Jamie Ferguson

The summer solstice has come and gone, and now that summer has begun (or now that we’re halfway through summer, if you like to think of things in terms of astrological accuracy) I’m taking stock of where I’m at and doing my best to make sure I stay on track with everything.

Since it’s me, ‘everything’ involves an awful lot of things. 🙂 But I wouldn’t be happy any other way!

My next published short story will be “The Switch” – it will be available in July in the Crimes, Capers and Rule Breakers bundle, which is curated by my friend Rebecca M. Senese. I’ve had a sneak peek at the cover and some other things Rebecca is putting together, and she’s doing a fabulous job – I can’t wait for this bundle to come out!

I haven’t done much writing over the past week, but I have spent a ridiculous amount of looking at potential cover images and experimenting with designs and fonts and colors. I’d like to put together the covers for a few of the upcoming bundles so that I can not only be ahead on that task, but also because having the design done early on helps give a little shape to the overall feel of each bundle.

My initial goal is to create three covers for an upcoming fairy tale bundle series (not to be confused with the faery bundle series…yes, I know it’s confusing…). After spending days – literally – trying out different things, I finally decided to take a completely different approach. This sort of means I’m back at square one, since this is a pretty drastic change and I now have to find all new images. But it also feels a bit more freeing because I have a lot more leeway in the imagery I pick, plus the overall cover design will be more simplistic, and I think that will convey a much more clear and concise message to the reader. I think the new approach will help link all three covers together as a series, and I wasn’t sure that was going to work quite as well with my original approach. Hopefully I’m right!

I’ve finally caught up on all the things!!!

There will be more things, of course, but as an unrepentant optimist I believe I will now not only stay on top of everything, I’m even going to get months ahead on my upcoming deadlines! Hooray!!!

I realize that’s an awful lot of exclamation points, but this is the first time I’ve felt on top of everything in 2017, so it deserves a bit of celebration. 🙂

Next up: The Beneath the Waves bundle launches this week!

This is the fifth bundle I’ve curated through BundleRabbit. I really love putting story bundles together. Yes, it’s a way to get one of my stories out in the world, which is very cool. But I also love to organize things, and this way I’m organizing something writing-related, which is awesome. Besides, if I wasn’t putting together story bundles I’d be doing something like organizing my garage instead. Clearly this is a far better use of my time. 🙂

The Fantasy in the City bundle was the first bundle I curated – it launched on June 20th, 2016. When I first decided to put that bundle together I wasn’t sure if I could find enough authors interested in participating, I knew there were a lot of things I’d need to learn (fortunately I didn’t realize at the time just how many things…), and the entire idea seemed daunting. But I decided it would be fun even if it didn’t go well – and it was fun, and it went well!

One of the many things I learned from that first bundle was that as a bundle curator (aka the organizer), I’m responsible for the stories that the participating authors have entrusted me with. This makes perfect sense now, but it was something I hadn’t expected at all.

I still feel this sense of responsibility. Yes, I want to do a good job in general, but knowing all of these authors are counting on me to do the right thing with their art is a serious and wonderful and special thing.

In my recent musings, I also realized just how much I’ve accomplished in the last year. A year ago I hadn’t published anything for about three years. In the past 12 months I’ve had six (eight by the end of this month) stories published in bundles, one published in an issue of Fiction River, I’ve sold one new story to an anthology, and I’ve submitted another story to an invitation-only anthology. I’m curating two more bundles that will be released in 2017, at least five in 2018, and I’ve been asked to write a story for another invitation-only anthology.

Yes, I do still have an almost-finished-really novel, and could have published that long ago instead of working on all of these short stories. But I’ve learned SO much from them, and from curating story bundles, that this has all been totally worth it.

My current goals are: work on promotion for the Beneath the Waves bundle launch, make progress on the classes I’m signed up for, get ahead on my remaining story deadlines for 2017, and finish and publish my current novel. 🙂