I’ve been interviewed!!!

Mark Leslie Lefebvre interviewed me for episode 27 of the Stark Reflections podcast!!!

This was my first ever podcast interview, and it was really fun! Mark’s podcast is one of my top three favorites, and while I haven’t yet worked up the nerve to listen to my own interview, it’s coming up in my feed and I’ll hear it in the next few days.

In the interview, I officially committed to finally publishing the non-fiction book about creating story bundles and anthologies that I’ve been saying I’d write for ages. I have lots of notes, and know this area very well, so what I haven’t jotted down will be easy to write. I just way overpacked my schedule for the past, uh, year…or so…and it was easier to put this off because I had so many other things that had actual deadlines. This is no longer the case, because I’ve given myself an official deadline, and even got my editor signed up to work on this book! Huzzah!

Speaking of bundles, my story “To Be a Monster” is in the Here Be Monsters bundle, which was put together by A. L. Butcher. This story was originally published in the Beneath the Waves bundle last summer, and I’m really excited to see it included in a new bundle.

This is one of the super cool things about story bundles and anthologies – you can reprint already published short stories, thus giving even more people a chance to find them. For example, one of the collections I’m putting together includes a reprint of a short story by Jaime Lee Moyer. It’s a wonderful story, but because it was originally published in an anthology years ago, right now only people who come across that collection will be able to read it. But soon it will be in a new collection, and will be read by people who would never have seen it otherwise!

Alex, the curator of Here Be Monsters, has organized quite a few story bundles, and has a number more planned. You can find links to the published collections, as well as information on what’s coming up, on the bundles page on her website. She’s also posting author interviews – and character interviews, where a character in one of the included stories is ‘interviewed.’ 🙂

I’m about to embark on a five-day weekend. For reasons I don’t understand – and am not about to argue with – my day job gave us all two days off for the July 4th holiday. I couldn’t pass up the chance to have five days off in a row, so I’m taking Friday off as well. I am very happy to have all this time, and I have SO much work to do – finishing edits on stories, writing new stories, editing stories for anthologies… I’m going to work hard on being focused and disciplined, and will try to avoid the “I have X days left, I’ll work on that later” trap. Wish me luck!!!

Jasper lying in the hole he and Rosie dig (and then we fill it up, and then they did it again…) under our yew. If you look closely, you can see Rosie’s cute little face through the branches.

Tree excitement

There’s been a lot of tree-related excitement at our house this week. It seems awfully coincidental that I’ve been working on a story about a dryad… 🙂

Our brand new crabapple!
We’ve added a Spring Snow crabapple by our garden. It will eventually shade part of the garden for at least part of the day, but that’s okay. This variety makes white flowers in the spring, and doesn’t make any fruit at all. I’m very excited about the new addition!

I’m actually excited about all our new trees and plants. We had our backyard completely redone last year – our sprinkler system had only partially worked for years, which of course meant we had big patches of dirt in our yard. And that in turn meant that when it rained we had two very muddy border collies… Now we have a lovely yard with grass that not only looks great, but also doesn’t need as much water as other varieties. I regularly walk around the yard and talk to the bushes and the trees, and tell them how great of a job of growing they’re doing. 🙂

Yesterday I watched a bee take a piece of a leaf from our redbud, and I was sure I’d imagined it, because since when do bees carry away pieces of leaves? This morning one of the guys from the tree company came out (a branch on one of our much older trees was broken by heavy winds last week, and needs to be pruned before it falls off and damages what’s beneath it…), and he saw the leaves of the redbud and said: you have leafcutter bees. I really did see a bee rip off a circle of a leaf and fly away with it! How cool is that?!?

Jasper and Rosie are unimpressed with the bees, but they do like playing in the yard, lying on the patio and, of course, digging in their favorite hole. We just put the dirt back when they’re done, which works great for them because they can lie in the cool dirt of their hole on hot days, and then dig the hole again after we fill it up.

In addition to all the fun tree goings-on over the past week, I was interviewed for a writing podcast last week for the first time ever. It was fun and exciting and only a little scary. 🙂 I’ll post more about it when I know when the episode is going to air. On the podcast I committed to finally publishing a non-fiction book I’ve poked at for a very long time, so I will be working on that as soon as I finish writing two more stories, wrap up a slew of edits, and make a book cover or two. The one good thing is that my day job gives us not one but two days off for the Fourth of July holiday this year, so I’m going to take a vacation day and have five whole days in a row to write – and to play with Rosie and Jasper!

Jasper and Rosie standing by a clump of prairie coneflowers. (And a pine cone.)

It’s never too wet to play

After a very hot week, we’ve now had two days of rain. Rosie doesn’t like to go out into the backyard when the grass is wet – she seems to not like getting her feet wet, because she’ll shake her feet off as she walks through the grass. 🙂 I’ve been having to lure her outside by going out into the rain myself. Once her feet are sufficiently wet (or once there’s a tennis ball involved) she doesn’t mind the rain, and will sit under her favorite bush until we make her come inside.

We managed to get our Saturday hike in while it was still sunny, though! There’s an irrigation ditch near the start of our regular trail, so Jasper and Rosie jump in the creek at the beginning of our hike to cool off, and then again on the way back to the car. I can fake Jasper out by throwing a rock in the water if I don’t have a pine cone, but Rosie pays closer attention, and she only gets in the creek if I throw a pine cone.

I’ve started to take photos of wildflowers on the trail. I only know the names of a few of them, and I’d like to know what they all are. I even have a book or two about Rocky Mountain wildflowers that would be helpful if I could remember where I put them. 🙂

My library outgrew my bookshelves years ago, and I now have stacks of books piled in front of other books, so it may take a while to find the books about wildflowers. In the meantime, here’s a photo of a lovely clump of yellow flowers that I don’t yet know the name of.

Speaking of books, my short story “Twin Wishes” is now out in the latest issue of the Fiction River anthology series! I sold this story over two years ago at the anthology workshop I attended on the Oregon coast. The theme for this collection is young adult stories involving wishes.

My story is told from the point of view of a teenage girl who is a mermaid – but she can’t allow her friends – or the boy she has a crush on – to learn about this side of her.

But sometimes things turn out differently than you planned, and sometimes wishes do come true. 🙂

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

John had never even looked at her, so it was ridiculous to be so infatuated. But, just like at least half the girls at school, she couldn’t stop thinking about him.

She daydreamed about walking through the park while he whispered something to her, something special and wonderful, his breath warm on her ear and his arm slung around her shoulder. Her diary was filled with little hearts drawn around variants of “I love John!” or “John + Ileana = True Love FOREVER!” all written with different colors of glitter pens and varying numbers of exclamation points. If only he felt the same way about her.

Of course, even if he did, she couldn’t let him know she was a mermaid.

None of her human friends knew, of course. This was how it had been her whole life. Who knew what would happen if regular humans found out that merfolk were living among them?

– from “Twin Wishes”
in Fiction River: Wishes