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Bundle story: “A Hearth Witch at Chisholm Keep” by Thea Hutcheson

Misha Millik, a hearth witch brought to Chisolm Keep by the headmaster, feels out of her depth at this magic school for the children of established magicians.

Branded a misfit by the wealthy students, she finds a friend in a stray cat who can talk to her. Desperately unhappy and completely inept at any kind of magic the school teaches, she wonders why the headmaster insists she stay at the school.

When she finds the horrifying answer, will her humble powers be enough to save herself and find her true place as a practicing witch?

“A Hearth Witch at Chisholm Keep” is in the Witches’ Brew bundle. You can learn more on BundleRabbit, Goodreads, and the bundle’s Facebook page.

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Thea Hutcheson explores far away lands full of magic and science with one hand holding hope and the other full of wonder. She lives in an economically depressed, unscenic, nearly historic small city in Colorado with four semi-feral cats, 1000 books, and an understanding partner. She’s a factotum when she’s filling the time between bouts at the computer.

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Using Jetpack’s “Related Posts” feature

Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that packages a number of features that are provided to people whose sites are hosted on WordPress.com. If you’re hosting your site on WordPress.com, you already have these features; if you’re hosting your site somewhere, you will need to install the Jetpack plugin (which is free).

The Related Posts feature analyzes previous posts you’ve published on your site, then underneath each individual post it displays links to three other posts that are related to your current post.

If you’ve set a featured image for a post, that’s what will display when it’s listed as a related post; otherwise, an image attached to the post will be used. The image will be resized and cropped to be 350x200px.

Note that if the contextual analysis doesn’t come up with at least three good results, no related posts will be displayed.

Activate Related Posts

In the administrative section of your WordPress site:

  • Go to Jetpack / Settings / Traffic
  • Under Related posts, turn on “Show related content after posts”

There are two configuration options listed:

  • Show a “Related” header to more clearly separate the related section from posts
  • Use a large and visually striking layout
    (This will display an image from each related post.)

Note: When I turn ‘Show a “Related” header’ on, that actually turns it off – although it correctly displays in the preview while you’re configuring Jetpack. 🙂

Here are examples of how the different permutations will look.

No header, no images

“Related” header, no images

No header, display images

“Related” header, display images

Customize Related Posts for your site

You can customize what image is displayed, how the image is resized, change the “Related” header text, modify how many related posts are displayed, and a number of other things.

Most of these changes require modifying your WordPress theme, so make sure you’re comfortable with that (and that you’ve backed up your site!) before proceeding. Jetpack provides detailed instructions on how to modify your WordPress theme on their site.

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Bundle story: “City Shadows” by Chuck Heintzelman

Clara works hard, juggling high school, her waitress job, and eking out time with her friends.

And now, finishing work far too late on a school night, she wants nothing more than to get home and sleep.

But dark and otherworldly things lurk in the shadows of her city.

 
 
 

“City Shadows” is in the Fantasy in the City bundle. You can learn more on BundleRabbit, Goodreads, and the bundle’s Facebook page.
 

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Chuck writes quirky short stories, usually with some sort of fantastical element. He’s as surprised by this as anyone. Even after dozens of stories he stills stays up too late at night, feverishly working on the next tale.

He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his beautiful wife and their three daughters.

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Bundle story: “Love Powders & Wicked Witches” by Ron Collins


Alicia was tired of spending nights alone in her empty little house, and was willing to try something weird or something stupid if it would keep Horatio at home.

Her friends told her how to find the house of a witch who lived in a house with a door made from wood stolen from the coffins of newly-risen dead.

All Alicia wanted was to keep Horatio at home…
 
 

“Love Powders & Wicked Witches” is in the Witches’ Brew bundle. You can learn more on BundleRabbit, Goodreads, and the bundle’s Facebook page.

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Ron Collins is an Amazon best-selling Dark Fantasy author who writes across the spectrum of speculative fiction.

His fantasy series Saga of the God-Touched Mage reached #1 on Amazon’s bestselling dark fantasy list in the UK and #2 in the US. His short fiction has received a Writers of the Future prize and a CompuServe HOMer Award, and his short story “The White Game” was nominated for the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s 2016 Derringer Award.

He has contributed a hundred or so short stories to professional publications such as Analog, Asimov’s, and several other magazines and anthologies (including several editions of the Fiction River Anthology Series).

He holds a degree in Mechanical Engineering, and has worked to develop avionics systems, electronics, and information technology before chucking it all to write full-time–which he now does from his home in the shadows of the Santa Catalina Mountains.

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Bundle story: “Dreams of Saffron and Lace” by Leah Cutter

Regina Victoria Edmondson rules as Queen over the nursery she shares with her twin brother Tobias.

Except when she allows him to direct their play as Raj.

However, on the rambling country estate where they live, neither of them control the gardens, where time moves in an unorderly, disquieting fashion.

Secrets hide there.

Deadly secrets.

If you enjoy cozy horror and stories with a gothic atmosphere, you’ll love the creepiness of “Dreams of Saffron and Lace”.

“Dreams of Saffron and Lace” is in the Haunted bundle. You can learn more on BundleRabbit, Goodreads, and the bundle’s Facebook page.

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Leah Cutter writes page-turning fiction in exotic locations, such as a magical New Orleans, the ancient Orient, Hungary, the Oregon coast, rural Kentucky, Seattle, Minneapolis, and many others.

She writes literary, fantasy, mystery, science fiction, and horror fiction. Her short fiction has been published in magazines like Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Talebones, anthologies like Fiction River, and on the web. Her long fiction has been published both by New York publishers as well as small presses.

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Bundle story: “Aunt Fabulous and the Malevolent Musician” by Valerie Brook

Sixteen-year-old Magnificent Maggie Fontaine is close to giving up on her oh-so-wrecked life. When she accidentally runs away from home, she doesn’t even expect to make it very far before something worse happens.

But running away might actually bring her closer to home, and when all hope is lost, a little bit of forbidden magic can change everything.

 
 
 

“Aunt Fabulous and the Malevolent Musician” is in the Fantasy in the City bundle. You can learn more on BundleRabbit, Goodreads, and the bundle’s Facebook page.
 

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When Valerie was a little girl her parent’s television blew out one night just as the news broadcast ended. For some mysterious and fateful reason, they never fixed it. Not for five years. And during those five years her mother read to her nearly every night; filling her head with distant lands, magical creatures and heroic courage. This seeded Valerie’s childhood dream to be a writer. Now, she lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family and well-loved pets. When she’s not writing she can be found painting, riding motorcycles, or dreaming about living on an old-fashioned farm.

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Bundle story: “Some Old Lover’s Ghost” by Dayle A. Dermatis

Helena runs Paranormal Manifestation Services—PMS for short. When she’s hired by Beth and Marguerite to find out why a ghost is bothering Marguerite, she doesn’t expect to get a crush on Beth…which makes things especially awkward when she learns who the ghost is.

Rainbow Reviews called this short story “unexpectedly romantic [and] heart-wrenching,” and it was nominated for a 2008 Romance Erotica Connection Award for Best F/F Romance Short Story and for a 2010 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Fiction.

BONUS: Includes an interview with the author about writing the story, her own paranormal experiences, and more.

“Some Old Lover’s Ghost” originally appeared in Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories (Lethe Press, 2008).

“Some Old Lover’s Ghost” is in the Haunted bundle. You can learn more on BundleRabbit, Goodreads, and the bundle’s Facebook page.

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Called “one of the best writers working today” by bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith, Dayle A. Dermatis is the author or coauthor of seven novels and more than a hundred short stories in multiple genres, including the first seven Uncollected Anthology anthologies and the forthcoming urban fantasy novel Ghosted. She is a founding member of the Uncollected Anthology project.

A recent transplant to the wild greenscapes of the Pacific Northwest, in her spare time she follows Styx around the country and travels the world, which inspires her writing.

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Bundle story: “Shadow of the Midnight Moon” by Eric Kent Edstrom

Take Stranger Things and blend it with Buffy. That’s the spirit of the Sal Van Sleen adventures, a YA paranormal adventure series featuring a funny and mischievous hero who must face down the forces of evil threatening his small home town.

In “Shadow of the Midnight Moon,” the discovery of a magical note starts Sal on a race to save his girlfriend Becky from the most terrifying threat he’s faced yet … himself!

 
 
“Shadow of the Midnight Moon” iis in the Witches’ Brew bundle. You can learn more on BundleRabbit, Goodreads, and the bundle’s Facebook page.

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About the Author

Eric is the author of the science fiction and fantasy series The Undermountain Saga and The Scion Chronicles. He lives in Wisconsin with his family.

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Bundle story: “Chocolate Alchemy” by Lisa Silverthorne

Tucked in a tiny corner of Pike’s Market is Starling’s Chocolates, where a sorceress conjures magical confections to make people remember their fondest memories or forget their worst moments. Or even fall in love.

Everything was just fine until Mr. Corporate America walked into Orriana’s shop.

Will he buy her out or steal her heart?

 
 
 

“Chocolate Alchemy” is in the Fantasy in the City bundle. You can learn more on BundleRabbit, Goodreads, and the bundle’s Facebook page.
 

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Lisa has published over seventy short stories in the fantasy, science fiction, romance, and mystery genres. She has appeared in dozens of anthologies as well as several volumes of Fiction River. Her first short story collection, The Sound of Angels, is available from Wildside Press and her first novel, Isabel’s Tears, was published in 2015 from Elusive Blue Fiction.

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Bundle story: “Never After” by Jaime Lee Moyer

“You wake and remember why he haunts you.
Blood washes off in the shower. You cry and never feel clean.”

Lillian Bryan goes to the office each morning and tries to ignore her co-workers’ stares, and her boss’ suspicions. She wants to believe that the battles she fights each night aren’t real, that it’s all a vivid dream. Lily tries to pretend that the nightmare will end; that she’ll stop waking up stiff and sore and bloody, haunted by the memory of those dying all around her. Haunted even more by how quickly she heals, and that she can’t seem to die.

The truth is she’s starting to forget living a life without fear and pain, or without ghosts staring in silent reproach. What’s happening to her is real, and Lily can’t break free of the nightmare.

Not without help.

“Never After” is in the Haunted bundle. You can learn more on BundleRabbit, Goodreads, and the bundle’s Facebook page.
 

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Jaime Lee Moyer lives in a land of cactus, cowboys, and rhinestones, while dreaming of tall trees and the ocean. She writes novels about murder and betrayal, friendship, ghosts and magic. Her first novel Delia’s Shadow was published by Tor Books in 2013, A Barricade In Hell in 2014, and Against A Brightening Sky in 2015. Delia’s Shadow won the 2009 Columbus Literary Award for Fiction, administered by Thurber House and funded by the Columbus Art Counsel. She writes a lot. She reads as much as she can.

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