have to leave you in suspense, for the same reason as all the other awards (my PC chooses to freeze solid). I will have the list up on the My Awards Page later today, though. So keep an eye out. 🙂

Lastly, I just want to draw your attention to the News Page above. I promise there won’t be too much creepy and depressing stuff (a la Albino hunting and poaching) on there. It’s just a short list of things that happened or are happening that I struggle to fit into the blog posts, or that come to my attention after I’ve posted. So I’ll be plugging blog fests, events and other blogs there. I’ll drop in the random personal news item in, but I’m trying not to make it too much about me. It’s basically intended to be a quick info list that links to other pages.

You are welcome to submit items for the News. Just send the news (preferably a short summery) and links to mishagericke(at)gmail(dot)com, with News in the tag line.

That’s all folks. Be back tomorrow. 🙂
 

So? I changed my mind.

Ladies and gents, I have twenty minutes to write this down before getting back to my books, so sorry if I’m a bit hurried. (I will try to get to the posts I missed by Sunday, as well as finally giving away the award…)

Perhaps I will post something better later tonight, but I won’t guarantee it. Investment Management 344 is like a Dementor. It sucks out my soul when I write it. (Ha! Bet you thought I’d never throw in a Harry Potter reference. I used to be quite the fangirl. And the simile was just too good to pass up.)

So… If I am absent, please don’t be too worried, I’ll just be busy picking myself off the floor with a spatula.

Anyway. When we hit fifty followers, I said that the next stop was 100. I never imagined that that would happen only a few weeks later. We’re currently at 91 and so need only nine more. I wonder how quickly they will come.

But I’ve been thinking, we should be doing something to celebrate. Something different from my everyday ramblings. I unfortunately can’t really do prizes, since one, I’m a student and have no money and two, I’m pretty much in a country where I will have to ship whatever it is off to a foreign country.

So… what to do? Well… I’m thinking that as soon as we hit 100 followers, I open the floor to you. You can ask me anything and I’ll try to answer as honestly as possible. And, perhaps, I can hold a draw where the winner gets to give me a topic to write about in the blog.

Does that seem like a plan? If not, let me know. If you have a better plan, I really want to hear it. Any comments and/suggestions are welcome.

Welcome to my blog! (psst… I see yooou…)

Firstly, I just want to say hello to the wonderful people following my blog. Your support means a lot to me. You can’t begin to imagine how much it sucked when you weren’t here.

Secondly, I want to say hello to my lurkers. Yes… I know you are out there. It’s kind or hard to miss when the number of page hits per day are twice the amount of people that follow me. Unless my followers want to make me feel better by checking what I wrote more than once. 

Working on the assumption that that is not the case, I just want to say that I hope my blog makes you guys feel welcome enough to a) comment b) follow c) both. This also includes my facebook friends that keep following the links I leave.

How do I know it’s you? Because the amount of South African hits are second only to the U.S. ones. Also, these two number at least three times the hits compared to the third largest number of hits.

So anyway… I want to thank you all for coming to check out my blog. I really hope that some of you are coming back to check out what I wrote. If you have come back at least three times, I think you might want to use the follow widget, or sign up for a free subscription. That way you can get e-mails of every blog post I write. Personally, I would suggest that you opt for following, since I pretty much post every day. At this point I will mention that I might be a bit more scarce next week – hey! stop jumping for joy! – due to my spring break, but I will try to be back as often as possible.  

Anyway. Since you guys and girls have potentially missed around twenty or more posts, I’ve added labels and a search function for your convenience. The search function should also connect you to any of the thirty plus blogs that I’m following. So the odds of you finding what you are looking for are pretty high. The labels might send you in unexpected directions, due to the twisted nature of my mind. But go on. Use them. It’s an adventure…

I hope you all enjoy it here. And please, I wasn’t kidding about the commenting. I hate when it feels like I’m talking to myself. Also, I’m still finding my voice, since I’m pretty new to blogging, so if any of you have suggestions, requests or questions, please drop me a line. Be as upbeat or blunt as you like, but please please please keep it clean. If you absolutely can’t, be cleanish. No abuse or unnecessary nastiness, please.

Hope to hear from you soon.

With lots of love,
Misha