A few weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night and had a hard time going back to sleep. For some reason I started thinking about dragons, and entertained my sleepy-but-sleepless self with a story about a dragon. I’ve thought about this idea every time I’ve had trouble sleeping ever since, and yesterday realized this story is the perfect fit for the fairy tale bundle series I’m organizing!

The current plan is to put together three bundles in the fairy tale series. If there’s enough interest the series could continue past three bundles, but I figured I’d start with three and see what happens. And, of course, three is an important number in fairy tale mythology. There are the three little pigs, the three bears, the three Billy Goats Gruff, the three wishes… 🙂

I have four short stories on the list before this one, plus some editing work to do, so for now I’ll just have to entertain myself with this story when I’m having trouble sleeping.

My goblin story will be coming out shortly in a Halloween bundle, and I’m participating in a few other bundles as well. Up until now I’ve written a new short story for each bundle, which has been fun, but has also been a lot of work. Two of my previously published stories will be in new bundles this fall, which is kind of cool – partly because I didn’t have to write new stories 🙂 and partly because it’s kind of neat to have gotten to the point where I have enough short stories out that they can appear in multiple places.

I’m still super busy. I made a list earlier this evening, and it looks like I’ll have about 20 new short stories published in 2018!!! A few of them will be stories that were finished earlier, but most of them will be brand new stories. This is both daunting and exciting! A year ago I would have felt completely stressed out just thinking about the prospect of having to write this many new stories, but I’m getting more comfortable with switching gears and creating entirely new things on a regular basis. And it’s getting to be more fun!

I do need to work on my time management. I’m pretty organized, but I go through phases where I’m really good and structured, and then I switch gears and spend my time organizing something totally unrelated to writing. This actually seems to make sense at times – everyone needs down time. But sometimes it’s because I’m working on a story that challenges me somehow, and procrastinating is a way to avoid whatever is hard for me at the moment.

My current time management goal is to restructure what I do when, so that I can work on the less mentally challenging tasks during the work week when I’ve spent my days at my day job, and then leave the weekends free for writing time. This is me tricking myself 🙂 because if I’m caught up on (or, hopefully, ahead on…hey, I’m an optimist…) all of my non-writing tasks, I’ll be able to focus on writing during the times when I’m most likely to have fewer distractions. We’ll see how this goes…