Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Lupa, author of New Paths to Animal Totems. This is a quick guide for working with “found” animal parts—naturally shed fur and feathers from pets, farm animals, or wild critters; bones discovered in the woods; and so forth. It’ll work with other animal parts, too, but found ones are relatively low-impact, don’t cost anything, and are relatively easy to find. First, make sure what you have is legal; for example, in the U.S. it’s illegal to possess the feathers of almost every wild bird. You can check laws at my Animal Parts Laws page; contact your local game authority if you have questions on how to interpret the laws. Next,

In lieu of the obligatory holiday gift guide, this year I am just going to give you all a list of every book I worked on that was released in 2012. Since I am already working on 2014 books, this certainly feels like a trip down memory lane for me! So I have also added a couple pictures of authors and fun stuff, too. You’ll notice that I’m not calling this the list of “best 2012 books” or anything like that because, when it comes to my authors and their books, I just can’t pick favorites! It would be like asking a mother to pick her favorite kid. If you’re looking for a cool gift idea for someone in your life, scan through this list and perhaps one of these will be the perfect

(Readers: this is Part Two of a 3-part article. Click on these links for Part One and Part Three.) Spring/Summer 2012 I need to start writing shorter descriptions if I want to get through all of these! Here are the books I acquired that came out this summer. Magical Gardens – written 15 years ago by the late and great Patricia Monaghan, a couple years ago she contacted me to see if we’d be interested in releasing a revised and updated anniversary edition. Of course I said yes! This book is a treasure, and if I ever have a yard, I will use this book to design an enchanted garden – maybe Bast’s Cat Garden, maybe Kuan-Yin’s Garden of Mercy, maybe the Sorcerer’s Secret Garden

(Readers: this is Part Three of a 3-part article. Click on these links for Part One and Part Two.) Fall 2012 This brings us up to books that have just released this month or the last couple months. Hot off the presses. Go find them in your local bookstores! Faery Craft – the ultimate gift for anyone who loves faery art, faery fiction, and of course, faery reality. This book offers everything from a wealth of tips to communicating with faeries to a full treatment of the faery-loving lifestyle, including festivals, magazines, and more. There are great interviews with writers like Charles de Lint, artists like Brian and Wendy Froud, musicians like S.J. Tucker, and the book is crammed