Contests, Pre Orders, Writing Oh My!
Jun
2
2010

Over at the Love To Read for Fun blog, Marq is running a Knocked My Socks Off contest to win several different books, including Laid Bare and Coming Undone. Head on over to check out the details!

Woke up to find an email from my lovely editor, Anne Scott, telling me REVELATION was now available for pre-order at Amazon! WHEEE! REVELATION is the follow up to TRINITY and is about Renee’s sister Kendra and Max de La Vega (Galen’s oldest brother). It will tie up all the loose story threads from TRINITY as well.

Turned in dirty/bad/wrong, my novella for next summer’s Berkley Heat anthology and now I’m back to MESMERIZED, Andrei’s story and the next Phantom Corps book. I now have enough note cards to fill an entire notecard box and have accepted that I need to change the way I plot my series because there are so many details I need to keep track of. At first I just wrote. I pantsed everything but then as I started writing series, I realized I needed to keep track of timelines and story details, especially when they dovetail into larger, multiple book storylines.

Then I started writing synopses – mainly because that’s what I needed to do to sell books on partial, LOL. But over time, I came to accept the necessity of a synopsis and at least some basic plotting to keep everything straight and manageable. I still rarely write the exact book I plot originally and my synopses are general with high notes – who the characters are (though I always learn more about them as I write) and the basic structure of the story beginning, middle and end. I flesh out details as I go because until I know my people, I can’t really write their stories. It comes to me as I write, which is one of the few superstitions/writing rituals I have.

I don’t have a muse, but I do have a belief that the writing of the book has to be organic for me to really fall into it. I can’t plan ahead what the process will give me, I just have to trust that those little epiphanies will come as they’re supposed to, when they’re supposed to and then I adjust as I go.

But that still leaves the issue of all the details and the books and universes getting bigger and more detailed and I need to keep track of all those details. So I’m going to be thinking on it as I write Mesmerized and plot out the last book in the story arc.

Speaking of that, gotta get back to work!

One comment to “Contests, Pre Orders, Writing Oh My!”

  1. Delilah Devlin
    June 4th, 2010 at 11:55 am · Link

    Congrats on the new release! The cover is hawt!! And I wish I could come up with a good system for keeping track of the details in a series too. Anything too structured will drive me nuts. If you hit on anything that works, let me know! 🙄