I’ve learned how to add sparkles to an image in Photoshop!

It isn’t very difficult, of course, but it’s still exciting! I followed this tutorial, with a few minor modifications. Here’s a peek at the cover I’m working on – look how sparkly it is!

I’m going to play with the sparkles a little more before calling the cover good (plus sparkles are really fun to play with!), but I’m very close to being done. I’m so close that I’ve started working on the back cover, since this novelette will be released both as an ebook and a paperback. And I’ve been thinking through an idea for a related story with some of the same characters, thanks to a little help from my good friend Alyssa. 🙂

The Out of This World bundle is available on BundleRabbit for one more week. After that it will be available on Amazon, iBooks, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble, but if you purchase it through BundleRabbit you have the option to donate 10% of the purchase price to one of two great charities: First Book, which provides access to new books for children in need, or World Vets, which provides international veterinary and disaster relief assistance to help animals.

I’m thrilled to be a part of a collection of stories by so many wonderful authors, and I’m looking forward to reading the other stories. But reading anything new has to wait until after the Historical Fiction, Time Travel, and Alternate History writing workshop I’m attending next month, since I’m still working through all of the reading we were assigned for class. This workshop is taught by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, whose novel Alien Influences is in The Out of This World bundle.

My short story “The Next Dance,” which is one of the stories I sold at the WMG Anthology workshop last winter, will be published in Fiction River: Tavern Tales. I just found out that this issue is coming out in January 2017, which is quite a bit sooner than I’d expected. What a wonderful surprise!