Monday's musings: Goblins, Gardens and Secret Books

My favorite reads from last week and what I'm working on this week

As I wandered the garden over the weekend, my mind kept circling back to a short story I read this week: Goblin Market by

Plotted Out

. I don’t want to spoil anything from Goblin Market, but you should go take a gander. I love stories about the fey from older tales. It reminds me of that and The Green Man, Tales from the Mythic Forest. It's a lovely anthology that ranks up in my top ten books from all time.

The garden itself is doing well. The weird weather patterns have changed things in strange ways. Half my flowers didn’t come up but the ones that have are dazzling. My dahlias are so stunning. Yet my mind wanders to the future and how two of my raspberry bushes died along with one of my blueberry bushes. I worry.

But brighter subjects. What am I working on?

That’s a complicated question since I decided to toss a little chaos into my schedule. Earlier this summer, I discovered the Publishing Derby by Inkfort. It's a contest of sorts for writers. Yet, it's anonymous and you can’t spend any money. Talk about starting over from scratch.

I didn’t have time to fit another novella into my schedule. Already, I publish once a quarter in the Nexus Universe. The Nexus Universe is a connected Universe that all of my books are in. It's a place with interconnected worlds through the leylines and portals. Some worlds understand the network, others don’t. Portal fantasy at its finest for a new adult audience. I love it.

Call of the Traveler in my Traveler series just launched this month and book three, Courage is coming out in October. I’ve drafted my January release, but I need to get started on the April release as well. My goal this year has been to get ahead by at least two books.

Yet… yet… there was this list of 154 covers for the contest. 

You see you rank them and then people are randomly chosen and they get the first pick on their list. Then it moves to the next random person and they get the first pick on their list, unless it was already chosen and they get the second. It goes from there through all 100 authors.

So many pretty covers in different genres than I am already writing. Ideas sparked and I added them to my ideas doc. Then I found myself ranking the covers. Finally, I caved and signed up. I could add a short novella to my schedule - if I focused. If I stayed on top of everything.  

But I can’t talk about it. Best of all, I still can’t. Not until Oct 25th when the contest part ends. Otherwise, I can’t discuss what I wrote, the good and the bad, or anything. At least I have learned that I hate keeping writing secrets. So October 25th, I’m going to throw a Secret party and spill everything that has been bottled up for the past two months.

What am I working on in the meantime?

A spin-off from the Traveler series. Susan, a side character from the first Traveler book had way too much to say. Or what she seen. She is getting her own series. The working title is the Seer series but I want something a little better. My plan is that the series will be several books long but we will see. In between that, I’m writing episodes of MEOW. 

I’ll be posting snippets of the first Seer book here as I find cute little things that don’t spoil anything.