Newsletter Reincarnation!
August updates: new newsletter, Trello organization, near-Hugo win, upcoming events & new business venture!
Hello!
So it’s August, my birthday month, and instead of assessing my life on New Year’s Day like most people, I do the personal deep dive in August. This month, I’m trying to, well, get my crap together. This includes re-animating the newsletter I started last year but had to put in limbo when I lost the previous platform (I am imagining the newsletter rising from a grave, rotting clothes and all!). So, welcome to the new ‘newsletter me’!
Another thing I’m doing this month is working to come up with a better way of scheduling my life. As a freelancer, nothing is ever calm or stable, and I’ve often got 2 or 3 jobs going at the same time, plus books or stories to start writing or, more important, finish writing. This doesn’t take into account life stuff. It’s all just … a lot. For years, I’ve used a paper day planner (sometimes 2!). I don’t plan on giving that up because it’s worked to give me an overview of the upcoming weeks or month. But I need something a bit more granular, more day-to-day. So, on the advice of a good friend and fellow too-busy-to-think writer, I’m going to try Trello. That way, if I don’t finish a thing on one day, I can move its little box over to another day in the week and pretend that it’ll get done! Wish me luck!
In other news, I recently got home from Glasgow Worldcon, where the Hugo Awards are handed out. I completely forgot to look at the various statistics, which are almost always published the night after the ceremony (except for during the 2023 Worldcon, but we won’t wade into that quagmire here!). I was shocked when the next morning Val Nolan, my Spec Fic for Newbies co-author, alerted me that volume 1 of the writing guide missed being on the Hugo shortlist for the Best Related Work award by about 8 votes! But on the heels of that, we were pleased and honoured to find out that Spec Fic for Newbies vol 1 is a finalist for the British Fantasy Award for Best Non-Fiction! I’ll be on hand at FantasyCon in October to see the outcome. (But, as always, if we don’t win, we are still super excited to be recognised!)
Coming Up
Coming up soon is Alex Davis’s writing Folk Horror event: Strange As Folk 2024. It runs online on September 14, and my workshop on using the folk horror ‘chain’ in your writing will start the day off. More info here.
Coinciding with that event is the release of the newest Black Shuck Books Great British Horror (Book 9): Something Peculiar 2024 anthology. I’ll have a story in it called “Until the Wheel Spins Round Again”: Gwen flips houses for a living, but at night, while living in her most recent project, she hears a baby cry; while her narrative thread runs forward into the 2020 pandemic, young Sarah’s story in the house nearly 400 years before starts at the end and runs backwards. Details on authors and titles are slowly spreading, but take a look at the website for more.
News Claxon
My final bit of news is something I’ve only just done, so I haven’t announced it all over the place yet. I‘ve taken over an established typesetting/book formatting business, Book Polishers. So along with my freelance editing and proofreading, I’m becoming nearly a one-stop shop for publishing!
It’s nearly autumn (YAY!), which means there are lots of craft & etc. shows coming up, and I’ll be hand-selling books and meeting readers in person. Find me at these events (or navigate my Linktree to get a hold of my books if you’re not in East Anglia):
Stonham Barns Autumn Craft Market Sept 21 & 22
Stonham Barnes Xmas Craft Market Nov 23 & 24
Stonham Barns Xmas Market Nov 30 & Dec 1
I’m planning by next year to have a new novella to add to my list of publications as well as a couple more short stories (in upcoming anthologies I can’t talk about yet!), and hopefully, a novel.
But for now, enjoy the rest of August and roll on autumn!
Tiffani