I’ve now sent two stories off to the fabulous DeAnna Knippling for editing, and submitted one to an anthology. Hooray!!!

Lest you think I’m now out of work, I need to wrap up one more in progress story by May 1st, have to write a completely new story by mid-May, need to finalize the sales copy, cover, and review the final ebooks for the Faerie Summer bundle and, if I have any extra time left, write two more short stories by the end of the month. The latter seems unlikely, I know, but as a Pollyanna I like to think I can accomplish an unending number of things. 🙂

The latest two stories were really fun to write.

“Clyde and the Ghost Cat” is about a cat who moves to a new house only to find it’s haunted by a ghost cat – and the ghost likes to lie in Clyde’s sun spot on the sofa. I realized a year or so ago that I often put cats in my stories – although up until Clyde, they’ve always been side characters. Not only are cats fun to write about, this story made me really, really wish I had cats. It’s been a long seven years. I have a deal with my husband (re-confirmed last night, with his mom as a witness) that we can get cats once we finish the remodeling project that will add a utility room (and therefore a place for a litter box) to the house. And yes, I said cats, plural. 🙂

“The Late Bloomer is my first ever attempt at a Lovecraftian story. I was nervous about this at first, but once I came up with the idea, this story was super easy to write. I’m clearly going to have to write more monster stories – although whether or not something is a monster is relative…

The next story on the list is “To Be a Monster,” which will be released in June in the Beneath the Waves bundle. The protagonist is Scylla, a monster from Greek mythology – but Scylla didn’t start off as a monster. She was a nice young maiden who was minding her own business until Glaucus, a fisherman-turned-sea-god, fell in love with her. Scylla fled from him, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer, and he asked the witch Circe for a love potion. Circe fell in love with Glaucus herself, clearly oblivious to the fact that he was a jerk, but he only had eyes for Scylla. So the witch turned Scylla into a monster.

This sort of thing happened quite a lot in Greek mythology. Not only would these poor young girls get turned into monsters, no one stood up for them after the fact. You’d think someone would have tried to convince the witch to undo her spell, or ask some random god for help – but no. Once an innocent person had been transformed into a hideous creature, everyone apparently accepted the new situation and went on about their lives. Everyone except the newly made monster, that is.

Expect more monster stories… 🙂