I’m in Lincoln City, on the Oregon coast. And it’s actually sunny!

I realize the sun does shine up here, it’s just almost always rainy when I come to the coast. I’m here for WMG Publishing’s week-long Master Class. This is a business class, not a writing workshop, so it’s a full week of talks about marketing, branding, and other fun topics (or at least fun for me!). There are 60+ people in the class – I knew 20 or so people from previous workshops, and it’s been great to catch up with them and to meet so many new authors.

I came up a few days early, and spent the extra time working on the next collection as well as on writing. I have three stories due by December 1st, so I have quite a bit of writing to do. It’s become very clear that I’m not going to finish everything I’d hoped to accomplish on this trip 🙂 but I’m making good progress, and I’m really happy with how everything is shaking out.

The next collection, which is called Stars in the Darkness, has been a great learning experience. It would have been much more enjoyable to learn these things when I wasn’t traveling, in a class, and finishing up stories for other projects. 🙂 But it’s been extremely educational nonetheless, and I’ve ended up making some changes to my future projects because of it. I’m setting this collection up through BundleRabbit, just like the bundles I’ve organized previously, but the format and structure is different. I’ve invited the authors, reviewed the stories (but didn’t edit them), designed the cover, but unlike with a bundle I’m also formatting the ebook. This means there will be only one cover, instead of one overall cover and a cover for each story. This collection will also be available in print, which will be awesome.

I really like this model for the short story ‘bundles’ because this way the stories in the book are all formatted the same way, so there’s a consistent look and feel. With a novel bundle, having different styles and structures for each title in the bundle makes sense, but with a short story bundle the differences in how the different stories are organized can be a little distracting.

And now I’m off to take advantage of the internet before it goes out again…