My first non-fiction book will be available this Thursday! More about it then, but I’m super excited! This book is about creating and promoting story and book collections, so it’s obviously targeted toward authors and publishers, not the casual reader. 🙂

I’ve started working on a second non-fiction book, which was not on the list at all until about two weeks ago. My goal is to hand it off to my editor by June 1st, so it feels like I have a lot of time…but having just finished one book, I’ve learned there’s a lot more work involved than it appears! The good thing is that this gives me a lot more prep time than I had for the 1st book, plus this also provides a good amount of time for my editor to do her part and for the two of us to iterate on the manuscript.

Here’s an update on new things I’ve learned and experienced in the past week!

Learnings

I learned that cooked tomatillos can be tasty!

Since I have two large and ridiculously prolific tomatillo plants, I’ve been struggling to figure out what to do with the tomatillos. I never even ate a tomatillo (knowingly) until a few years ago, when my parents forced me to take a bunch home from their garden. After making tomatillo salsa I was sold, and have grown a few plants every year. The plants I have this year are many, many times larger than any of my tomatillo plants ever got in the past. I’m sure part of this is because I now have a raised bed with a sprinkler system, plus the variety I grew this year is supposed to get large (although not this large!).

Last night I roasted a bunch of tomatillos and poblano peppers (also from my garden), and made a stew with them and a few other things. I was really surprised at how tasty the roasted tomatillos are.

Unfortunately this didn’t even make a dent in the number of tomatillos still out in my garden, but it was a fun and tasty experiment nonetheless.

Experiencings

The one thing that stands out from the past week is that I got annoyed by world events, and after talking with a few author friends, I decided to start publishing two volumes/year instead of one in the justice anthology series. (All of the proceeds from this series go to charity.) The first volume is Stars in the Darkness, which contains stories about why being just matters, and what the ramifications are for individuals, groups, towns, countries, or even worlds if justice is not expected, encouraged, or enforced. The second volume, The Golden Door, is in progress. I gave the authors who participated in the first volume the opportunity to submit stories by October 1st, and just opened the anthology up for general submissions.

This series still doesn’t have a name, but there are several strong contenders. In fact, it’s kind of hard to settle on the name because the options on the list are all really good. Hopefully one of the names will start to stand out!