I have a confession to make.
My mind is naturally geared to longer
stories. If you want to see me stress about my writing, tell me to limit my
word count to 5000 words or less.
I’m serious. At school, I was that kid in
English class that haggled my creative writing word-counts up. (Yes, I was really popular in my class.) I don’t
like being limited in my writing. I want to write a story until it’s done.
If it takes ten books, so be it. Don’t worry,
my longest series following on each other—as supposed to a series of standalone
books—will probably consist of six books. Endless
has a bit more of an interesting story behind it, though.
See, I had just finished rewriting a 120k
word monster that would go on to be books one and two in the above-mentioned
series. Then I wrote an emotionally wrought start to a romantic series.
So when the idea finally solidified into “One
immortal suffers from amnesia and falls in love with another, not knowing they
used to be enemies,” I was actually excited to finally have an idea that could
actually be contained in a single book.
It would be like a break. A nice holiday from
constantly worrying about how what I’ve written would impact the rest of the books
in the series.
I finished the rough draft with a sense that
I had actually succeeded in writing an actual stand-alone.
About a year later, I re-read the book and realized I was woefully incorrect. I had in fact written the foundation for two books. After banging my head on my desk a hundred times or so, I took another long look at my rough draft and realized that even if I wrote two books, the overall story probably still wouldn’t be done.
And like a house of cards, my goal of writing
a stand-alone collapsed. The rest, as they say, is history.
Kidding.
It’s actually just an idea for the next two books.
How do you decide if
you’re going to write a series? If you don’t write series, how do you stick to
only writing stand-alones?
About the Book
“First, do no harm.” Blake Ryan swore that oath to become a doctor. Ironic, given that he spent most of his thousand year life sucking souls out of other immortals. Things are different now. Using regular shots of morphine to keep his inner monster at bay, Ryan has led a quiet life since the Second World War. His thrills now come from saving lives, not taking them.
Until a plane crash brings Aleria into his hospital. Her life is vibrant. Crack to predators like him. She’s the exact sort of person they would hunt, and thanks to a severe case of amnesia, she’s all but defenseless.
Leaving Aleria vulnerable isn’t an option, but protecting her means unleashing his own inner monster. Which is a problem, because his inner monster wants her dead most of all.
Amazon
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About the Author
Misha Gerrick
lives near Cape Town, South Africa, and can usually be found staring at her
surroundings while figuring out her next book. If you’d like to see what Misha’s up to at the moment, you can find her on these social networks:
Tumblr | Twitter | Google Plus | Writing Blog
