I now have my very own Facebook group! Yes, I also have a Facebook page. 🙂 I set up the group to make it easier for anyone who doesn’t want to miss a release to stay on top of everything. And if nothing else, I will occasionally post photos of Rosie and Jasper just for fun. Someday I hope to have cats again, and when that happens there will be cat photos as well. And maybe even photos of dogs and cats!

Speaking of photos, I was rummaging around looking for a picture, and I came across this. It’s an x-ray of my wrist from when I broke it 8 years ago. It’s probably a good thing I’m not a doctor, because I can’t tell what’s broken in that image – but I do remember that there were about seven different fractures. I was on a walk with Lucy, one of our dogs at the time, and slipped on the ice a few blocks away from home. Poor Lucy was very confused!

I apparently don’t have the photo I was looking for on my computer, but it was fun (albeit not very productive) to look through pictures for a while. 🙂

I finally got back on track and did gobs of organizing. Last year I posted a few interviews on my publishing site, and I’ve turned that into a weekly interview series for 2018. The next interview will be live tomorrow – it’s with Thea Hutcheson about her short story in Stars in the Darkness, an anthology that I put together last fall. I’ve been surprised at how much fun I’ve had putting these interviews together, plus ones like this one with Thea give you a way to learn more about what’s behind a story.

He hadn’t meant to cast a love spell on Ceana. The enchantment he’d found was supposed to make her notice him, to see him for who he really was, just for a few days. She’d hated him since they’d first met, and no matter what he’d done since, he’d only managed to strengthen her dislike for him.

And no matter how much he’d tried not to care about her, he couldn’t stop. He’d been in love with Ceana since he accidentally spilled his glass of wine on her dress, three years, two months, and seventeen days ago.

So when he’d come across the spell in an old book of magic his great-great-grandfather had brought when he’d emigrated from Scotland, it had seemed safe. What harm could possibly come from casting a spell that was designed to do something so simple?

Apparently quite a lot, if the person casting it was so excited about finding the spell that he didn’t correctly translate the handwritten Gaelic text.

– from “Bewitchery”

That sample is from my story “Bewitchery.” I have at least one more story set in the same world, with some of the same characters, but I’m considering renaming the character currently named Ceana. I wanted her to have a Gaelic name, but in retrospect it might have been better to give her a name that had a more straightforward pronunciation for most of the people who’d read the story. Even I have to look up the pronunciation every once in a while, which seems like a bad sign.

I’ve never renamed a character, though, so I’m kind of torn about this. I don’t want it to be like when you start watching a new series of one of your favorite television shows only to find they’ve replaced one of the actors but you’re supposed to pretend like it’s exactly the same person. On the other hand, since I do intend to write at least one more story with the same character – and that story may be a novel – this would be the time to make the change.

I can’t decide what to do, so I will just do some background fretting about that while I work on my current project. 🙂