Lost socks & exploding wine bottles

Holiday fun plus book updates and other news!

Hey,

I hope you had a happy holiday if you were in the US.

My scribe celebrated Thanksgiving with her family. It was a fun day filled with good food, laughs, a broken gizmo to uncork wines which lead to someone (maybe my scribe) stabbing the stuck cork to loosen it. The cork popped and fell into the bottle finally, spraying everyone with wine. Much laughter followed and also a lot of clean up.

The day ended with a search for Melinda’s niece's sock. It somehow disappeared during the day. No one found it, so we still don't know where it wandered off to.

When asked for a comment, Melinda's niece just said, “no” and resumed playing with the little mice family magnet on Melinda's Mom's fridge.

The little girl didn't seem at all bothered by her sockless state. Thankfully, her dad had another pair of socks in his pocket.

When asked why he had a pair of his daughter's socks in there, he just shrugged. All in all, it was a good day.

On Saturday evening, Melinda accompanied her mom to a tree lighting event/memorial at the funeral home that took care of her father and sister when they passed in 2024 and 2014, respectively.

It was a lovely ceremony with a Christmas story about a family in 1883 that bought shoes for the children of their widowed neighbor instead of buying their son presents. There were Christmas songs (What Child is This, Holy Night, and Silent Night) sung by a cantor while accompanied by two guitarists.

They pastor lit candles and the families of the deceased were invited to put an ornament on the tree. At the end, they darkened the room and the grandkids of the funeral director turned on the lights strung around the tree.

Everyone there will have an empty seat at the table this Christmas. But for an hour, we decorated a tree, and stood together in its light. I hope the season brings light into your life too.

That’s what my scribe did when she wasn’t writing. But she did write a lot and most of it was about me!

(This is Ran, Sarn’s son from the Curse Breaker series. I can’t complain, and that’s weird. I had a great rant all ready to go. But I’ll save it for another week since I achieved my goal. I got more page time! That’s what I did over the holiday, and my mission was a success!)

And now for book news, the best kind of news!

Melinda is still writing Void Spells. That's not really a surprise since it's only been two weeks since she realized that Storm Spells ended. She'll probably finish Void Spells soon since she's making a list and checking it twice.

She's determined to end the book with as many loose ends tied up as possible. But I'm trying to leave some loose ends dangling so she has to come back and write some more in the future.

So that's where we are with that. I'm trying to ensure I'll get more page time, and she's trying to box me in. Who will win that battle of wills? Come back next week to find out!

Did you notice anything missing this holiday season?

Usually we send out a special holiday newsletter with a story in it. We've done that every year except this one.

Why didn't we send one this year?

Because things took a bad turn with Amazon and my scribe was depressed about it.

What happened?

Last week, I thought we were making progress. Both support for the publishing side of Kindle and the consumer side of Amazon told my scribe to make a new account and move what content she could.

So my scribe did that.

And then they terminated that new account.

Melinda’s original account is still active, but it's unrecoverable, according to both sets of reps, and we can't access it. So that doesn't do us any good.

Melinda spent considerable time appealing that decision. (Because we can only reach the departments by email now without an active account that we can access.) I’m pretty sure we’re not reaching real people anymore since the replies come back instantly saying they are upholding their decision.

So we're stuck again, and trying everything recommended to us. At this point, I'm not sure we'll ever get access to our books or be able to publish anything on Amazon again.

And the kicker is? This was all triggered by a password reset.

Melinda has been buying books directly from her favorite authors when they run Kickstarters, so she has some books to read. But she reads pretty voraciously, so I don’t know how long that will last.

The holiday was a mixed bag, but hanging out with friends and family made it better.

I told my scribe: “we can’t let them win. We have to make every new book so awesome they’ll be jealous it’s not for sale on their platform.”

So that’s the new plan. But we can’t do that alone. Will you help us hype them up?

We have 5 new books coming in January!

Those new books are: Catch the Scribe, Book Battles, Rogue Characters, Storm Spells, and Void Spells.

You can get your hands on them through our Kickstarter which will likely launch at the end of January. That’s when we think we’ll have the final proof copies in hand.

It’s hard to forecast that with the Christmas holidays coming up. So I’ll just keep you in the loop.

Melinda is already formatting Curse Breaker’s Companion Books 3-4, but she needs to finish book 4 (Void Spells) before she can finish that. So the designs for that book are not final and the cover foil design could change.

We have not finalized the edge design yet, so that’s why the mockup doesn’t show it. There’s some characters with strong opinions about it. Okay, that character is me. But we’re getting closer!

We don’t launch anything until every book is 100% complete and ready to print, so that determines the launch date. Follow the campaign to get notified when it launches.

May your week be bright and may all the books you read have good endings. If they star me, then you get bonus points!

Find all our books on our shop (use code CBS30 at checkout for 30% of all our ebooks). You can also request our books at your local library or find them on Libby/Overdrive and other library platforms.

Whatever you do, make sure you have a good week!