Jamie Ferguson's Blog, page 15

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Needless to say, our candidate did not win that year, in spite of our best efforts.

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...

The witching hour

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

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!

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...

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.

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...

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.

Witches and ghosts and elves

The Witches’ Brew bundle is now available! I’ll be posting information on the authors and their stories on the bundle’s Facebook page over the next month or two, so consider ‘liking’ the page on Facebook if you’d like to learn more.

This is a collection of twenty short stories about witches, magic, and enchantments, including my short story “The Lesson of the Love Spell.”

This is the second bundle I’ve put together, and in some ways it was even more fun than organizing the first one. With t...

There and back again

I spent the past week at the Historical Fiction, Alternate History, and Time Travel workshop taught by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. I learned a ton, got to catch up with a few authors I already knew, met five more authors, and had a wonderful time.

I not only wrote my first time travel story (which is, of course, the opening to a novel), I also wrote my first alternate history story (also a novel opening…). I’d never had any desire to write either – reading those types of stories is very differen...