Today is the last day to purchase the Very Merry Christmas bundle on the BundleRabbit site, where you can can donate 10% of the purchase price to either the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society or The Humane Society of the United States. After today the bundle will be available on Kobo, Amazon, iBooks, and Barnes & Noble – but there won’t be an option to donate to charity.

I’ve been working on bundling-related tasks for the Haunted bundle, and that plus thinking about the Very Merry Christmas bundle made me realize there should be a bundle of ghostly Christmas stories! Until I put together the list of ghost articles that are being posted on the Haunted bundle’s Facebook page, I didn’t realize that there was a tradition of telling ghost stories at the holidays. I mentioned this to Rebecca M. Senese, the curator of the Christmas bundle, and she added this to her list of Christmas bundles to plan over the next few years. Ho ho ho!!!

I’ve mostly managed to do publishing tasks and avoid actually writing over the past week, but I did do so many Sudoku puzzles that I don’t think I’ll need to do one for a long, long time. 🙂 It’s been a long time since I spent a few hours doing something so nonconstructive, and I decided to enjoy it.

In more productive news, I’ve plotted out most of a new story which will be either a novelette or a novella. The title is The Lady of Winter, and it’s about a character who I mention once briefly in Entangled by Midsummer. Here’s the reference:

Laran leaned against the cold stone of the balcony wall and looked out across his lands. The hills were dappled in shades of green, trails of mist growing at their lower edges as the evening grew on. In the distance, the high peaks that hid the palace of the Lady of Winter still had snow on their jagged tips, but not for much longer. Soon it would be Midsummer, and on that night he would marry Merenna and use the power of the spell he’d found to bind his bride to him forever.

I didn’t plan on ever writing about the Lady of Winter, but apparently I’m going to. 🙂 Just not until I finish a few more manuscripts! Making notes about what I intend to write is okay, though – and kind of important, since I don’t want to rely on my memory and end up forgetting some key detail. I’ve also started watching the 1946 version of Beauty and the Beast for research as a few parts of that tale (not the cleaned-up Disney tale) are similar to some of the things I plan on writing – although we’ll see what happens once I actually get to this project!