It's Holidailies 2023 Time!

Welcome to the blog! It's time for Holidailies, the daily blogging challenge that runs every December.

In case you don't know me, I'm Theresa, and I'm a full-time author. My cozy mysteries are published under the pen name Tess Baytree, and my science fiction & fantasy books are published as T.M. Baumgartner. (See below for more info if you want to see what I write.) I have an author website, but I try to be more professional over there. This blog gets the random stuff that may or may not be related to my books.

Other things in my life that I tend to talk about:

• My dog, Georgie, is an adorable grump. Despite being an Alaskan Husky mix, he doesn't like cold weather, so he's mostly curled up on the couch at this time of year. The best thing about have an 11-year-old dog who doesn't like bad weather is that I don't have to leave the house when it's raining.
  
  
• I foster kittens for my local county shelter. Currently, I have four, named after various characters in Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London urban fantasy series. Peter, Nightingale, Molly, and Lady Tyburn have been with me for nearly two months now, but I think we've finally got their upper respiratory problems under control, so they'll probably be going back to the shelter for adoption on Wednesday. In the meantime, here's the link to the kitten cam!
  
  
• We just finished National Novel Writing Month and I have a bunch of great writer friends, some of whom I see in real life every once in a while.

So... yeah. If you're looking for deep thoughts, this probably isn't the right blog. But if light slice-of-life is your thing, or you've always wanted to know what a full-time-author-who-will-probably-have-to-get-a-job-next-year does, this is the place to be!

Here's a picture of Molly. She is a wonderful & friendly kitten.

For the record, here are my accomplishments of the day:

• Got more kitten food from the shelter. (Very important. These kittens are gigantic now.)
• Wrote 500 words on how the rest of Theoretical Magic, the urban fantasy novel I started during NaNoWriMo, is supposed to go. Some people might call it an outline.
• Made proofreading changes for the new Penelope Standing novel (Death Paints a Picture), wrote the acknowledgements, formatted the thing, and uploaded the final version to all the retailers 15 days ahead of the release, which is a new record. Some authors don't release books in December, but who am I to learn from the mistakes of others?
• Remembered that Holidailies starts today and wrote this blog post.
• Still to-do today: Figure out what happens in the next episode of the dragon serial on Kindle Vella, and figure out what the digital bonus will be for my Patreon supporters. Yes, it's nearly 6pm, but I set my own hours.
• Step count for yesterday: 21,781. Today will be similar because I've been writing this while walking on the treadmill at 2 mph.

Anyhow, I'm looking forward to reading the other Holidailies blogs!

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Want to check out what I write? Here are some series starters that are either free or $0.99:

• Death Walks a Dog, book one in the Penelope Standing Cozy Mysteries. She's a dog walker in her fifties who accidentally ends up in the middle of a murder investigation headed up by her boyfriend, Jake. One of my reviews says "Greatest couple since Nick and Nora Charles." (Ugh, this sounds very sales-y, but I'm trying to get better at marketing.)
  
  
• The Chaos Job This is science fiction or maybe space opera or possibly a space western. (Are you starting to see why I need to practice marketing?) There are AIs and hidden gods and sheep. My friend Sierra live-emailed me as she was reading and you can see her comments here.
  
  
• All Gremlins Great & Small A veterinarian in a changed world...