Cats and luck!

I’m very, very pleased to report that my taxes are done! Hooray! For the first time ever I put most of the information together in December, so the final bit was extremely easy. The end was even easier since my super awesome accountant did the hard work, at least from my perspective. 🙂 I’d like to say I learned a valuable lesson, and will be this organized (or even more!) going forward. We’ll see if my good intentions last…

While I am, sadly, going on ten long years of being catless, I write the occasional cat-themed story, and each time I think about how happy I’ll be when I have cats again. Notice I said cats plural—because why have just one? 🙂 Three of my catty short stories are in the Cat Tales bundle series, which is curated by Steve Vernon. Steve is a wonderful writer—he’s had stories in several collections I’ve organized so far, and I hope to continue working with him for many, many more years. He’s also a cat lover, hence the Cat Tales series!

Steve also put together the Weird Wild West bundle, which contains my novel With Perfect Clarity as well as three other novels and eight short stories.

I’m working on several anthologies, have ten or so short stories to write before the end of the year, have committed to make a round of edits on my next novel and deliver it to my editor by July 1st, and plan on writing at least one more novel (actually three, but we’ll see how that goes…) by the end of the year. And yes, I still have a day job, make time for my friends and my dogs, and all that…so my life is obviously a time management nightmare. 🙂 But things are getting better, because I recently hired an assistant—and she’s awesome!!!

I learned about Adriel Wiggins from another author I know, Andrea Pearson. (Andrea is also awesome!) About two weeks ago I decided to email Adriel and see if she had any room for another client. Fortunately I hadn’t yet listened to the interview Mark Lefebvre did with Adriel in which she said she wasn’t taking on new clients. 🙂 Completely by accident I managed to email her at just the right time, so I snuck in—and now she’s back to not taking on more clients.

Even though we just started working together last week, Adriel has already saved me gobs of time. Plus she’s super organized, detailed, and very easy to communicate. I am spending a lot of time right now documenting things and cleaning up my existing files, but the time investment on my part is totally worth it. I am SO happy to be working with her! Now I’ll just need to stay focused and take advantage of the extra time I have to write!

I finished two new things!

I recently finished editing a new short story, and sent it off for review! I think the editors for this collection will like it, but you never know. Or they might like it but feel it’s not a good fit for this particular collection. Having put together a bunch of collections myself, I’ve learned that a story can be fantastic, but if it doesn’t fit the theme, or if it doesn’t mesh well with the other stories, then it’s not a good fit for the collection as a whole. But in this particular case, I can say that my mom likes it, so that’s a win! 🙂

This new story is actually one that I started writing in 2014. I had a full draft, but I’d never made the final editing pass because I always had other projects that had deadlines and homes, whereas I wasn’t quite sure where to submit this one. It’s a post-apocalyptic story, set in our contemporary world, but after a virus has wiped out most of the world’s population. I wanted to focus on what life might be like for someone who’d survived the pandemic—but I also wanted to give the story a more positive spin. We’ll see what the editors of this collection think!

I also recently wrote a historical fantasy story, “The Tommys,” which is in Beasties, the latest issue of the Uncollected Anthology. I had several ideas, and I liked them all, but I just kept feeling like they weren’t quite right for this collection even though they all fit the theme. I finally decided to write a new story using a character I’m considering using for a novel series at some point (in my copious free time…). That was totally the right decision, but it’s a historical fantasy story, and any time I write historical fiction I end up spending a lot of time doing research to get facts right (or at least as right as I’m able to). So the new story took way, way longer to write. 🙂 I really like the end result, though!

Who knew?!?

My new mattress is made from fishing line! Yes, fishing line. Check it out!

Our mattress looks like a collection of scrubby pads. 🙂 Why anyone thought to make mattresses out of fishing line in the first place is beyond me, but hey, that’s innovation for you!

I know you’re thinking: not only does this sound weird, could it possibly be comfortable? The answer after three nights is: sort of. 🙂 This is a very firm mattress, so while it’s fine for sleeping on, it doesn’t feel very cozy. When I wake up in the middle of the night, instead of snuggling under the covers and feeling all warm and snug, I think: “Well, I guess I’m supposed to go back to sleep now.” Sleep feels a bit more perfunctory than enjoyable. We’re going to buy an extra padding layer, which I think will fix this issue.

I haven’t done any writing recently, as I’ve been working on getting the anthologies I’ve edited into print. Yes, finally! 🙂 This requires creating full covers, which include the front, back, and spine, and the interior of the book is formatted slightly differently. For example, I’ve added blank pages in a few cases so that each story begins on the right-hand side of the page. Most of my time is spent designing the cover, and I’ve spent a ludicrous amount of time figuring out how to save the cover in the right format. I’m using Photoshop, so I export the cover as a jpg, then open it and save it again as a Photoshop PDF. Sounds super easy, right? Wrong! 🙂 I’m doing something wrong, but I haven’t figured out exactly what yet. Mysteriously, I did manage to successfully create and upload one cover that worked, but I have no idea why it worked. Fortunately I’m stubborn and have a sense of humor…