Jamie Ferguson

I’m very, very happy to report that I’ve finished editing stories for two new anthologies! Hooray!

There are a few more steps before each one will get out the door, and everything is temporarily on hold while I wrap up a short story that’s due this week. But still!!!

I’ve been a bit slow on the writing front, partly because I seem to have allergies or something. I think maybe to dust, since I’m pretty sure I feel like this at the same time every year, and now that it’s colder we’re keeping the windows closed. Whatever it is, it apparently means that I have evenings where I don’t get as much as I’d like done, which is a little frustrating since I have a day job and therefore kind of need to work on writing tasks in the evening. I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving weekend, where I’ll have big chunks of time for a few days in a row.

Learnings

I learned that diamond dust mirrors are actually made using silver, not diamond dust. Melted silver alone won’t evenly coat the back of a piece of glass, but if you mix in mercury, the liquid mixture will. The mercury evaporates, leaving an iridescence that looks like tiny diamonds in the glass. I’ve seen mirrors like this many times, but never knew why they looked like they do.

Experiencings

For the first time in my entire life, I’m giving away a LOT of books!

I grew up thinking someday I’d keep acquiring book after book, and would eventually have a house with a library. I even had a library for about two years! Then my husband moved in with me, and I had to give him my library so he too could have an office. It seemed a bit selfish for me to have two rooms of my own. In retrospect, perhaps I should have kept them both…alas. 😉

I ran out of shelf space in my office years ago, and have done all the usual things: stack books on top of other books…stack books on the shelves in front of other books…stack books on the floor in front of the shelves… Last weekend my husband came in my office and said he was concerned that some of the books might fall and hurt a dog. I thought about his comment, and realized this was actually a legitimate possibility. 🙂

I made a small stack of books to donate (in another room, since obviously there is no room left in my office), and to my surprise, I found it was not nearly as hard as I’d expected to pick out books to give away. I have been thinking about doing something like this for at least five years, probably more, so I think my subconscious must have finally gotten to the point where it was okay with the concept.

That said, I have yet to actually donate these books, so we’ll see how things go when I get to that step…

Readings

Most of what I’ve read in the past week has been snippets from history books and websites that I’ve looked at while doing historical research for a story I’m working on. This has been really fun, and has been very helpful for the story, but I’d really like to actually read a whole book for a change! 🙂

My short story “The Truth About Goblins” is in a the Halloween Night bundle!

This story was originally published last year in the On Hallow’s Eve bundle, and I’m super excited to have it included in a second collection. I had such a great time writing it, and had completely forgotten that I’d wanted to write at least one more story with the same characters. I won’t get that done by this Halloween, but I’ve put it on my to-do list for next year.

Here’s the description of the story:

Bean hated Halloween.

It used to be his favorite day of the year. He had fond memories of teaming up with his friends to play tricks on the older goblins, and of the music and dancing and feasting that lasted until well into the next day. But after moving to live among humans, he spends every Halloween terrified that his true nature would win out and cause him to end up eating someone.

One Halloween an old friend visits. To his dismay Bean finds himself out amongst the trick-or-treaters, where he learns the real truth about goblins.

I also have a brand new short story out in Rocketpack Adventures, an anthology put together by Russ Crossley. Ten thrilling tales of action and adventure with humans and non-humans donning rocket and jetpacks to take on the future, the past, and alternate universes to defeat evil in all its forms!

This is the story I squeezed in during September, even though I was writing a non-fiction book that had an extremely firm deadline. I loved the idea of writing a story involving jetpacks so much that I decided I’d fit it in no matter how much work it was. And boy, was it a lot of work! Not because writing the story itself was hard, but because I was so crazy busy with the book I was writing, and I knew if I didn’t get the book done on time I’d miss the opportunity I had to include it in the NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month—Writing Tools bundle (an annual collection of writing/publishing books). I managed to finish my story, “The Levitation Engines,” just before the deadline. Literally! I sent it to Russ a few hours before midnight on the day it was due. And I turned in my non-fiction book (Bundle Up) the day before it was due. Success on both fronts!

Here’s my update on new things I’ve learned and experienced in the past week, with my exciting new category to cover what I’m reading! Note that I’m not talking about what I’ve finished reading… 🙂

Learnings

I’ve learned that dogs can be allergic to people!

Every year we’ve had Rosie (we adopted her in December 2013) she’s been itchy from roughly July to November. After five years of this, I finally decided to do allergy testing. And it turns out she’s allergic to me! Well, me and my live-in personal chef. 🙂 This seems perfectly logical, but I was really surprised. She’s allergic to a number of other things…grasses, trees, weeds, ants, and her strongest allergy is to wool. Yes, the border collie who would be awesome at herding sheep would, in fact, be allergic to her own flock.

We don’t know which of her many allergies cause her to be itchy for a few months a year. My guess is that her people allergy is not the cause of that, since of course she’s with us year-round. We’re going to try immunotherapy and hopefully that will help her next summer when whatever it is that causes the seasonal itchiness shows up. Maybe she has some issues all the time, thanks to being around people, but they manifest in a way we haven’t noticed—so hopefully the treatment will help her more than we’ll see.

Experiencings

I have a brand-new pillow stuffed with fluff from kapok trees!

My previous pillow was stuffed with down, and over the years it had grown smaller and smaller as the down compacted. It’s now a tiny fraction of its original size, and nothing I’ve tried to re-floof it has worked. I wanted to get another down pillow, but was a little uncomfortable about even cruelty-free down, so I did research on alternative fillings. I decided to give kapok a whirl, and I really, really like my new pillow!

Readings

Rather than actually finish a book, I’ve started reading a new one: Death by Polka, by Robert Jeschonek. It’s a cozy set in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. I’m on chapter 14, and I’m really enjoying the story.

I’ve been working super hard on getting a few anthologies out the door, so I’ve been doing editing and formatting books instead of writing. This has been kind of a nice break, since I spent about six weeks super heads-down working on my non-fiction book (and on the jetpack story I snuck in during that time). But I’m looking forward to getting back to writing fiction. Which is good because I have a few more deadlines before the end of the year. 🙂