Making progress even without a personal assistant

I took advantage of the three-day weekend and worked super hard, but feel as though I’ve hardly made a dent in my to do list. Fortunately I write down everything I did, so I have proof of my accomplishments. 🙂

I published post #3 in my spiffy new series of how-to posts for authors. I was already writing up notes on this type of thing for my author friends when I learn something new, and I decided I might as well put this information on my website so I could more easily share it. Plus then I don’t have to try to remember if I wrote up steps for something on Facebook, in an email, on a mailing list, or in a Google Doc. And this also means I now know exactly where to look if I ever forget how to do something myself!

One of the many things I did this weekend was finish drafting all of the author profiles for the Haunted bundle. I’m publishing one/day on the bundle’s Facebook page. I can’t schedule those posts (they’re Facebook notes, not regular posts), so I still have to publish them manually every day – but they’re all written and ready to go!

A post about one author & their bundled story is also being published each week at Blackbird Publishing, but fortunately those are scheduled. 🙂 Those posts are alternating between bundles I’ve curated.

I finished the first draft of “The Late Bloomer” on Saturday. It’s a story I wrote for an anthology; I’ll get feedback on that from my writing group tomorrow, and then should have a final draft ready by the end of the week. It was really fun to write – I just wish the length limit was longer! It’s set at 4,000 words, and my first draft is about 3,300 – so I’m going to be dangerously close to the limit by the time I’m done.

This weekend I kept thinking about how great it would be if I had an assistant. A lot of the bundle/blog work is really straightforward, but it takes time, and it would be great to hand that off to someone. But since that is not an option at the moment, I spent some time this weekend streamlining things to make this type of work more efficient in the future. I’m also going to try to improve my time management and work on simple tasks like that when I have tiny time slices, or when I’m too tired to write. But I still would like an assistant…or I should say a third assistant who knows how to type…

My current assistants are quite helpful, just not very good with computers.

Bundles and faeries and plugins, oh my!

I’ve started posting author profiles on the Haunted bundle’s Facebook page. 🙂 Each profile contains information about one of the stories in the bundle, as well as cover images for some of the author’s other work, and links to where you can find that author online. I’ll be posting one every day until I’ve made it through all 20 authors.

This is the first bundle I’ve been in that was available on both BundleRabbit and other sales channels (Kobo, Amazon, iBooks, and Barnes & Noble). It’s been really neat to see the bundle have also-boughts so soon after launch. An ‘also-bought’ is when you look on Amazon or wherever and see a section that says something like “people who bought this book also bought these other books.”

The next bundle up is the Faerie Summer, which launches May 1st. I still need to make the finishing touches on my own story (and come up with a title…), but I really love this story and can’t wait to see it out in the world. It’s about a little girl who accidentally wandered into the realm of Faerie, and doesn’t know how to get home again. One of the faeries who finds her is a minor character in my almost-done-really novel, and it was fun to write about him as a child. He’s definitely going to appear again in the future.

I’ve been busy catching up on classwork. I have one more week of videos to watch in the Endings class (yes, that’s about how to write good story endings), just did the first homework assignment for the Point of View class, and I’m, ahem, working on catching up on videos from one of the classes I took last summer. 🙂 The homework assignment I just turned in last night involved writing about 500 words of a story opening, and while I’m not yet sure where my opening is going, it’s clearly going to become a full story so I’ve added it to my list of projects to work on someday.

And now I have a new project: figure out which WordPress plugin is wreaking havoc with my website. 🙂

Ghosts, saloons, and superstars

My short story “The Next Dance” is in Fiction River: Tavern Tales!

Fiction River is an anthology series published by WMG Publishing, which also hosts the anthology workshop I went to in Oregon last February – and they purchased my short story at that workshop.

I’m very excited to have a story in Fiction River, and not just because my story is the only Western in this issue. (I was shocked to discover that in spite of the title “Tavern Tales,” I submitted the only Western!) 🙂 Just look at the list of authors: Stefon Mears, Michèle Laframboise, Ron Collins, Dayle A. Dermatis, David H. Hendrickson, Lisa Silverthorne, Diana Benedict, Anthea Sharp, Kim May, M. L. Buchman, Eric Kent Edstrom, Brenda Carre, Dory Crowe, Brigid Collins, Chuck Heintzelman, and Annie Reed. They’re all fabulous writers, and it’s super awesome to see my story alongside theirs.

Not only did Fiction River: Tavern Tales come out this week, the Haunted bundle launched as well. In fact, it launched on the first day of the Superstars Writing Conference in Colorado Springs. And on top of all of that, I started drafting posts for Blackbird Publishing’s blog. Needless to say, it was a busy week. 🙂

The Haunted bundle is the third one that I’ve curated (aka organized). It’s available on BundleRabbit for a limited time, just like all the other bundles have been, but it’s also available on Kobo, Amazon, iBooks, and Barnes & Noble.

In the past, bundles would be available on BundleRabbit and nowhere else for a few weeks, then they’d be available on the other sites but not on BundleRabbit. I really like this change because it allows people who want to donate a percentage of the purchase price to charity to do so by buying on BundleRabbit, but it also makes the collection available on more familiar sites for those people who would otherwise have to wait a few weeks to purchase it.

Superstars was a lot of fun. This conference focuses more on the business end of writing, but this year they added an additional day for craft-related topics, which was very cool. I learned new things, caught up with some author friends, and met a ton of new, wonderful people. There was quite a bit of variance in the authors who attended. Some hadn’t published anything; some have lots of books out. Some are indie published, some traditional, and some hybrid. But regardless of where people were in their careers, everyone was friendly, helpful, supportive, and happy. My absolute favorite part was James A. Owen’s talk on drawing out the dragons. It was a powerful, positive, beautiful talk which he regularly gives to children. I went up to thank James afterward, but it was a little challenging to speak because I kept crying 🙂 so I gave him a hug instead and thanked him verbally the next day.

And now…it’s back to normal life for a while. I’ve got stories to finish, author profiles to write, posts to draft for Blackbird Publishing, and dogs to cuddle with and coo at.