Ghost-Hunting Critters, which contains my story “Clyde and the Ghost Cat,” is available for pre-order on Amazon!

This anthology is edited by J. A. Campbell, and all of the stories are set in her Brown, Ghost Hunting Dog universe. There are ghost hunting dogs, cats, a velociraptor, and even a goldfish. 🙂

If the idea of a ghost hunting dog seems vaguely familiar, you may have read Julie’s “Brown and the Hotel Colorado Haunts” which appears in the Haunted bundle. Brown is a ghost hunting border collie in the Old West – how awesome is that?!?

I recently discovered a new tool called YASIV that allows you to view data about a book on Amazon – it incorporates also-boughts (i.e. people who bought this book also bought these others), sales numbers, and things like that. I wrote a post about it on Blackbird Publishing’s site, and while I normally don’t mention those posts on my author website, this tool is so cool that I had to make myself stop playing with it – several times. 🙂 Here’s a screenshot:

I’m sure you’re wondering what on earth that represents – it’s a graph of The Faerie Summer and the other books it’s related to based on who purchased what. My how-to post on Blackbird Publishing is about how this type of thing can be useful to authors, but it’s also useful to readers! I added several new books to my reading list before forcing myself to get back to work. 🙂
In writing news, I’m making slow but steady progress on my story for the not-yet-named justice bundle. I got hung up on some of the historical details, since I want to be as accurate as possible, and finally decided I need to finish the first draft and research and adjust the details later. Part of the problem is I’ve decided to move the setting to either Texas or Kansas, and my historical and geographical knowledge of both states isn’t as strong as if I were writing something closer to home.

For example: would there be enough places for a man on horseback to stop for water if he were riding straight through from, say, Dallas to Denver? Or would it be safer to ride north to Kansas, then head west? How many days would it take to get to Denver? I did learn it’s safe to assume you could go 30 miles/day on horseback, but I don’t know the geography of the areas I’m looking at well enough to know how many twist and turns you’d have to take. And since this story is set before the Civil War begins: what about the Indians?

I could spend days and days researching all of this, but I’m going to focus on writing the story and then see what facts I really need to look up.

I spent some time this weekend working on upcoming bundles. There’s the unnamed justice bundle, the faerie series (The Faerie Summer is volume 1), and the brand new fairy tale series. Even I get confused between the faerie/fairy tale series 🙂 so I split my colorful planning spreadsheets apart, which has already been helpful.

Tomorrow is the eclipse, and while we’ll only have 93% totality here, I’m very excited – and I’ve got the beginning of a story idea that involves an eclipse!