I haven’t actually been gone, I’ve just been extra super busy—which is saying a lot, since I’m usually super busy. 🙂 I’m so happy to be working with my virtual assistant, Adriel Wiggins, and her team! They’ve been a tremendous help, and I’m still handing things off to them, so they’re going to be even more help. Plus Adriel is not only super organized, she’s also smart and funny and has great ideas. Hooray!!!

Quite a few people have asked me what kind of work Adriel does for me, so here’s a quick overview. She’s proofed an audio book and the audio revisions (I’d still be listening to the first version…), and is going to collaborate with me to get this set up on Amazon and friends. She and her team (because Adriel needs assistants too!) have formatted a bunch of promotional materials for me, are working on formatting the manuscripts for the next anthology (things like making sure each story uses the same style of dashes, ellipses, etc.), and will put together the resulting ebook and print files. Adriel has set up a number of projects using Asana, a project/task-tracking tool, and I’m so happy with what she put together that I’m now using Asana for the projects I work on with my friend and co-editor DeAnna Knippling as well. And there’s more! But that should give you a sense of how much Adriel has helped me out since I hired her in April.

In dog news, Jasper has been getting either acupuncture or a massage once a week, and his back is clearly feeling better! He even occasionally does a downward dog stretch, which is so great to see. He’s not as stretchy as Rosie, of course, but still!

I planted the first batch of herbs in my garden on Saturday, just in time for a frost advisory. I covered everything that night, but then gave up after that. It’s snowing right now…yes, it’s May… 🙂 This weather is ridiculous! I think the herbs will probably be okay, but I’m glad I held off on planting the peppers. The plants growing in the rocks next to my raised bed are borage volunteers, seeded by last year’s borage. I’m torn between pulling them (since there really aren’t supposed to be plants growing in the rocks) and leaving them (since I love borage, and so do the bees). Thanks to our wintry weather I don’t have to make my decisions just yet.

I have so many projects (one might say too many, but I wouldn’t listen if one did) going on right now that it’s a good thing I’m using Asana to track everything, or I might forget something important. 🙂 Innocence and Deceit, the second anthology in the Ever After Fairy Tales series, will be available in paperback any day now (it’s already out as an ebook). Water Faeries, the fourth volume in the anthology series A Procession of Faeries, will be out in June (in both ebook and print—from here on out, I’ll release both formats at the same time). DeAnna and I are about to begin editing stories for the next issue of Amazing Monster Tales, Monster Road Trip, and the first issue will be out in paperback soon. I’m reviewing stories for a few more anthologies; I won’t start editing them until June, but am going through the submissions now. I’m putting together a faerie-themed ebook bundle which will be available on StoryBundle in November, working with Adriel to get the audio and print versions of Bundle Up! released, and am gearing up to work on edits for my novel Entangled by Midsummer (which will be released as part of the bundle in November). This past week I wrote one non-fiction article, revised another, and participated in the quarterly Uncollected Anthology conference call. and I’m probably forgetting something, but as you can see it’s kind of hard to keep it all in my head. 🙂