I am happy to announce my new release in the Magic and Mayhem Universe. What A Witch Seeks is book six in the What A Witch series.

Blurb:

Her life was destroyed.

At one time, witch Raisa Chekhov had a glowing future. The archaeology professor on a dig was falling in love—and then she was kidnapped. Tortured. And turned into a raven Shifter. But the worst blow was that her beloved never came for her. Finally escaping, she started a new life in Assjacket, West Virginia. And found acceptance. Friends. A new career. But Fate was simply biding her time.

A warlock searches for his lost mate.

When warlock Dr. Bran Maddocson’s mate went missing, the anthropologist was devastated. Their soul mate bond should have led him directly to her. It didn’t, and for five long years, he’s tried to find her.

Fate, the whimsical beeotch, drops him a hint.

There, on the internet, is a picture of his mate. Living in some U.S. town with the name of Assjacket. He anticipates a heart-warming reunion. Instead, Raisa flies from him. And…flies? She has wings? It seems he’ll have to win his mate all over again. If he can get her on the ground.

After that, they’ll deal with who or whatever stole her.

Baba Yaga welcomes y’all back to Assjacket with an adorable raven Shifter, an Indiana Jones hero, and the cutest kitten familiars ever found on four paws.

Check out my my website for a link to the Kindle excerpt and the Buy Links for your favorite on-line e-book retailer.

And while you’re checking out my new book in the Magic and Mayhem Universe, check out these other new releases.

What’s next from me?

I am currently working on Before the Storm, Book 7 in my Security Specialists International series. I started this book last November during NaNoWriMo and achieved 54,000 words. The target during NaNo is 50,000 words. Yay me, right?

I continued working on Book 7 throughout the winter of 2021 into 2022 and hit 92,000 words around mid-May (I can’t write every day, sorry, just can’t — for physical reasons and life responsibilities).

For most people 92K would be a whole novel. But not for me.

At that point, my characters hadn’t even made it out of what I would call the “middle” middle part of the book, i.e, the characters were still working their way to the “crisis,” or in my books, the crises, which lead to the final scenes. Yes, I put my characters through hell.

Normally, I would’ve kept working on it and probably would’ve finished by mid-summer, but for previous commitments, gardening season, and life in general.The biggest commitment was my promise to write a new What A Witch book for a release in October.

In July, during Camp NaNoWriMo, I wrote What A Witch Seeks and then spent all of August revising and editing. I did some serious rewriting after my crit buddy got her hands on it. This shoved me into September and another previous commitment, Bouchercon in Minneapolis. I was a moderator for a paranormal cozy panel and needed to read five panel members’ books so I could do a good job for them (and not look like an idiot). Back from Bouchercon, I began to reread what I had already written on Before the Storm and made notes for needed revisions and to re-familiarize myself with my own book!

That brings us to November and NaNoWriMo during which I will work hard to finish my SSI novel. Since November 1st, I have added over 5K to the previous 92K. And I am still in the middle-middle. The End could be more than 50K words away, but NaNo should get me almost there.

How I write.

By this time, you might have concluded that I write slow. Actually I can turn out a lot of words in a day if I can work with no distractions. So putting “new” words on the computer is not why it takes me so long to get a book done. The issue is how I write and, in the end, what kind of book I want to put out for my fans and the reading public.

I write linearly. I can’t hop around and write pieces of the book and then put them together like a jigsaw puzzle. My process is to start at Point A and write to Point Z with important plot points that must be hit along the way.

Before I could even begin working on Before the Storm again, I needed to refresh my memory, as previously mentioned, on where the characters had started their journey, why they’d even gone on it to begin with, and how far had they gone and what had they seen and experienced.

During this “refreshing of my memory,” I also needed to determine if I’d messed up any of the plot logic. Plot logic inevitably gets messed up due to the linear way I write, and I always have to “fix” things. Fixing things is good, because I am making it a better story. A lot of writing is rewriting.

Sure enough, there were scenes that needed to be tweaked or just taken out altogether. And, yes, I save those scenes, just in case I need any part of them later on.

Even after all that tweaking, there will still be issues with scenes that I might’ve revised six or seven times.

So that is where I am at — I’ve come back up to speed on my book and I am writing new words. Yay.

Now, you might be thinking — why doesn’t Monette have the story all outlined so she doesn’t need to go back and revise and rewrite so much?

Outlines and I don’t mix well. In my early years of writing (back in the late 1990s), I tried outlining. I spent more time rewriting the outlines because my characters did what characters often do and went off script. After taking a couple of writing classes, I discovered I am not a plotter (one who writes outlines and sticks to them) or a pantser (one who just wings it).

That makes me a quasi-pantser. This method is adaptable enough to be a safe place for thousands of authors who suck at sticking to an outline, but can’t go all wild and submit totally to the whims of their Muse and characters.

Personally, I think of this writing method as a road trip. I know my starting point (the set up). I know who is going on the journey, what baggage they’re taking, and why they feel the need to go on this particular journey at this particular time (set up, character motivations, and inciting incident). And I know where they will end up (crisis and final action leading to the ending). I also know what places need to be hit along the way (conflict/action moving us from the inciting incident to the crisis).

Between the beginning and the ending, the method allows me to adapt the characters’ journey as needed to allow for other, unanticipated points of interest along the route. Such points of interest could be driven by outside actors, think of these as roadblocks, or the characters just needing to slow the action down a bit and taking a rest before hitting the road again to face other potential problems.

Eventually, we’ll get to our destination (the end) and all will be resolved. FYI, I don’t do cliffhangers as far as the main characters are concerned. Their journey will be complete after I type The End.

Thus, my characters and their conflicts drive the action. If we get off the interstate due to outside forces, and I hadn’t planned for that detour earlier in the book, I have to go back and “fix” earlier sections that no longer make sense.

Why? Because I write linearly and am extremely A-type. Things/actions have to be in their place, and I have to clean up messes as they happen.This often means I start over from word one and revise going forward to make sure the plot flows smoothly and logically until I arrive back at the point where we got off the road. “We” being my characters and I. Yes, they talk to me. Often all at once.

In longer books such as this one, I can make that detour-and-backtrack revision process many … many  … many times. This is why I say I write slow.

Could I turn out 50-60K a month? Yeah, and I have. But I would still feel the need to revise those words again and again as the story evolves.To polish the story. To choose the exact word needed to convey an emotion. To go back and more thoroughly set certain scenes so the reader is pulled in.

Think of my writing process as something akin to glaciation during the Pleistocene Epoch when the glaciers slowly advanced and just as slowly retreated, changing/molding the landscape as they did so.

Another factor adding to my already involved writing process in this book is — I have two sets of characters who each have their own romance arc:  the heroine and her hero (Loren Walsh) and the heroine’s mother and one of the Osprey’s Point military veterans (second chance at love with an older couple). The danger (from two different sources, no less!) to the heroine has pulled all those others into keeping her (and those she loves) safe. That takes a lot of action and a lot of words — and a lot of me doing the glacier thing to make the story flow properly.

Before the Storm is going to be a long book. Probably longer than A Cold Day in Hell which I think is my longest SSI book.

To all my SSI fans, prepare yourselves — the next three SSI books are all going to be just as lengthy as this one. So, I’ll thank you for your patience ahead of time.

Wish me luck.