One story down, seventeen to go! 🙂

I finished “The Glass Coffin” last night, and will take one more look on Wednesday before submitting it to the fairy tale anthology it will appear in next month. I’m still debating the title, but haven’t thought of any other options yet. The original tale by The Brothers Grimm was called “The Glass Coffin,” and there is – of course – a glass ‘coffin’ in it. But that’s just one element of the story. I’ll ponder this for the next two days…

I’m now working on another fairy tale story – no, I’m not obsessed with fairy tales! The next story is for an anthology I’ve been planning for the past year (yes, year), whereas “The Glass Coffin” (or whatever it ends up being called) popped up more recently, and coincidentally has a release date around the same time. The new story isn’t based off of an existing fairy tale – it’s intended to be fairy tale-like. One of the main characters is a dragon, and he’s proving quite fun to write about. Hopefully writing about him will give me some ideas for the dinosaur story I’ve been asked to write…

Jasper and Rosie have, of course, been a big help with everything. 🙂 We celebrated Rosie’s 4th Gotcha Day in December, and Jasper’s 5th is next week. They’ve played together every single day since I brought Rosie home. Jasper came from a border collie rescue group in Nebraska, and Rosie from a herding dog rescue group in Utah (because I can only adopt dogs from organizations where I have to drive eight hours each way in the middle of winter), so they didn’t meet each other beforehand. It’s still amazing to us how fortunate we were to find two dogs who ended up being such fast friends.

I’ve only written one story so far that has a dog in it, but I recently realized I’ve written quite a few that have cats. My latest one is in the Fantastic Feline Heroes bundle. I posted a snippet from it about a week ago – here’s another. Gilroy is a cat who is also a witch’s familar; Delaney is the witch’s great-niece who, when poking around, managed to trigger a spell that turned her into a kitten.

Now Gilroy just had to corral Delaney so that she couldn’t cause any more trouble. Shutting her in the bathroom would be a good idea. The worst things she could do there would be to rip the toilet paper to shreds, or climb the shower curtain.

He walked across the floor toward the kitten. She jumped on to the chair again, stared up at the plant, let out a tiny squeak of a meow, and then launched herself into the air. She missed the lowest leaf of the plant by at least three feet. She caught a glimpse of Gilroy out of the corner of her eye and arched her back, dancing sideways, her brown and black fur raised up, and her little tail pointing at the ceiling. She scampered across the kitchen floor, ran under the table, and then leapt up on the window seat.

Gilroy trotted after her, and then his ears pricked as he heard a small, metallic scraping sound.

The window screen.

– from “Gilroy and the Kitten“

Writing that story really made me miss having cats! The plan is to adopt two cats once we remodel and create a place for a litter box, since this house has no decent spot for one. This will likely not happen for some time, but I’m going to be very happy when it does! And then we’ll find out how Rosie and Jasper feel about cats…