Jamie Ferguson's Blog, page 18
March 7, 2016
Hooray!!!
I sold three out of six short stories at WMG Publishing’s anthology workshop!!! Yay!!!!!
They’ll be published in three different issues of the Fiction River anthology series. The publication schedule has not yet been finalized, but I do know that the earliest any of my stories will come out is May 2017.
The stories I sold were:
“The Next Dance” for the Tavern Tales issue. Editor: Kerrie L. Hughes
“Twin Wishes” for the Wishes issue. Editor: Rebecca Moesta
“Haunted” for the Hard Choices issue....
February 28, 2016
Oregon Ho!
I’m finally at the anthology writing workshop in Lincoln City, Oregon!
I had a little time yesterday before class started, so I drove down to Newport. Entangled in Midsummer is set mostly on the Oregon coast, and I wanted to take some photos to get the imagery better set in my mind. Here’s one area that’s similar to a setting that’s used at the end of the novel.
Hopefully I’ll have time to drive around and take a few more pictures before I leave. Even if I don’t tweak anything in the story,...
February 21, 2016
Cover up
On Friday I received the first pass at book covers for Entangled by Midsummer, my upcoming novel. I spent the rest of the day trying not to stare at them every three minutes. 
There are four different covers, each using different images, fonts, etc. I can’t share the images here since I haven’t purchased the rights to the artwork yet, but I can say all four are very different from one another. Two immediately appealed to me more than the others – not that the other two aren’t good, because th...
February 14, 2016
So many lessons!
I’ve read 76 of the stories submitted for the anthology workshop – only 159 to go!
While this is an awful lot to read, it’s been really fun. The quality of the writing is very good, the stories are engaging, and on top of all of that I feel all of this reading is helping me look at my own writing from a different perspective. I’m not quite sure yet how to quantify what I’m learning, but as an example I just re-read one of my own submissions and felt that looking at all of the other stories h...
February 7, 2016
The reading has begun…
I have to read 235 short stories this month…
The next phase of homework for the anthology writing workshop is to read, or at least attempt to read, all of the stories submitted by the other students. Not everyone wrote stories for all assignments, but there are really 235 stories total. I’ve read 40 so far, and am glad I’m a fast reader!
Totally random photo of the snow we got this past week.
In the workshop we’ll spend every day listening to the seven anthology editors discuss why they would...
February 1, 2016
It’s time for recess!
I submitted the sixth and last short story for the anthology workshop last night. Hooray!!! Now the writing is done, so it feels like a break…but there’s plenty of work left to do. By the time class starts in a few weeks I need to read, or at least attempt to read, all of the other short stories submitted by my fellow students. There will be somewhere around 300 stories total. I rarely have enough time to make it through my monthly book club book, so this is definitely going to be a challenge...
January 18, 2016
And the winner is…
It took years – literally! But I finally have the title for my selkie novel!
I will, of course, continue to wonder if this is the right title. But I’ve been fretting about this since I started working on this story, so why stop now?
The working title was originally The Selkie and the Sidhe, but it quickly became clear that I’d have to come up with something else. I found an awful lot of people aren’t clear what a selkie is, much less a Sidhe. And as I worked on the manuscript, I realized th...
January 11, 2016
Tiddlywinks
Yesterday I finished the third of six short stories I’m writing for the anthology workshop I’m taking next month. It was so much fun to write! I set this one in the old West, and I had a ball both with the writing and the research. I also used this round of research as an opportunity to improve the organization of my research/reference material.
The soon-to-be-released (and soon-to-be-named!) novel has a variant of a Cù Sìth/Cú Sídhe, which is a hound from Celtic mythology. The next novel in...
January 3, 2016
In with the new year!
I don’t set New Year’s resolutions. I prefer to think of things in terms of guidelines rather than rules, and saying something like “In 2016 I will finally organize the storage closet in the garage!” feels more like a burden than something to look forward to. (And it’s not even that cluttered of a closet.)
That said, I am very detail-oriented, and I can’t stop myself from tracking some things. So rather than set goals for 2016, I’m looking back at what I accomplished in 2015. I have to confes...
December 27, 2015
Fictional logistics
I am in the middle of a logistical nightmare.
I’m working on chapters 16 and 17 of unnamed novel #2. There are only nineteen days left to figure out the title…but that’s another topic.
Chapter 16 is the beginning of the climax of the book. There are two critical scenes, one leading to the other. Both scenes are logistically challenging – right now I think the first scene is the hardest, but we’ll see if that’s true when I get to the second.
The first draft of chapter 16 was written from one...
