Back to editing!


My very first contributor’s copy arrived this week!

My short story “The Next Dance” is in Fiction River: Tavern Tales. Here’s the anthology’s description:

Think you know a tavern tale when you hear one? Think again. The seventeen stories in this volume run the gamut of genre and mood. Bars filled with glitter and ghosts stand alongside taverns filled with orcs and adventurers. Exclusive members-only drinks served at the end of the universe war with coffee bars with strange employee policies in the Pacific Northwest. Dive bars, afterlife bars, gay bars—you name it, and you’ll find it in Tavern Tales. So, grab a drink and get ready for one of the most entertaining Fiction River volumes yet.

I’m also excited to report that it was recently announced that Fiction River: Wishes, which will contain my mermaid story “Twin Wishes,” will be available in March 2018. Yay! That may seem like a long time away – and rest assured that it seems even longer to me. 🙂 But it’s super exciting nonetheless.

This has been a slow week writing-wise thanks to my ongoing website/email migration. Rather than fix the one website that got hacked, I decided to move it and this site to a new hosting provider, since that was already on my to do list. Then once that was done I realized I’d forgotten to redirect my mail, and my emails were bouncing. Oops… I investigated a few options, then finally decided to go with G Suite (formerly Google Apps). That took more setup time, and I’m still waiting for my email to finish migrating. At this rate, it may be done by the end of the week…apparently I should have cleaned it up before starting the migration. But soon this will all be done and I won’t have to worry about any of it ever again, other than when I get the bills since I’ve drastically increased what I’m spending.

I’m now back to the editing I’d planned to finish last weekend. I still haven’t come up with a name for the faerie story, but here’s an (unedited!) snippet from the first page.

Context: a young human girl somehow ended up in the Land of Faerie, and doesn’t know how to get back home. A few faery boys, who were out playing games, came across her, and aren’t quite sure what to make of the little girl.

The small creature certainly didn’t make any sense. She clutched her doll, as if an inanimate object could do anything to help her find her way back to the Land of Men, and continued to make the same horrendous racket she’d been making since the sun had started its slide down from the top of the sky.

Nuár hoped she’d stop soon. If humans made that type of sound all of the time, that would certainly explain why faeries had so little to do with them.

Once this one is done I’ll wrap up “Clyde and the Ghost Cat,” which appears to be the title for the ghost cat story. That was a lot of fun to write, although it did make me miss having cats… Rosie and Jasper would like having cats too. Maybe… 🙂

A surprise detour

I started editing the faerie story on Saturday, and had set aside the entire day to finish editing it and my Lovecraftian story “The Late Bloomer.” (Lovecraft meets Jamie, so make of that what you will.) And then I realized the post on my publishing site in which DeAnna Knippling interviewed Rebecca M. Senese about her Haunted bundle story had gone live but was not showing up on Facebook. How odd, I thought. And so I investigated.

Many, many hours later 🙂 I had moved both websites to a new hosting provider. I’d been planning on switching anyway, and had done some research and narrowed my options down to two companies, but I hadn’t been planning on switching this soon! It turned out that my publishing site had gotten hacked, and while the hack itself was very easy to fix, my guess is that the plugins I’d tried to update in an attempt to get the interview to post to Facebook had gotten corrupted because I ran the updates before realizing there was something more broken than an out-of-date plugin.

Since the site was all jacked up – I’d click on a link in the admin panel and get a totally blank screen – I decided it would be safer to move that site by hand. Fortunately it’s a pretty small site at this point, but it took a while to configure the domain and all, and then I decided to take advantage of the mishap and restructure my media library… At least I didn’t have to move my author site by hand! There are still a few little things to tidy up, but I’m very happy with the new company.

While I’m a little behind on editing thanks to this exciting turn of events, I did get through the first scene of the faerie story (which I hope gets a name soon). This story will appear in the Faerie Summer bundle, which will be released on May 1st. I wrote it about 2 years ago, and I just love it. It was also interesting to see how my writing has improved. In 2016, my big craft revelations were when and where to use ‘said’ tags, and to use more line breaks. Unsurprisingly, this story needs adjustment in both of those areas. That’s easy to do, of course, and it was cool to see how this type of thing jumps out at me now, but it obviously didn’t two years ago.

It’s a little frustrating to have lost most of a day, but on the bright side, now I don’t have to worry about having to move my websites. 🙂

I had a surprise package waiting for me when I got home tonight – my contributor’s copy of Fiction River: Tavern Tales!

Rosie and Jasper look like they’re excited about it, but they really just wanted to play ball. Don’t worry, that’s what we did as soon as I stopped trying to make them pose with the book…

This anthology issue contains my story “The Next Dance,” which is one of the stories I sold at the anthology workshop I took last winter. It’s very, very neat to see it in print!

And now I’m off to do some editing!

Rosie and Jasper keeping an eye on their pine cones.

Beware the ghost cat

I’m afraid to let my guard down, but I’m finally starting to get caught up on my many, many projects! In fact, I’m even ahead of the game on a few things! Hooray!

Each week, a post about one of the stories from a bundle I’ve curated will be published on Blackbird Publishing’s blog. I’ve now written and scheduled ten posts – that means those posts are scheduled through the first week of May!

Interviews with the bundle authors will appear on that site occasionally as well. The very first one will be published next Sunday – DeAnna Knippling, who loves doing author interviews, has interviewed Rebecca M. Senese about her short story “The Haunting of Melsbury Manor,” which appears in the Haunted bundle.

And I’m also writing a series of “how tos for authors” posts, which has been really fun to work on – although I am not ahead on those posts… 🙂

My next newsletter will be out in a few weeks – on March 20th, the vernal equinox, and the beginning of spring. So that’s on my list to write as well. I’ve been providing newsletter subscribers with a link to a secret page on my website that provides something special, like a peek at a cover for a story that’s not out, or the text of a short story. I’m pondering whether or not this is a good approach – if you have any thoughts, I’d love to hear them. Quite a few authors I know provide a free short story when you sign up for their newsletter, so I’m debating whether or not that would be a better way to go. I originally thought I’d put up a short story every quarter (since I send out the newsletter four times a year, unless there’s a sale or other special event), but I’ve committed to delivering so many stories this year that putting up something new every few months is just not doable.

The Faerie Summer bundle is the next one in the queue, and there are several more in various stages of planning after that one. The Beneath the Waves bundle will be released in the summer, and the theme is mythical water creatures. So far we have a few variants of mermaids/sirens, a kelpie, a rusalka, and a few man-sharks from Hawaiian mythology. It’s going to be a fun collection! And after that one is a fairy tale bundle (no title yet), which will be released in January 2018. There’s been so much interest in the fairy tale theme that it might turn into two separate bundles, which would be kind of neat.

My writing group gave me good feedback on my Lovecraftian story “The Late Bloomer,” so I’m making a few tweaks and will have that one wrapped up this week. I’m currently working on an unnamed story about Clyde, a cat who has moved into a new house only to discover that there’s a ghost cat haunting his house – and she keeps lying in his favorite spot in the sun! It’s a cat horror story! 🙂