No More Mourning Rugs

Today, I feel fairly accomplished (at least so far), despite not doing that much writing. I did work on a number of writing-related things, however.

First of all, I wrote the acknowledgements and a new bio for a short story in the AngeLINK universe that Cheryl Morgan at Wizard's Tower Press will be publishing. It's a story that was first published in, of all places, South Africa, in 2003, in a magazine called Simulacrum: The Magazine of Speculative Transformation. The short story is going to get cover art for the first time EVER, which I bought from the lovely and talented Theo Lorenz, who happens to be the author of the successful coloring book Unicorns Are Jerks (and others.)





What do you think? I know it doesn't match Bruce Jensen's amazing cover art for the AngeLINK universe or even the cover of Resurrection Code, but... I don't know, maybe short stories are friendlier? (Also, I didn't ask Bruce, because I'm sure I can't afford him.)

At any rate, I'm pretty excited to have this story come out and have a wider distribution. Wizard's Tower Press has been very awesome to me. I will let you know when this will be available for public consumption. I believe that it's first going to be part of a giveaway for the Accessing the Future Anthology's successful fundraiser. But, I suspect once they have the contributors have their copies, Wizard's Tower will make it available to the public. And, yes, of course, as soon as I have those details, I'll post them here (and probably everywhere. :-)

And, since we're talking writing, there are two new chapters up at the Enter The Unseen/School for Wayward Demons website, "The Cavalry Arrives with Donuts" and "Destroying the Dead." So, if you've continued along with the story, there's just so much extra goodness for you today.
Speaking of the School for Wayward Demons, I got a very, very rough draft of the novel version off Naomi for beta-reading and probably some triage/first aid. I feel like the novel has good bones but, because of the way Rachel and I wrote it, it's a kind of Franken-story, stitched together with very obvious stitches! :-) But, Naomi is a very smart reader and has always in the past found ways to make my books make sense, so I trust her to have good advice to smooth out the rough edges.

And, to be fair, this is all work I'm doing before I'm even giving it back to my co-author, so it will get many subsequent passes. I'm absolutely sure that by the time we're done, it will be one seriously amazing book.

Fingers crossed, 2015 will start with at least two publications! So yay! Go me!

My other resolution has to do with the blog post I made below in which I discussed some of my publishing "feels." As I told one of the commenters, one of my problems is that I actually had a really good career with Penguin and so when the rug got yanked out from me, I was so stunned that I just sat there on the floor, not getting up, shouting to all passers-by "HEY, THERE WAS RUG HERE! WHAT HAPPENED TO MY RUG? WHY DO YOU STILL HAVE A RUG? I WANT MY RUG BACK!"

It's time to get up off the floor. The rug is gone, my friends, and it's time to move on.

So, I'm going to finish up UnJust Cause, self-publish that, and then, with any luck at all, start on some new novel project.

I'm kind of excited to see what it will be.