Hello! Sorry to have left you hanging for months and months. I’m not great at blogging regularly, but I guess you know that by now.
Here’s what I’ve been up to lately:
My largest ongoing project (besides my ever-in-progress fantasy series THE VOID AND THE RAVEN) is a collection of ghost stories, tentatively titled HAUNTED HOUSES. This is a long-term project I’m hoping to finish and self-publish in the next five years, or possibly sooner if I’m able. It will include new editions of older stories like “Wake Your Ghost” (which you can read here) and “Spirits in the Dark” (a novelette first published by JMS Books, which unfortunately didn’t get much attention although I was really fond of it). I also hope to include stories like “The Angel,” which you can currently see in Literally Dead: Tales of Holiday Hauntings by Alienhead press, and about fifteen other stories now in various stages of development. I’m currently editing another novelette called “The Woman at the Top of the Stairs,” which is a gothic romance story set in Prague, and hope to start sending it out soon.
On the subject of publications, I have an announcement to make! A very cool new magazine called Baubles from Bones has chosen my story “The Feast of the Changes” for publication in its inaugural issue. “Feast,” inspired by Where the Wild Things Are, is a soft, dreamy fantasy story about a boy traveling the world with his best friend: a large, furry monster. I had a great time writing it, and I’m really happy that it found a home with this venue. You can read the magazine (or purchase a copy) here.
There’s one more project I wanted to let you know about: some friends and I are putting an anthology together. It’s a collaborative project on the theme of “Journeys,” and it’s been in the works for a few years now. Everyone involved is a writer friend and occasional critique partner (including several from the Durham Writers’ Group), and all of us write speculative fiction of one stripe or another. Since late 2020, we’ve been batting things back and forth on Discord, deciding the anthology’s theme and parameters and editing each other’s contributions. Given that coordinating with other writers is like herding cats under the best of circumstances, and adding the specific complications of having to play chat-tag across disparate time zones, we had some trouble keeping things going, and there’s been a lot of trial and error involved in this process. But we’ve kept going, and we’re almost finished, and we’re pretty excited about it.
We’re hoping to publish the anthology in September. It will probably be released as an ebook first and then in hard copy. I’ll let you know about preorders as soon as they’re available. If you’d like to receive updates, you can join our Facebook group here.
Contributor Allegra Gulino has also created a Facebook page where you can see promotional artwork she’s created for this project.
We’re really looking forward to telling you more about this project as we get closer to publication time. In the meantime, thank you for tuning in, and have a great month!
Katherine Traylor 