Here is my first blog post for 2022 and my 89th post since I began blogging on May 1, 2020. It’s time for an update on the Emerald Cove projects.

Before I get to the exciting news, however, I have an announcement about this blog. Instead of writing a post every Friday, as I’ve been doing for more than a year, I’m switching to the first Friday of every month.

Why change from once-a-week to once-a-month? There are two main reasons. First, my beloved co-author and I are nearing completion of the sequel to Prophecy’s Malignant Son, so I need the extra writing and editing time. It takes a long time for me to produce these posts each week — particularly the ones with the travel pictures. At present, I really need to focus that time on the new fantasy novel.

Second, a weekly commitment can be rather stressful, particularly on those weeks when I am unable to think of a good topic for the blog. Coming up with 12 topics a year will be far easier than 52. If I switch to the first Friday of the month, it will take off a lot of pressure and ensure that this blog continues to be a fun activity that I look forward to completing.

When I first started writing the blog in May 2020, I was in a writing slump. John and I had published 60th Hour, but we didn’t know where to go from there. The pandemic shutdown had been going on for two months, and I still felt lost and insecure. I was trying to rewrite an older manuscript to use as our second published novel, but it just wasn’t working. The project did not excite me, and I was dragging my feet.

Producing this blog every week, got me enthused about being an author again. Apparently, writing about writing is a great way to get excited about writing. The blog helped “jump-start” our fiction and got the two of us talking about new story ideas. By September 2020, John and I came up with the plot for Prophecy’s Malignant Son, and we finished writing it in less than a year from start to publication. We began writing the sequel in June 2021.

Will this blog ever go back to a weekly format? Perhaps. We’ll see.

Well, so much for that. Now, on to the real news!

Emerald Cove Press has finally announced the title of its upcoming anthology. Exiles of Eeria will soon join the Cove’s line-up of short-story collections. Unlike the two previous anthologies, which included unrelated stories on a particular theme, the new book is a shared-world anthology. Although each short story is separately written, they all take place in the same fantasy universe with many of the same characters. In this case, the fantasy setting is our own beloved San Diego, a truly magical place if there ever was one.

It’s Emerald Cove’s most ambitious project to date, and we’re very excited about it. In addition to two short stories by yours truly, it includes great fiction by Danny Atwood, Sue Dawe, Stephanie Golightly, and Jefferson Swycaffer. It also features amazing artwork by Sue Dawe. You can see her great book cover featured in the picture at the start of today’s post.

Emerald Cove has not yet announced the official publication date for Exiles of Eeria, but I’ll keep you posted as soon as that occurs. In the meantime, have a great month!

I’ll talk to you on Friday, February 4, 2022.

-Susan 1/7/2022