I had a fantastic time at the week-long writing workshop in Oregon, but I’m SO happy to be back home with Rosie and Jasper!

Hiking this morning did feel a bit strange at first after two weeks spent sitting 🙂 but the dogs herded me along nonetheless.

The workshop is WMG Publishing’s annual Business Master Class. I’ve wanted to attend this class for the past few years, and it was even better than I’d anticipated. I’m planning on going back in 2019 – the publishing industry is changing so fast that I’m sure there will be lots of new things to learn about in two years.

In addition to learning gobs of things, it was wonderful to catch up with so many of my author friends – and I made lots of new friends as well! I also learned that licorice ice cream not only exists, but some people actually like it. I am not one of those people, but I did quite enjoy the combination of chocolate peanut butter and vanilla ice cream – and my ice cream didn’t turn my lips black.

I now have so many things to research I’m not really sure where to start. 🙂 I did take notes, and after a while started jotting tasks down in a to do list as well, so I’ll be able to figure out a plan once I go through all of that. Relying on my memory would not be a good idea – after seven days, everything in my head is all a jumble!

One of the more important things that came out of this class is that I’ve decided to switch from doing short story bundles to structuring the collections more like a traditional anthology. I have zero interest in editing, so I’ll keep calling myself a curator instead of an editor, but instead of having a bunch of ebooks combined in one ginormous manuscript I’ll compile the ebook myself. The advantages of this are that the ebook will look more streamlined, since all of the stories will have the same formatting style, and I’ll also be able to make print versions available – which will be super cool. The disadvantage is that there will only be the one main cover instead of that plus one cover per story, but while having the different covers is fun they don’t outweigh the other advantages.

So many things to do… But the dogs will keep me company while I work on everything. 🙂