Please give a warm welcome to my guest, Misha Gerrick!
First Line Quote Trivia
My favorite
quote: “He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was
mad.”
From: Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini
Interview
1. What
movies/shows/books have influenced your writing or writing ideas? How/why?
This is hard and easy at the same time. I’ve read so
many books in my lifetime, and I’d like to think every one of them had some
sort of impact on me as a person. Even if I did not agree, the knowledge that I
disagreed with something in a book taught me something about myself.
(Tyrean's inserted comment): I know how you feel. I've read plenty of writing books and even the ones I didn't like helped me in some way.
That said, there are five books that proved
instrumental in me writing the book that would become The Vanished Knight and The
Heir’s Choice. (And they might surprise the people who’ve read one or both
of them.)
Harry Potter and
the Prisoner of Azkaban was my first ever fantasy book, (unless you count Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory,
which did, in some form, find its somewhat subtle way into my The War of Six Crowns’s world.)
Then I went on to Chronicles
of Narnia just as The Lion, the
Witch, and the Wardrobe came out. And it was re-reading Prince Caspian that Darrion appeared in
my head to distract me, with his tale of another world where people can in fact
travel both ways.
Except he snorted a bit at Narnia in Prince Caspian and said: “Those kids
would never have made it if they ended up here.”
Needless to say, I was hooked.
The problem was that I was ill-prepared for the huge
scope of my series. The Right to Write by
Julia Cameron was what got me to 1) Blog (for accountability) and 2) Finish my
book.
Finishing is so important!
2. How do goals
help you see projects through to the finish?
My goals, and specifically blogging about them, keep
me accountable to my writing. I sometimes don’t finish the concepts I work on,
but instead, I set them aside for later so I can incubate them a bit more.
Furthermore, I’m also not all that strict about my
draft deadlines. I set goals, and aim for the general vicinity of those
deadlines, but the point really isn’t to finish on time. It’s just to finish. And having something to aim
for helps me do that.
As do goals like “write something every weekday.”
One of my favorite parts of your blog is reading your writing goals, Misha - they inspire me!
What's your
favorite part of writing?
When I’m rough drafting, I love that beginning
excitement when I start out. I also love picking the beautiful notebook I’m
going to draft in.
Rewrites are awesome because it’s like a rough draft,
but I’m typing out a better version of it with much less of a struggle.
I possibly love edits the most because as I work, I
see something resembling the book I had in my head all along come out. Drafting
just can’t do that.
Yes, the first draft, although fun for me, never matches the image in my head. And notebook choice, ah yes, I love beautiful notebooks. :)
Thanks so much for having me over!
Thank you for visiting, Misha!
The Vanished Knight
The entity living
inside Callan’s soul orphaned her at age eleven. By the time she’s sixteen,
it’s ensured her being shunted from one foster family to another.
Her thirteenth
foster assignment should be routine. Except... it's not. A psycho in medieval
armor kidnaps her and she ends up in a magical world. There, she accidentally
discovers a secret her parents had kept until the day they died.
Both actually came
from this magical world, but left before Callan was born. To cover their tracks,
they’d lied about everything. Even who they really were.
Driven to find out
where she comes from, Callan’s trapped in a race for life and death. Walking
away isn’t an option, but if she stays too long, the entity will find its next
victim.
In this world where
secrets are sacrosanct and grudges are remembered, finding the truth will be
near impossible. Especially when Callan has her own homicidal little secret to
deal with.
One with a taste for
destroying her life.
The Heir’s Choice
After discovering
her parents had kept a whole world secret, Callan races to discover her past.
Not easy to do with an increasingly agitated entity living in her soul.
Going to her
long-lost elvish roots should answer all her questions. Instead, she ends up in
the middle of a nightmare.
The elves are on the
verge of an apocalyptic war. Their enemy, King Aurek of Icaimerith, will only
be appeased if Callan marries his heir. It’s either her life getting messed up,
or an entire country’s lives lost. Simple enough, right?
Wrong.
Because when the
entity wants the elves blotted out of existence, saving them gets taken to a
whole new level of complicated.
Bio
Misha Gerrick has
been creating stories long before she could write and is currently going after
her dream of making a living as a writer.
If you’d like to see
how that’s going, you can visit her on her blog (http://Sylmion.blogspot.com), where she also discusses all things
related to writing and publishing.
Or, if you’d just
like to know what she’s reading and get updates on what she’ll be publishing
next (Sorry, no newsletter just yet.):
You can follow her
Tumblr (http://mishagerrick.tumblr.com)
You can follow her
on Twitter: @MGerrick1
And you can circle
her on Google Plus: +MGerrick
