What’s Happening Now

On Tuesday of last week, which was the fateful night of the election, I came home to find these boxes from Book Baby stacked high on my doorstep.

It doesn’t get much more exciting than that, and they came out beautiful!

I especially love that they now have a barcode and ISBN number on the back!

When you scan it with a smartphone it gives you the title of the book and all of the places online where it will available for pre-order up until the release date (which is December 5th, 2016.)

I had meant to post right away with this update, but then I couldn’t really bring my mind to focus on writing anything after all of the chaos on Tuesday and the week to follow. Instead I decided to spend some time organizing and ordering the remaining supplies needed to put together the backer rewards packages.

So far, I now have…

The postcards:

The Christmas cards, or Krampuskarten:

The majority of the buttons printed; all ready for @powerpoppins to take to the button press:

A bulk order of shipping supplies now ordered and on its way to me:

Custom sheets of metallic gold sticker seals also ordered and on the way, which I plan to stick on all of the front covers of the first run of 150 books to mark them as the special first-edition copies:

Two metallic gold Sharpies, for signing all of the first-edition copies:

And a new (mostly vintage) outfit to wear to my book signing and release party. The dress is traditional Dirndl style from the 1950’s coming to me from Amsterdam, the peasant blouse is from the 1970’s and coming from California, and the horns are made from expanding foam in a silicone mold cast of actual goat horns, created by an FX sculptor in Boulder, Colorado.

It looks like I’ll be having my book release party at The Fernie Brae on Sunday, December 11th. I’m currently planning the event with the owners of The Fernie Brae, Bryonie and Eric Arnold. It’s going to be such an honor, and as we finalize the details of the event I’m starting to get really, really excited about it! I will be sure to keep all of you posted as soon as I’ve got an official press release about it.

So that’s all the major stuff that is going on right now, besides the obvious that my book is now available for pre-order from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and a few other online retailers. I’ll also be putting together an order form of some kind very soon so that local people will be able to order from me directly and not have to pay for shipping. Again, the official release date is December 5th, which actually falls on Krampusnacht. The more pre-orders I can get before the release date, the more books the big online retailers will want to stock in their warehouses so that they can have them on hand, available for immediate shipping…which is always a good thing!

All I can say, folks, is that it’s about to hit the fan for real. My fortune cookie from last night not only had two fortunes inside of it, but it just might have been onto something.

I’ll be doing my best to keep you updated over the next couple of weeks, so don’t give up on me just yet!

Back from the Grave (Post-Halloween)

I’m back, guys! Here’s a very brief recap–the Kickstarter campaign ended at 134% funded, I was able to order 150 books from the publisher Bookbaby instead of just 100 because we totally KILLED the original goal, and then I channeled the souls of multiple personalities throughout the month of October, because Samhain aka Halloween is actually my holiday despite my somewhat out-of-character choice to write my first children’s book about Christmas. Writing all about October would probably take several long posts and I’m sure that nobody really wants to read that, so I’ll just rapid fire a bunch of choice photos from the past month that you may or may not have already seen if you follow me on Facebook or Instagram.

I’ll also include a couple of distant past flashback photos to wrap up this manic Halloween montage, because they are pretty special. This one is from our very first Halloween together (and the very first incarnations of the same Sarah and Jareth costumes in the photos above that I resurrected for one last ride to The Fernie Brae.) This was now TEN YEARS AGO!!! Just look at it–I think it was even taken with one of those ‘digital cameras’, remember those?!

The last flashback photo I will include is one that I probably post every year, because it’s one of my favorite pictures from our wedding four Halloweens ago. Our anniversary is October 31st, 2012.

We were both working so much all throughout October that I was actually worried that we wouldn’t get to celebrate our anniversary or the best holiday ever, which thankfully did not turn out to be the case! Before I was certain that we’d have enough time set aside to celebrate our special day, I had booked a room in Eugene for the following weekend. The plan was to spend a day exploring the town and then to go to the Eugene Witches Ball at night. We’ve decided to keep our plans, so this weekend is now going to be like Halloween part two! I have a lot more to write about regarding some exciting news about my book, but for now I will wrap this up and save all of that for another post. I’ll be posting again very soon…I promise!