Hi friends,

First, I’d like to thank all of you who sent prayers and well-wishes for my recovery from kidney stone surgery. Things have improved every day, and it’s really uplifting to hear from all of you, so thanks again!

And my second bit of good news — and the reason this newsletter is a little late today — the Christmas “Once Upon an Apocalypse” E-Magazine is live today!

Over twenty of us post-apoc authors have all donated short stories, author bios, free prizes, articles, recipes etc. and the awesome Baileigh Higgins worked like crazy putting this whole 500+ page project together.

And guess what?

It’s FREE! This is our Christmas gift back to our readers who are the reason we can afford to spend time creating stories.

So click below and download it. No strings attached. You don’t even have to enter your email address (unless you decide to enter the drawings for the collection of prizes since we need a way to contact you if you win.)

Once Upon an Apocalypse FREE Christmas E-Magazine

Also, this is only available until the first of the year. At that time, we’ll have the big prize drawing and then take down the magazine, so grab a copy before then.

And feel free to share the download link with any friends who enjoy the genre.

We really hope you get some enjoyment out of the magazine itself and maybe find a new author or two to follow.

Happy holidays to you and your family!

______________________

Misty’s Writing Update:

I just passed 43k words in my new book and am experimenting with dictating again. I can obviously speak faster than I can type, but I generally leave behind so many errors that the clean-up afterward kind of ruins the whole ‘write faster’ goal.

So, I’m investigating new microphones that are supposed to be much more accurate, but they run around $300 – Yikes! If any of you out there do much dictating and have some advice, I’m all ears.

I’m currently using Dragon Naturally Speaking 13 Premier and the included microphone headset to dictate into Microsoft Word. I found that dictating into Google docs introduced too many random punctuation and capitalization errors.

It turns out there is a newer version 15, but again it costs about $340. What’s with the $300 price tag for everything?

On the other hand, if I can figure out how to write more in the same amount of time, that would mean more books, and they would hopefully pay back the investment in quality software and equipment.

I’ll keep plunking away and improving my author skills and appreciate all of your kind advice.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays,

— Misty 🙂