Ok, first thing’s first, Last Friday I didn’t update because I was traveling. I was in Vegas for the week taking an incredible number of notes on Space Opera and all of its inner workings, attempting to internalize all that lecture, and then also writing a story so I could get critique from my instructor.

I’m chuffed to report that both of my short stories were returned with “this is excellent, no notes, send it to magazines” !!!

Last year at a craft class with this same instructor I had a much more thorough teardown of where I had gone wrong, so clearly I’ve improved in the year since then! I’m extremely pleased with this.

Stories were sent. Current status of on-market stories is:

The Glass Flower Library to Asimov
Vault Runner to Interzone
Weaving The Lovelace Gate at Analog
In The Eye of the Beholder at Analog

Between finishing the space opera class and now, Glass Flowers was submitted and rejected from Clarksworld and Vault Runner was submitted and rejected from Asimov. So I just keep sending them out until I get a bite. Rejections aren’t personal and they’re not reflective of my level of writing. You’ve got to hit the right editor at the right time with the right story on the right theme at the right length. It’s hard to line up all those variables when you control none of them!

As for This Week.

I started the week intending to take most of it off for a break, and I did take Monday to relax. It took a few days to recover from travel, so I’m glad I built that into my schedule.

And then 47 took office and Did Some Shit that made me angry and I went right back to work.

I have proofed Hellebore Court #2 and #3. Hellebore #1 and #2 are both formatted into ebooks and I’ve started the combined paper format for 1/2.

I’ve started my next short story, which is a Bone Witch entry that’s tangentially related to st. patty’s day. Not as firm a tie there as I’d like, but the story is good. I’m about 3k into that.

I’ve scheduled newsletters through the end of January, and created the February template. That puts me nicely ahead of the newsletter churn for now. I also took a chunk out of my ongoing audio backlist project.

New releases have been scheduled for preorder and scheduled for early access on my blog. March and May, I think, off the top of my head. April is reserved for an Uncollected short story (also Bone Witch, probably) that I haven’t written yet, it’s scheduled for Feb.

busy busy. You’ll start seeing bits for the Hellebore Kickstarter coming up soon. I need to assemble the content so I can start collecting emails for that. As always, you can read books 1 and 2 for free on the website with a membership.