Susanne Winter

I was just going through my feedreader (I know, so old-fashioned), culling everything that I either don’t read or that hadn’t updated in the past few years.

Well.

This blog has been dormant for years as well. Sorry. Life happened and I wanted to redesign it (still want) and I wanted to focus on writing because I had way more to do than I had time or energy for, and then was now.

Anyways. The Eva Mandel trilogy is written. Book 1 is about to be launched into the world in all its ebook glory. I’m still a bit undecided whether I should focus on bringing this website up to speed or do a cover reveal, preferably both, of course.

So, I promise to not fall off the face of the world for years again without checking in, and will keep you posted.

Sorry for not posting in months. I’m still rather busy with the writing. I am currently on book two of the Eva Mandel series.

I’m doing NaNoWriMo again, this time as a rebel because I started this book a few weeks ago.

First few paragraphs of book two:

It was my first day coming back to the university after a week off. I only had spent one night in the hospital but the doctors had thought it best for me to rest instead of work.
I did resent that because I didn’t like not working but then I realized that they were only talking about not going in to teach. Nobody had said anything about research.

And I had to say that spending a week at home had been very nice. Now that I had my home back, my tiny little house, parked behind Katherine’s barn. I sat on my stoop with a cup of tea in my hands, looking at the woods.
I hadn’t dared to go in again so far but I couldn’t avoid it forever. I was a little scared of finding the clearing again where I had met that weird, magical creature. I was almost equally scared of going into the woods and finding out that there was no clearing. Or no creature.

I had had a lot of things to think about in the past week, not the least if it being my newfound ability to use magic. For thirty years I had been very sure that I was the least magically inclined person there could be and then things exploded in my face. Literally. When I started to work at the academy.

I’ll try and check in a little more often this month.

Well, all of that did not go quite as expected.

I started writing a new series in November. Finished the first draft of that, and immediately started writing the first book in yet another series.

And that’s the one I’m currently working on. I am hoping to finish that one by the end of the month but then I had hoped to finish it at the end of March – shrugs shoulders.

Anyways, here’s something from that story for you to read:

The inside view and the outside view never match up.

I was scared shitless.

The people I was going to meet would probably think me cold, arrogant, and completely unconcerned.

Story of my life.

I stood in front of the huge building that was housing the Academy of Supernatural Phenomena. It looked more like a castle than like a university. I was wearing a bright and shiny new white gown that showed my status as a member of the teaching staff. I had cursed whoever thought white was a good color for that. Not only was is impractical and hard to keep clean, it only made me looked all washed out and unwell.
And it didn’t go with anything I owned so I had to invest in a second capsule wardrobe just for my new job.

I thought back to when I had gotten the letter asking me to teach and do research here. Feeling wanted was a novel experience for me, and getting the psychology of magic-department started was important enough to trump my need for privacy and quiet.

From past experience I expected a lot of misunderstandings, and a lot of people offended, and a lot of dumb questions. But there was nothing to be done about it.

I walked up the stairs under the gothic arches and entered the dark entrance hall. It looked almost like a church. Maybe whoever built this thought that connecting the university with history – even if that connection was fake – would make it more respectable, more legitimate and more structured.

Right in the middle of the big hall was the statue of a grieving angel in white marble. “To those who have fallen in the service of magic,” it read. As if there had been a war.

Unlike a lot of the students studying here, I could remember a time without magic. A time when we thought that the supernatural was just something humanity had invented for pleasure, and to make sense of the world before science existed.

And then the Y2K problem had turned out to not be a computer failure but instead the return of magic to the world.

There are quite a few things that I’ve been wanting to write about here on the blog but I’m pouring all my writing time into writing fiction at the moment. I have also almost finished the posts for the „buy fewer books challenge“ for March and April, I only need to put in links which is a little ridiculous.

So. Back to the writing I go.