Magna's Plea by Cherie Reich Release

A princess will rise and challenge Fate. 

While her father, brothers, and people fight against the Kingdom of Apentha, tenacious eighteen-year-old Princess Magna can only watch the destruction of Amora, her besieged city and kingdom. Her mother, Queen Vyvian, has refused to allow her heir to join the fray. 

But Magna won't take no for an answer. She seeks out an end of the war from Prince Cyrun of Apentha, their prisoner. If she can't persuade him toward peace, then Amora may fall. 

This short story prequel includes a sneak peek of Reborn, Book One of The Fate Challenges, forthcoming May 2014. 

YA Epic Fantasy
The Fate Challenges #0.5
A 5500-word Short Story

Best of all, you can download this short story for free at Amazon / Nook / iTunes / Kobo / Smashwords / Goodreads and read online at Wattpad.

Cherie Reich is a speculative fiction writer living in Virginia. For more information about her work, please visit her blog and website.

 

The Faerie War by Rachel Morgan, the third book in the Creepy Hollow series, releases today!

It's party time!!! 

Today is the official online release of Rachel Morgan's third Creepy Hollow novel, The Faerie War. After that cliffhanger at the end of the second book, fans can finally find out what happens to Violet and everyone else in Creepy Hollow. If you'd like to get your copy, you can find it at the following online stores, plus a few others:

Amazon US | Amazon UK

Barnes & Noble

iTunes

CreateSpace (print)

There are seven other teaser images displayed on various blogs today. If you'd like to see them, you can visit the following fabulous bloggers:

And there's a major giveaway going on!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Insecure Writers' Support Group (#9)

Insecure Writer's Support Group (IWSG) is a really awesome meme that you should be doing along with the rest of us writers. Unless you truly are happy with your writing and don't feel the need to vent about your insecurities because they don't exist for you. But, really.... Don't they?  
IWSG is hosted by Captain Ninja Alex at his blog, Alex J. Cavanaugh.

As some readers of my blog may already be aware, I've had problems crashing and burning when it comes to my writing in the recent past. It has not been pretty nor fun. I had gotten to the point where writing was so painful, I began to really dislike it and prefer doing anything else besides. And I want to do this for a living!

I had to do some realizing about why this was happening to me, since it hadn't ever happened before. So, I let this issue percolate in the back of my mind for a while, as I tend to do when trying to do damage control in my life (when am I ever NOT doing damage control?!).

I found a book on how to become more prolific (The 7 Secrets of the Prolific: [...] by Hillary Rettig) and the section on perfectionism really stuck out for me. I definitely needed to get over my perfectionism issues and just let myself write crap when composing my first drafts. Why I wasn't doing this, I'm not sure. I just didn't want to make mistakes, period. But, I realize now that it's okay to make them when first writing a draft, and even afterwards. I think I made an important breakthrough there.

But, that was hardly all I needed to do. I still felt very stuck and very unhappy when writing. Just my perfectionism alone wasn't all that was stifling me, clearly. I thought more and more about what made me love writing back when I was doing it for fun. And, something I had heard J.K. Rowling say in an interview once about why her Harry Potter books are so popular popped into my mind and wouldn't leave: she said, according to thousands of fan letters, it had to have been the characters she created that made her books endearing.

I thought about all that I had been writing since I wanted to write with the intention of publishing. It wasn't that I hated what I had been writing. It was that I wasn't writing characters that I could fall in love with anymore. That was the difference. It all occurred to me after figuring out that I used to write characters that made me love to write about them, and I had somehow, without realizing, stopped doing it.

When I love any book I read, truly love it, it's always, always, always because there's at least one if not more than one character in the book that I liked a lot, or even loved. That's it. That's why I read and that's also why I write. I'm a character-person above everything else.

I decided to zero-in on my newest characters in my current work-in-progress to ensure they were making me find them endearing. With a little effort on my part, I've been writing better characters, at least as far as I'm concerned, and really loving to write again! 

In the end, I don't even care if my characters don't enchant anybody else. Maybe everyone else will find them boring--who knows? For now, they need to be right for me and make me happy. All I've been wanting is to love writing again and I had to rediscover what it was that made me love it in the first place. Now, if I could only make myself remember this in the long run......

 

My Post-It Notes Novel

As a writer, over time, I've only gotten weirder. I've gotten to the point where I can't finish any draft I start and have now resorted to writing my novels on Post-It Notes just so I can have the story organized and out of my head.

I discovered this idea from reading Roz Morris' novel, Nail Your Novel: Why Writers Abandon Books and How You Can Draft, Fix and Finish with Confidence. I have to say, so far it's actually working! I'm about half-way finished writing up all the different scenes and snippets I want to include in my first draft. Half-way! That is so big for me. It's odd, but I really feel like I'm writing the manuscript already, even though I'm not literally doing that, yet. But, composing a cohesive, viable story is half the battle.

What I love most about this little tactic is that I can add and remove scenes so incredibly easily. I'm figuring out what works and what doesn't long before any prose is being typed up in "stone" on that computer. I realize I have a huge dislike, or dread for trying to find something I wrote within a sea of literally thousands of words in order to axe it, add to it or move it around. Of course, this has to be done during every author's editing phase, but at least I can do some of that axing, adding and moving before those scenes ever gets lost in that abyss known as a Word document.

Life made easier! That's progress for me. I've been in a horrible writing slump lately and this is really helping me to move past it. I never thought I'd actually be writing an entire novel on Post-It Notes, but now I can see myself doing this with every story I write from now on.


Have you ever tried anything off-beat or bizarre in order to get out of a writing slump?