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!