I’ve published a new anthology! Doorway into Faerie is the third volume in the anthology series A Procession of Faeries. The theme is faery paths, portals and passageways. This collection contains my new short story “And Then There Are Cats,” which includes a naughty cat, and was very fun to write.

Volume #4, Water Faeries, will be out in a few months. I’ve received all of the stories, and will get back to editing them in another few weeks, once I wrap up my current projects. I haven’t put out the call for submissions for volume #5 yet, but the theme is the Wild Hunt. I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to write for that one, but I’m sure it will be fun!

The next collection coming out is Dawn of the Monsters, the very first volume in the brand new series Amazing Monster Tales, which I’m co-editing with DeAnna Knippling. We’ll start posting on our Facebook page and website soon, so keep an eye out!

My non-fiction book Bundle Up! is in the NaNoWriMo Writing Tools bundle for a few more days! This bundle ends November 30th. I’ve interviewed most of the other authors in the bundle, if you’re interested in learning more about them and their books: Andrea Pearson, Craig Martelle, Scott King, Kevin McLaughlin, Blaze Ward, Simon Haynes, and Dean Wesley Smith.

Learnings

I’ve learned a lot about colors and Photoshop over the past few days. The biggest thing I learned was that I need to learn more. 🙂 As much as I love the cover for Doorway into Faerie, it’s pretty dark and is a little hard to read in a thumbnail. It’s even darker on Amazon and friends, and while I think I understand why now, I still am not completely sure how to fix this. I have some ideas, but I spent hours and hours and hours adjusting the colors, and finally decided the image was good enough for the time being. I will give it another go at some point. This experience reinforced a lesson I previously learned, but apparently needed to have reinforced a third time: don’t use really dark backgrounds on a book cover if you want people to be able to see the imagery clearly.

Experiencings

This week’s experience is that I released an anthology for the first time in about eight months! There are a lot of reasons for this big gap. It’s actually kind of funny that I’m thinking of this as a gap at all, since three years ago I would have considered the very concept of putting together an anthology a bit overwhelming. But I’ve now released nine collections, the tenth should be out in a week or so, and the eleventh and twelfth will follow shortly afterward. 🙂

Readings

A few days ago I finished reading Death by Polka, a cozy written by Robert Jeschonek. I met Bob at a writing workshop in Oregon a few years ago, and overheard someone at that workshop talking about this book. It sounded like fun—how could a cozy involving polka and murder not be fun? 🙂

I’m now reading Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon. I started reading this years ago, but at the time my day job took a ton of time and mental energy, and I found it hard to read much fiction. It’s been fun to get back to this book! I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d left off, so I picked a spot and am re-reading a few chapters I read a few years ago. But that’s actually good because it’s getting me back in the story and the characters.