Midsummer at Midwinter!

Entangled by Midsummer has been released! It’s currently live on Amazon and Kobo, and will be up on the rest of the sales channels within another day or two, it has a page on Goodreads, and it should show up on my BookBub profile soon. It actually went live on December 21st, so while Amazon is showing it as published on the 20th, I didn’t submit the files until the 21st. 🙂 Print will be available soon—I’m trying a new approach there that will take a little more time, but I got impatient and decided I’d just publish the ebook since it was ready to go.

As often happens to me, this book began as a short story assignment (ha!) in a writing workshop. After much fretting, procrastinating, and chocolate, I finished the book in 2016, sent it to my editor, got her initial comments…and then did absolutely nothing with it for three years. The delay was partly because I’d started putting together short story collections (initially ebook bundles, then anthologies), and as I only had so much time, something had to go by the wayside. But it was also because novels are scary. Not only are they quite a bit longer than short stories, they take a lot more time and energy. Plus if you write a short story that’s good but not great, it’s just one of a bunch of stories you’ve written—whereas if you’ve only written one novel, your second novel is going to stand out a little more to potential readers, so you want it to be the best book possible. This all apparently requires a lot of fretting and procrastination, and I certainly did plenty of both with this book. 🙂

So in the summer I finally buckled down, got back to work, and finished the book! It was originally released in November as an exclusive title in a bundle of books on StoryBundle, so I couldn’t publish it anywhere else until that bundle ended. DeAnna Knippling, my friend and co-conspirator on many things (as well as my super awesome editor) interviewed me about my novel for that bundle. The fabulous Adriel Wiggins did continuity editing on this book—among other things, she caught a few eye color changes, as well as a few time inconsistencies since I made a few changes to the timeline. Thanks, Adriel!

The one complication with this novel that I did not expect is that my writing skills improved quite a bit over the past few years, and since I’d set this manuscript aside for three years, I had to do a lot of work to tidy up a few spots. That took more work than I’d anticipated, but it was also really neat to see that I’m a better writer now than even just a few years ago. I’m also a lot more focused, so while I do still procrastinate, I don’t do so nearly as much as I used to. I’ve learned that even though sometimes writing a story (or a novel!) feels hard, I will get to the end.

It’s good that I’ve learned this lesson, because I’m taking the last two weeks of the year off from my day job, and have set a goal of finishing the first draft of a brand new novel. 🙂

Rosie and her pig.

Announcing the Realm of Faerie bundle!


Enter the Realm of Faerie, a world of beauty, danger, and enchantment. But remember the legends if you want to make it back home again…

The tales in this bundle are set in worlds like Tír na nÓg, Annwn, the Otherworld, Elfame, as well as in our own—for there are places where the boundaries between worlds grow thin, and one can pass over as easily as stepping across the threshold of a door. There are queens, mermaids, and monsters. Bargains are made, and secrets kept. Duels are fought, curses laid, and wishes sometimes come true.

These stories contain both good faeries and bad, their motivations noble, or selfish, or sometimes beyond the ability for mere mortals to comprehend. Some of the worlds are enticing and filled with marvels, others rife with threat and intrigue—and, just like with much of faerie mythology, many of the tales in this bundle intertwine beauty, enchantment, and danger. For part of the appeal of Faerie is that it’s a land of contradictions, a place where you could dance with a king or queen under the silver light of the moon, then the next night be sacrificed to a god so ancient no one remembers his name.

I’ve loved reading about faeries since I was little, and am delighted to bring you this collection of novels and short stories. I had a wonderful time putting together a collection of the kinds of books I love to read, and I hope you enjoy them as well.

Step into a fairy ring, walk through a portal, or follow one of the straight tracks, and enter the Realm of Faerie!

The Books

Enter the enchanting, beautiful, and sometimes dangerous world of fairy tales in Alethea Kontis’ Tales of Arilland. Alethea received a volume of unexpurgated fairy tales for her eight birthday, and the impact of reading those stories of magic, monsters, darkness, blood, and hope is clear in the nine tales in this wonderful collection.

In Windshaker’s Bane, by Tom Deitz, the faeries—the Sidhe—come across as magical, intriguing, and different from mortals, yet at the same time feel very, very real.

Jenna Elizabeth Johnson’s Faeborne takes us to a land where the Morrigan, the goddess of war and strife, aspires to become more powerful through the use of violence and sacrifice. This is a wonderful tale of how even in dark and complicated circumstances, one can find love, trust, and happiness.

Midwinter Fae is a collection of short stories about faeries and magic set at the time of the winter solstice. Will the Holly King, who signifies the old year and the shortened sun, be defeated by the Oak King? Or will winter reign eternal?

Anthea Sharp’s Faerie Song: Ten Magical Tales contains stories about magic, music, and the fey. Several of her tales incorporate elements from traditional ballads and songs, and Anthea’s love of music (she plays⁠—and sings!⁠—Celtic music) is evident throughout this beautiful collection.

Faery Novice, the first book in Leslie Claire Walker’s Young Adult series Faery Chronicles, takes us to a fast-paced world of magic, intrigue, and romance where faeries, angels, and demons are all very, very real.

Enter the beautiful, magical realm of winter in Amber Argyle’s Daughter of Winter. The Winter Queen’s daughter lives a life of isolation in the land of ice and snow, unaware that she is a key part of a bargain that was made long, long ago.

Leslie Claire Walker’s Faery Prophet is the second book in her Young Adult series Faery Chronicles. Will the blossoming powers of a faery seer’s apprentice be strong enough to prevent a demon from rising? Or will he lose, and become a demon himself?

Sharon Kae Reamer’s Primary Fault, the first book in her Schattenreich series, is set in Cologne, Germany. Sharon, a retired archeoseismologist who actually lives in Cologne herself, creates a unique, engaging, magical world which combines mythology, seismology, history, and romance.

Things often take an unexpected turn in DeAnna Knippling’s stories, and One Dark Summer Night is no exception. In this book she’s created a dark, intriguing world with fairies who are more complex than they first appear.

Sacrifice, Changeling, and Rival are the first three books of Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s series The Fey. The Fey, a beautiful, complex people, have conquered have of the world, and are determined to control it all. Kris weaves elements from mythology together into a world rich with battle, intrigue, mystery, and love.

Charlotte English’s Mr Drake & My Lady Silver is a beautiful, engaging tale about curses, predicaments, magic, and love. Pour yourself a glass of ice-wine, grab a cloudy starcake with jelly pearls, and enter the world of Aylfenhame.

Entangled by Midsummer, by Jamie Ferguson (me!), combines elements from Celtic mythology with intrigue and danger. I love to put my characters in situations where they have to make hard choices, and when you throw in faeries, magic, and ambition, the consequence of failure becomes deadly.

The Realm of Faerie bundle

This bundle is available for a limited time at StoryBundle.com/Fantasy.

Bundle buyers have a chance to donate a portion of the purchase price to the charities Mighty Writers and Girls Write Now!

Progress on making progress

My laptop died last week…which may be partly my fault. 🙂 It was doing a zillion things—I always have a bunch of apps running, and 50+ browser tabs open in multiple windows. It had gotten really slow that day, and for some reason I thought: I know, I’ll reboot it!

I’d forgotten about the warning message I’d gotten earlier that day telling me I was almost out of disk space…

Since there was literally no disk space left (oops), my laptop was unable to boot. I normally kept it in a stand and plugged it into two big monitors, but something had obviously gone awry I pulled it out of the stand and set it flat on the kitchen counter. Except…it wasn’t flat. 🙂 The bottom of the laptop had become slightly rounded because the battery had swelled, which is a Very Bad Thing. And once I realized that (which I only did because my husband pointed it out), I remembered that I’d noticed that the bottom wasn’t flat a few months ago. I just hadn’t thought anything about it. You might be wondering: What exactly did I think at the time, and why did I assume it made any sense for the bottom of my laptop to suddenly become rounded? That is an excellent question which I am completely unable to answer. 🙂

Fortunately my husband lent me his laptop, and I keep almost everything in the cloud in some way or another, so I was able to get back up and running with most things after only an hour or two.

But there’s more! Yesterday I realized I couldn’t open any of my Photoshop files that were in a Dropbox folder on an external drive, which was alarming as every single book cover I’ve created is in a Photoshop file. I’m still not sure exactly what happened, but it turns out that while the files on that drive are bad, what’s actually in Dropbox is fine. Whew! I think this may have been because I was accessing the drive across the network in a way I’d never done before…although it still doesn’t quite make sense. Whatever happened with those files also happened to my Quicken file, so today I realized that all the work I did balancing accounts and things last weekend didn’t actually get saved, and has to be redone.

My new computer should arrive tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to recreating my little world. I’m especially excited about finally being able to look through all my photos from Tokyo on a big screen. They’re all safe, but I didn’t want to set up too many things on my husband’s laptop since my new computer was on its way. It’s an iMac, which I’ve resisted buying for a long time because I like the flexibility of a laptop. But most of what I do is at my desk and doesn’t require a laptop, so I think this is the right decision.

One good thing that came out of all of this is that I sort of cleaned my desk. “Sort of” means that I got rid of some extra computer-related things (a monitor, an external hard drive, and an Airport that I didn’t even realize existed), and I dusted (at least the top of the desk). There’s still a big pile of papers that I need to sort through because I’m behind on paying bills thanks to all my computer excitement, but at least there’s a lot more space for the pile. 🙂

I started a new short story today, and am really happy with where it’s going. Writing is like exercise: if I take too long of a break it’s hard to get going again, even though it’s something I want to do—and know I’m capable of doing. I hadn’t written anything in over a month, and on top of that I’ve been super busy—even without the computer craziness. 🙂 So it was really, really hard to get going today. But now that I’ve started this story I should be fine…until the next time I take too long off from writing…

Ready to play ball!