Lara & the Witch Collection - Volume I

Like I said, in publishing "Here To Help," I had five stories that I thought made a pretty good presentation of the Lara Demming series, so I went ahead and put out "Lara and the Witch: Volume I," which collects those stories (as well as a new introduction).

This was something I challenged myself to do in the month of February, choosing "Here To Help" (which wasn't 100% finished) to end the collection, instead of "The Company You Keep" (which was finished and already out there).  I decided on five stories instead of six when I discovered that just the first four stories came to sixty-something thousand words (which seems like a great deal).  With the fifth story/introduction, that brought it to more than 81,000 words.

I struggled with the cover art, having picked this image (that I still like), but was much too low-res:

But I found a photo of two mushrooms on last year sometime (on Unsplash, where people upload photos they've taken and you can use them as long as you give the owner credit), and sent it to Big, which he used his own special magic on to make this cover:

I still like that one a lot.  Maybe I can use it sometime.

But since then, he and I have discovered that most pernicious of new technologies, image-generating A.I., and while I have dabbled in here and there (probably only wasting five or six hours over the past months), Big has absolutely gone wild for it, spending nights at a time on the website, not getting up to go to the bathroom (warning: that bottle of Mountain Dew he's got next to his office chair is NOT Mountain Dew).  You can read about his adventures here, if you like.  He's blogged about it, but he couldn't pull himself away from the A.I. siren song to publish the post yet. 

But using that program, I asked for a silhouette of a big witch and a small one, and here's the new 2024 cover, one I had a bit of difficulty getting to look right (I'll admit that the mushrooms are less prominent than I would've preferred).

So, now that I have published it (you can get your own copy HERE, if you like), I've started editing the audio for "Here To Help," and I keep getting ideas for new stories (just today, I noticed that Lara mentions that her birthday is in just over a month, and I thought, "Ah, that's got to be a story, what she gets/does for her fifteenth birthday"), but what do I do if I write them?  What I mean to say is, as of right now, this volume includes the first five stories, chronologically, in the L&TW series.  But if I write a story set in 8th Grade, or heck, one from back when she was even younger, where do I fit them?  And does that mean I need to revise the collection, so it's six stories?  Or keep it to six stories, but kick "Here To Help" to Volume 2?  

I've never done this sort of thing, so I honestly don't know.