All the turns!

Jasper isn’t allowed to hike or play ball for a month. He’s got some issues with his back, and while there’s nothing dire going on, he’s supposed to only go on leashed walks. Needless to say, this is going to be a very long month… 🙂 Conveniently, I bought a new book on dog tricks the other day, so he’ll at least get some mental exercise. Hopefully he and Rosie will learn how to take turns practicing. They are not very good at being patient – they both want ALL the turns!

Writing-wise, I’m still in fairy tale land. My latest short story, “Ilsa and the Dragon,” will be out in a week or so in Beauty and Wickedness, the first volume in the fairy tale anthology series I’m putting together. And “Magic and Machinery” is Once Upon a Quest.

I just interviewed Alethea Kontis, one of my fellow authors in Once Upon a Quest. Alethea is not only a wonderful writer, she’s been a speaker about fairy tales at the Library of Congress, and even gave a keynote address at the Lewis Carroll Society’s conference celebrating the 150th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I think she knows more about fairy tales than anyone else I know.

There’s at least one more fairy tale story on the horizon for me. I’ve got a general idea about what to write, and am hoping my subconscious will figure the rest out while I work on other stories. I’m pretty sure there will be a dragon in this one too…

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Ilsa scanned the rocks, searching for a place where she could scramble up. This close to the cliffs, she realized they were actually a collection of blocky granite towers. Low, blocky boulders lay scattered about at the base of the crags, with short, stubby bushes clustering around them. Higher up, several giant slabs of rock leaned on one another, and here and there a few brave trees grew on small, knobby outcroppings. A small waterfall flowed down the lichen-covered stone of the southernmost crag, and turned into a little stream. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of a raptor soaring high above the cliffs, its long tail streaming out behind it, and its red feathers sparkling in the sunlight.

Red feathers? Raptors weren’t red, and bird feathers didn’t sparkle. And birds didn’t have long tails like that.

But dragons did.

– from “Ilsa and the Dragon”
in Beauty and Wickedness

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The (as yet untitled) story I’m working on now is mostly set underneath London, so I spent some time over the weekend looking at images of tunnels and things. Fortunately I already had a Pinterest board set up thanks to another story. 🙂

Looking through these images reminded me how much I’d like to finish the other story – it’s the first novel in a contemporary fantasy series, and I think I’ve got about 20,000 words written so far. I’ve got a whole slew of things to write first, unfortunately, but it was fun to be reminded of that story and see that it’s still something I’m really interested in finishing. If I stay disciplined, I should get to it this year… 🙂

Jasper and Rosie are disciplined when they know there’s a ball involved.

In which I read as well as write

Beauty and Wickedness, the first volume in the new anthology series Ever After Fairy Tales, is getting closer to launch! I made teeny tiny tweaks to the cover to appease my OCD, I’m working on formatting the ebook, and I’ve been experimenting with marketing images. I’m also reading through every story to make sure there isn’t a random typo hiding somewhere, and so far have only found one very minor one where the word itself was spelled correctly, it was just the wrong word. 🙂

Speaking of fairy tales, I interviewed Jenna Elizabeth Johnson, one of my fellow authors in the Once Upon a Quest anthology. Jenna’s story “Bane and Balm” is loosely based on “Red Riding Hood,” and is set in the world she’s created for her Otherworld fantasy series.

I love the idea of writing multiple related stories set in the same fantasy world. This is what I’ve been doing with my faery short stories for the past year and a half – they’re all set in the same world I created for my really-almost-done-novel-as-soon-as-I-have-time, Entangled by Midsummer. Another nice thing about writing shorter works in the world I’ve created is that I can experiment with things. For example, in “The City Trees,” one of the characters uses something magic to create a portal from our world to the Land of Faerie. I have no idea how that magic works 🙂 but I’ll find out because it’s going to show up in future stories – and by writing about it in a short story I was able to play with the concept in a way that would be much harder to do in a novel.

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Her insides felt as though they’d been tied in knots. She watched, unable to pull away, as Roderick sat down on the edge of her bed and took her hand in his. The cold, hard metal of the ring he wore on his pinky finger rubbed against her skin. She willed herself to sit up, to pull her hand free from his, to push him off her bed and hit him over the head with the crystal potpourri dish.

She couldn’t move even the tiniest muscle.

“My dearest Maude,” he said. The moonlight cast dark shadows across his face. “I apologize for disturbing your slumber, but I simply couldn’t wait until tomorrow. I caused this lovely music to play in order to awaken you. I have fallen in love with you, and want you to be my bride.”

His bride? Who broke into a woman’s rooms, did something so she couldn’t escape – or even speak at all – and then proposed?

– from “Magic and Machinery”
in Once Upon a Quest

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In addition to everything else, I’m doing a ton of reading in preparation for the week-long Fantasy Workshop I’ll be taking in a few months. It’s taught by the wonderful Kristine Kathryn Rusch, who taught the Historical Fiction/Alternate History/Time Travel workshop I took in 2016. We have a massive reading list: 2 anthologies, 18 novels, 8 short stories, 4 movies, and 3 Wikipedia articles. 🙂 Fortunately Kris prioritized these so that we can read the ones most important for the class first, and then do our best to get through the rest. And even more fortunately, I’ve read 5 of the books before (really 6, but I haven’t read the 6th since high school and don’t remember anything about it).

Not only is it fun to read these stories, it’s been a big help for me because I got out of the habit of reading regularly years ago when I had a very demanding job, and while I’ve been trying to read more it’s hard to stay on track since my reading time is also my writing time. I do read stories for the collections I put together, and I’m also in a small critique group so I read the submissions there, but it’s not the same as reading books just for fun. The one downside is that there are a few books where we’re supposed to read book #1 in a series, and now I have to wait to read the rest of the books until after the workshop because all my reading time is booked solid!

Life is a fairy tale

My story “Magic and Machinery” is now available in the anthology Once Upon a Quest!!!

I am SO excited about this collection! I really enjoyed writing my story, and I’m thrilled to be in a collection with so many wonderful, talented authors. I interviewed Anthea Sharp, the author who organized this collection, and it still feels a bit surreal to think that I’m a part of this project. (If you enjoy Celtic music, I highly recommend you look up her band Fiddlehead.)

And on top of all of that, I was just invited to participate in a collection that is super amazingly awesome (I clearly need more superlatives), and I just might have to write more stories in the fairy tale, steampunk world I appear to have created. 🙂

In other news, I just returned from a rare vacation – a long weekend in Vancouver, BC, where we met up with an old friend, a reasonably new friend who feels as comfortable as an old friend, and went to another old friend’s wedding where I made new friends. 🙂 We had surprisingly sunny weather, which was wonderful – I had no idea there were mountains that close to the city! It did rain, of course, but only a smidgen.

I’ve been working hard on putting together the next anthology: Beauty and Wickedness, the first volume in the anthology series Ever After Fairy Tales. Every time I put a collection together I think about how much I’ve learned, and how that will make the next one easier… And then with the next one I realize how much more I have to learn. 🙂 I’m really excited about this series. I read all the stories beforehand, and it’s been wonderful to see how engaging and well-written they are.

While I had a wonderful time in Canada, I’m so happy to be back home with the dogs! We only spent three nights away from Rosie and Jasper, but it felt like weeks. It’s SO good to be back home with them!