Hello one and all!  I hope you are all doing well and are safe!  I mean, I have a news app, a decision that I regret on a daily basis, and I see that the world is completely bonkers right now.  Everything is bad and hurricanes are just the whipped cream on the poop sundae we’ve got going for us.  Stay safe, please.

I’ve got news to share!  October is going to be a great month!  I mean, it usually is.  Fall is my favorite season and Halloween is tied as my favorite holiday.  But this year, I’ve got stuff coming for you!

My novel, coming out from Thunderstorm books will be out in October!  Isn’t that cover magnificent?  It is not ready for order yet, but when it is, I will post links all over social media.  I promise you won’t miss it!  I can’t convey in any sort of educated way how excited that I am about this release.  It’s my first “big” release since Vicki Beautiful and I am so incredibly proud of this work.

I have a short piece in Unnerving Magazine’s BIG Halloween edition!  I was so freaking happy to get this acceptance because Unnerving is a great asset to the horror genre with the articles, reviews, interviews, and published pieces.  My piece is short and weird and I am so very psyched to have my name on a magazine with so many other authors that I greatly admire.  Check out Unnerving Magazine and when this issue goes live, of course, links will be all over social media!

And lastly, my yearly Halloween short will be out in October!  I love this cover (look forward to me saying that about everything I publish, I am easily smitten)!  Last year’s Halloween short, Mischief, is always available in ebook on Amazon and is a mere $0.99 always and forever, or if you’re a Kindle Unlimited user, it’s free.  If you haven’t checked it out, I hope you will and I hope that it will whet your appetite for this year’s short!  Here’s a little snippet for you! It’s very rough, mind you, so be kind!

The familiar is a nonessential tool that aids the witch.  In olden times, the thought was that the familiar was given to the witch by the devil himself.  These familiars were lesser demons who aided the “evil” witches in their terrible deeds and even occasionally killed the enemies of the witch with whom they were bonded.  This, of course, is nonsense.

            Familiars, in my own pagan faith, are animals.  I do not pretend that I am so powerful as to summon a creature of magic and command it to aide me.  No, it is my belief that familiars find us, sensing in us our magic and maybe even a connection of souls. 

            My familiar walked out of the woods behind my house one day.  A proper forest panther, this long-haired black cat walked right to me and sat at my feet, looking up at me with a startling intelligence gleaming from her golden eyes.  She is with me when I practice magic, in all my workings.  Even if it is something as minor as a healing tea, my familiar is with me, channeling the power that I harness. 

            My grandson named her Jeffy.  It is not a dignified name, I’ll grant you, but it is her name.  It is the one that I know her by and the one she answers to when I am in need of her for either magical workings or companionship.  Jeffy is a good spirit. At least to me and mine, at least as long as I am living.  Woe to the world that has to suffer a familiar that has outlived it’s witch.

And that is all of the news for now!  There will be more later, I can tell you that!  As an aside, do you know those little moments that we have that make us pause and notice that we are, finally and definitely adult?  Or a parent?  Or one of those enormous life-changing titles?  I am just now, typing this, having that kind of revelation where I really and truly feel like I am a writer.  Wow.

I guess I’ll say goodbye now and harness this energy and keep writing.  Thanks for hanging with me and keep an eye open on my Facebook author page, or my Twitter page for those links!