Sleeping Cat Books is a new entity out there – run by one of my copy editor friends, Sarah Holroyd. This newest venture brings all kinds of publishing services to authors.

I’m especially excited about the new anthology, The Coming Storm. It’s open to many visual and written options – from black and white photography to poetry to fiction.

Speaking of anthologies, my first published story appeared in an anthology, Ruins Metropolis. It can be a great way to start to build a presence and get a name out there for readers to see who you are and what you want to say. It reminds me also that the reasons all of us write are different.

I know there are writers out there who work on a book or one specific world for all of their spare time. It’s about characters who become very close to them and I was really struck almost speechless when I heard a woman say she didn’t want to end the book because then she’d be done with the characters. Maybe that explains why we just keep moving slowly through the story.

Other writers have a couple things moving at a time, each at different paces, cycling through ideas and characters as if they have a shelf life and must be written before they expire.

Do you ever feel like one set of characters or one world is so close to you that it is impossible to work outside that zone? Do you instead put a little here and a little there and mark characters in as many different times, places, situations as you can manage to imagine? What makes you decide to write this set and not a different one at this time?