The summer solstice has come and gone, and now that summer has begun (or now that we’re halfway through summer, if you like to think of things in terms of astrological accuracy) I’m taking stock of where I’m at and doing my best to make sure I stay on track with everything.

Since it’s me, ‘everything’ involves an awful lot of things. 🙂 But I wouldn’t be happy any other way!

My next published short story will be “The Switch” – it will be available in July in the Crimes, Capers and Rule Breakers bundle, which is curated by my friend Rebecca M. Senese. I’ve had a sneak peek at the cover and some other things Rebecca is putting together, and she’s doing a fabulous job – I can’t wait for this bundle to come out!

I haven’t done much writing over the past week, but I have spent a ridiculous amount of looking at potential cover images and experimenting with designs and fonts and colors. I’d like to put together the covers for a few of the upcoming bundles so that I can not only be ahead on that task, but also because having the design done early on helps give a little shape to the overall feel of each bundle.

My initial goal is to create three covers for an upcoming fairy tale bundle series (not to be confused with the faery bundle series…yes, I know it’s confusing…). After spending days – literally – trying out different things, I finally decided to take a completely different approach. This sort of means I’m back at square one, since this is a pretty drastic change and I now have to find all new images. But it also feels a bit more freeing because I have a lot more leeway in the imagery I pick, plus the overall cover design will be more simplistic, and I think that will convey a much more clear and concise message to the reader. I think the new approach will help link all three covers together as a series, and I wasn’t sure that was going to work quite as well with my original approach. Hopefully I’m right!