Jamie Ferguson's Blog, page 14

December 12, 2016

Eureka!

I started WMG Publishing‘s Teams in Fiction online workshop last week, and had a eureka moment!

I’m planning on writing a series set in the same world as my short story “The City Trees,” my soon-to-be-released novel Entangled by Midsummer, and The Lady of Winter, which is the story I talked about outlining in my last post. This series will contain five novels, each with a different protagonist – but they’ll all be related.

Having a different main character in each novel isn’t out of the ordin...

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Published on December 12, 2016 12:01

December 5, 2016

The ideas just keep on coming

Today is the last day to purchase the Very Merry Christmas bundle on the BundleRabbit site, where you can can donate 10% of the purchase price to either the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society or The Humane Society of the United States. After today the bundle will be available on Kobo, Amazon, iBooks, and Barnes & Noble – but there won’t be an option to donate to charity.

Very Merry Christmas bundle banner with covers

I’ve been working on bundling-related tasks for the Haunted bundle, and that plus thinking about the Very Merry Christmas bundle...

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Published on December 05, 2016 07:06

November 27, 2016

Squeaky toys and fonts

The Very Merry Christmas bundle is only available for purchase on the BundleRabbit site for one more week! It will be available elsewhere after that, but if you purchase it through BundleRabbit you can donate 10% of the purchase price to either the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society or The Humane Society of the United States.

Very Merry Christmas bundle banner with covers

I’ve been working on both the cover and the manuscript for “The Scent of Roses,” my short story that will be in the Haunted bundle. I’ve been experimenting with different font...

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Published on November 27, 2016 18:28

November 20, 2016

Getting in the holiday spirit!

The Very Merry Christmas bundle is now available! This bundle contains twenty stories of Christmas cheer, and is curated by the ever-festive Rebecca M. Senese. Rebecca is also the curator of the Out of This World bundle, which contains my short story The Cat’s Meow.

Very Merry Christmas bundle banner with covers

We’ve finally had a tiny bit of cold weather here in Colorado, and even got some snow the other day, so between that and the bundle I’m starting to feel ready for the holidays! Yes, it was 70 degrees today, but still.

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Published on November 20, 2016 17:02

November 14, 2016

Things that matter

Election years are always interesting. Sometimes my candidate wins, sometimes not. I still have fond memories of the time my friend Kim and I painted “Vote for Perot!” on our cars in white shoe polish.
Perot 1992
Needless to say, our candidate did not win that year, in spite of our best efforts.

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Published on November 14, 2016 07:50

November 7, 2016

Editing and bundling and planning

Only one more week to go before the Very Merry Christmas bundle launches! It’s curated by Rebecca Senese, who also curated the Out of This World bundle. Rebecca has put together a great collection of stories, and I’m really excited to be a part of this bundle. I can feel the holiday spirit already!

My story “The Least Merry Elf” is about Jolper, a disgruntled elf who works at Santa’s Workshop.

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I’m curating three more bundles in 2017: The Haunted bundle will be available February 1st, The Fa...

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Published on November 07, 2016 06:17

October 30, 2016

The witching hour

Tomorrow is Halloween, and the Witches’ Brew bundle’s sale is almost at an end!

The Witches' Brew bundle - Halloween sale

I’ve had SO much fun curating this bundle. Yesterday we were in the top 100 in all three of the bundle’s categories on Amazon!

The Witches' Brew bundle - Amazon rank

Thanks to Lucya Starza for mentioning the bundle on A Bad Witch’s blog. The Bad Witch, aka Lucya, has a book of her own. Candle Magic: A witch’s guide to spells and rituals is a grimoire on candle magic – and if you think you don’t believe in this type of thing, remember how many times y...

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Published on October 30, 2016 17:16

October 24, 2016

Back to editing!

It’s a warm fall here in Colorado. We’ve been raking leaves, but during the days it’s been in the 70s – and sometimes even 80s. So it doesn’t yet feel like fall, which apparently means I do most of my writing on the couch in the living room where I can enjoy the sunshine, instead of in my office. I’m curious to see if this changes when we switch our clocks in two weeks. Lately I’ve noticed every time I go into my office I have a “wow, there’s a whole other room in our house!” feeling.

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Published on October 24, 2016 07:28

October 17, 2016

Sometimes writing is easy, and sometimes not so much

My Christmas story is done! Hooray!!!

I’m really happy with it, but wow, did that take forever. Sometimes I’ll start a story and the words just pour out onto the page, and other times it takes a Herculean effort to write a paragraph. With this story, which I titled “The Least Merry Elf,” I ran into both kinds of writing.

My rule of thumb is to not worry if a story is hard to start because by the time I’m about 1,000 words in I’ve usually gotten comfortable enough with the character whose poi...

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Published on October 17, 2016 09:06

October 9, 2016

Elves at Halloween

It took me longer than I expected to get into the Christmas elf story I’m writing – it’s hard to think holiday thoughts when it’s not even Halloween.

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Published on October 09, 2016 15:16