Things Accomplished This Week

I'm afraid this week's post isn't going to be very exciting. Just a list of stuff I wrote and published this week. I'll probably, eventually, do a separate weekly update post at the end of the week and put up something more interesting on Wednesdays. But I'm lacking in sleep this week, so this is all you get.

• Review of See Jane Run by Hannah Jayne
• Review of Witch Finder by Ruth Warburton
• New chapter of Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective @JukePopSerials
• New page of Fey (actually an old page, but new in this current re-launch)

I've also thumbnailed and pencilled the next four pages of Fey, but haven't quite managed to get them inked yet.

I've also been reading a lot, and I'm thinking of keeping track of what I've read again in a new 50 Books challenge. Except since I know I'm going to read more than 50 YA books this year, on account of work, I'll aim for 50 YA books, 50 adult fiction, 50 non-fiction, and 50 graphic novels. That's only a little more than I've managed in previous years. Sure, maybe it will be too much, but I'm more curious about how many I'll get to than in actually hitting the goal.

So, here's what I've read so far:

YA Books

1. See Jane Run by Hannah Jayne
2. Witch Finder by Ruth Warburton

Non-Fiction

1. Artists on Comics Art edited by Mark Salisbury
2. Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe by John Bell

Graphic Novels

1. The Tomorrow Girl and Other Stories by Aaron Diaz (aka Dresden Codak)
2. The Replacement God by Zander Cannon

Hunh. Six books in one week. That's kind of a lot.

And that's it for now. I'll try for something more exciting next week.

OK, Yet Another Cover Post

No blurb written yet, but I'm working my way towards finishing the edits on Dark Stranger, so I made a cover for it. I wanted it to match Milk Sister, since it's the sequel (even though Milk Sister was originally written as a stand-alone novel, one character wouldn't get out of my head and kept insisting I ought to tell his story, too). Here's the cover for Milk Sister:

If you click to see if bigger, you can see the lovely leather... The background image is an actual book that I bound a few years ago (it's a K-118 binding, for you bookbinders out there), and that's pretty close to the actual colour of the leather. The fairies are excerpted from an intaglio print, also from a few years ago.

I knew I wanted Dark Stranger to be blue. No real reason, it just seemed right. SoI used Photoshop to make the same book image blue, re-did the typography to more-or-less match, and then had to find an image to use. Like I said, I wanted the covers to go together, so it made sense to excerpt another old intaglio of mine.

There aren't really any moths in the story, but books are kind of important (in a roundabout sort of way), so I guess it works. It's more about the feel, anyway (and the fairies in Milk Sister aren't the tiny winged kind, either, so ... yeah).

Dark Stranger should be up for pre-order in the next few weeks.

A Quick Writing Update

So, it seems to have been ages since I last posted here. Oops. But I found a big stash of old articles I wrote when I was the "Guide" at About Creative Writing for Teens. The site no longer exists, so I can use the articles however I like. So I think I'm going to start posting them here. I'll edit them some, probably, because my views on some things have changed over the years.

But, the reason I started this post was to say something about the writing I'm doing now. When I first started this blog, it was a way to keep track of what I was working on publicly, with the idea that if people could see when I was being lazy, I'd be less likely to be lazy. So I'm going to try to start doing that again. This could mean lots of very short posts like back in the old days, so be warned.

Anyway. Right now, I am just about to start on today's word count on Dark Stranger, the sequel to Milk Sister. It's coming along very well, at 44, 234 words, and I think it's just about to head full speed into the finale. But I also seem to be leaving a lot of unanswered questions, so there's going to be a third book, most likely. Milk Sister was Maddy's tale, Dark Stranger is Dubhghall's, and untitled book 3 will be their story together. Or something. Then again, I did introduce a pair of interesting new characters in this book, who also have a story...

Other writing news... Reindeer Girl (aka White Foxes, Full Moon) is being serialized at JukePop Serials. Soon I'm going to reach the end of the bits I've written and start writing new stuff. Fortunately, I know more-or-less where it's heading. Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective, by alter-ego Calliope Strange, which was formerly serialized at Doctor Fantastique's is now also being serialized at JukePop. It's been finished for some time, so it will appear a chapter at a time until the end (14 installments). After that, I plan to write the next chapter in Aeryn's story. Especially if the current book proves popular.

And finally, now that this update has already gone on longer than I meant it to, Kentaurs. I had a reader (a fan? Do I have a fan?) ask if/when there would be a sequel to A Madness of Kentaurs. The answer is, this summer, if all goes well with finishing up the projects listed above. It'll be called Melanippe's Odyssey, and though it's not a direct sequel (Octavian and Ixion probably won't be in it, except maybe at the end), it will tie into the larger story.

So, there. That's what I'm up to. Now I need to go get Dubhghall a little closer to finding Maddy and figuring out how to escape his destiny.

(PS. I will come back to this later and add links. I'm on my iPad right now and the Blogger app is a bit of a pain for doing much other than text. Edit: JukePop links added (and pictures, too!))

Looking Back, Peering Ahead

One of last year's beginning-of-the-year goals was to blog more regularly. I did okay with that, up until mid-year, when everything fell apart. In fact, that's about when my fiction-writing goals evaporated, too. I'm not even sure why. Possibly I was just trying to do too much at once, as usual, and got overwhelmed.

But even though I didn't really meet many of my 2012 goals, I can't really call the year a failure, either. Here are some of the things I accomplished in 2012:

• I wrote three novels, a short story, and a novella. I was aiming for four novels and ten or twelve short pieces, so I didn't meet the goal. But still, three novels! Two of them still need editing and transcribing, but the bulk is done.
• I printed some new letterpress and linocut pieces, finished up a few bookbinding projects, and came up with a new notebook product (at the last minute for the holiday craft fair!) that I'm really pleased with. Again, I didn't meet my goal of finishing up all in-progress projects before starting new ones, but I did get a few things off my worktable.
• I spent more time walking in the woods. Though I didn't get in as much exercise-oriented walking as I wanted to, I renewed my love of simply wandering and seeing what there is to see. As a consequence, I felt renewed and refreshed creatively, even though my writing production crashed halfway through the year.
• I changed jobs. Sort of. Though I really loved my job writing about videogames for About.com, I've been wanting to get back into something more writing or fiction or book oriented for a few years. I've applied for a few other About sites, and even made it to the evaluation stage once (the process of getting hired at About is fairly long and involves writing a lot of samples, but it's worth it). Finally, this fall, I made the switch to writing about books, and I'm now the "Guide" to Young Adult Books. I'm still editing the videogames super-newsletter, though, so I get to keep up on that stuff, too.

Those are the biggest accomplishments, I think. So on to my goals for 2013.

• I'm going to attempt, again, to blog more regularly. I've just installed Blogger for iOS on my iPad, which I hope will help with that, since I've been doing more and more work on my tablet since I got it. My two pen-name author blogs will probably only get infrequent updates still, but this blog, and my bone blog should start seeing some more posts.
• Again, I'm going to aim to finish more in-progress projects. I have plans to do a lot more linocut prints this year -- there's the Vanishing Bestiary to work on, and a triptych of fossil-inspired prints, and I just had a request to make my winter raven card design into a larger art print. I have some bookbinding things to finish up, too. First off, though, is to get those dragon pop-ups done and sent off to my IndieGoGo backers.
• I'm going to focus on getting my fiction writing and publishing activities back on track. This means transcribing and editing Familiar (book 3 in the Others series by alter-ego Nic Silver), and adding needed scenes and editing Dark Stranger (sequel to Milk Sister). Also, I'm going to get the full Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective novel formatted and available as an ebook and POD paperback (by alter ego Calliope Strange). As far as writing, I'll be finishing Reindeer Girl, and tackling the next Nic Silver novel. After that, I'm not sure, but I have a list of ideas to choose from.

Of course, I can't start a new year without a few brand new projects. This year, I have two big ones in mind.

• First, a non-fiction project. I won't say too much yet, because I'm still mulling it over, and it's the sort of thing I have a specific publisher in mind for, and if they don't want it, I probably won't make it a priority. It'll tie together my folklore background and my current writing-about-YA-books in a scholarly sort of book. This month, I'll be working on a proposal and sample chapter.
• Second, an artistic and natural history project. This is one I've been thinking about for a while, but always put off because it seemed most logical to begin it at the beginning of the year. So starting a little later today, I'm going to use a great big notebook I made for an unrelated art project and start keeping a natural history journal. So as not to be overwhelmed, I'm not going to try to force myself to write every day, though it would be cool if I managed it. I'll just write down observations and make little sketches of the world outside my door as the year goes by.

And now I think I've probably blathered on enough for one day.

Reindeer Girl Cover

If you're a Facebook friend or you follow me on Twitter, you'll have seen pretty much everything in this post, but I thought I'd bring all the work-in-progress shots for this book cover together in one place.

First, a bit of background. I've been working off and on to write a novel about a character called Maring Darkberry, who belongs to a culture called the Reindeer Herders (or just Herders)--a genetically mixed people who live on the barrens of my imaginary island/continent of Frisland (also the setting for many of my short stories, and for the Aeryn Daring stories I write as Calliope Strange).

The story started out as a short story called "White Foxes, Full Moon," but I soon realized there was a lot more to Maring's tale. But for some reason I never got farther than perhaps two-thirds finished.

So recently, I saw a call for submissions from a place called JukePop Serials which had an interesting business model. And I thought maybe by serializing the thing, so there were people waiting for the next chapter, I might actually finish it. And the editors at JukePop liked it. So now the title is Reindeer Girl, and it'll be serialized starting in September. And it needs a cover.

Maring

First I needed a reference for Maring. It didn't have to look like her, exactly, as long as the pose was right. So digging through a box of old pictures, I found this one of my beautiful mother with my sister and me (I'm the chubby one on the left) in her lap.

I did a sketch I was pleased with, changing her features to make her look less like my mom and more like the character in my story. Though in the story Maring has fair skin and blue eyes to go with her black hair, I wanted it to be clear from looking at her that not all her ancestry is European. Her people have intermarried all over the place, and they currently live quite close to a people they refer to as the Snow People (who are, of course, Inuit). So I wanted Maring to look like some of her recent ancestors were Inuit or perhaps Siberian or even Mongolian.

I could already tell that I probably hadn't really left enough room for the rest of the picture, but I was thinking about scanning the inked drawing and colouring digitally, so I went ahead and inked the drawing on the sketchbook paper, rather than transferring it to watercolour paper.

Text

 I spent a long time looking at type, and found what I thought was the perfect typeface for the title. It was Celtic, but rough-looking; calligraphic but loose. Unfortunately, none of the links on the designer's website worked. So I kept looking and eventually decided that what I really wanted to do was hand-letter, a la Walter Crane, or more recently, Charles Vess.

Of course, I then decided I also wanted to hand-colour, so I had to figure out a way to squeeze everything onto the page.

Background

I had in mind a particular photograph, taken on the barrens of the southern Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland, which just happened to have caribou in the shot (for the curious, caribou and reindeer are the same animal, Rangifer tarandus, the first usually used in North America and the second in Europe). Alas, there must be another box of my photographs still in storage at my mother's house in BC, because I couldn't find it. So instead I used this one, taken somewhere between Cape Ray and Gros Morne, Newfoundland.

I started with a blue wash, and quickly began to wish I'd taken the time to transfer the drawing to watercolour paper before inking.

Then I added green and yellow. You can see the paper getting more and more wrinkled with each colour I add.

Then some brown and grey, and a little red and purple.

Finally, I brightened up some of the colours and added a few details with pencil crayon.

Then I had to flatten the thing so I could get a good scan. I did this by thoroughly spritzing it with water from the back, until the paper relaxed and it lay flat. Then I put it between sheets of printmaking rag (I used some old proofs) and newsprint, and put it under a goodly amount of weight to dry. And the next day it was perfectly flat.

I had to scan it in two pieces, because it's too big for my scanner--thanks to Photoshop's "photomerge" function, putting the two pieces together was a snap.

And if anyone's interested, I've made it available as a print through Zazzle (if you order, make sure to let the preview load for the size you select--some sizes will cut off the top and bottom of the image). I may do my own prints at some point, on my very nice super-deluxe photo inkjet printer on digital photo rag paper. If enough people ask, that is.

Would You Read This Book?

Su just wants to sit in a dark corner for a quiet drink when she spots a newborn vampire across the bar. He's confused, and he's starting to draw attention to himself. And he's hot.

So Su decides to give him a few pointers. Then she realizes that the reason this baby vamp is wandering around without a protective escort is that she killed his parent vamp earlier that night.

Now Su feels responsible. A newborn vampire is helpless until he regains his memories and learns how to act like a vampire. Su knows enough about vamps to be able to teach him that. But Su has her own problems. She doesn't have much of a memory, either, and while she's not a vampire, she's not exactly human.

Su doesn't know what she is, and she doesn't have a kindly stranger in a bar to tell her.

August Giveaway: Mini Print + eBook + ?

So I've decided to have a giveaway here on my blog, every month. It'll run from the first of the month (or whenever I get it posted) to the last day of the month, and to enter all you have to do is leave a comment (see the end of the post for more specifics). I do hope you'll pass this on to your friends via Twitter, Facebook, etc, too.

Also, later today I'll be putting up a coupon code for a free short story download on my Facebook page. "Like" my page and you'll be able to get the code. The story will be available all month, and then next month a new coupon for a new story will go up. This month, the coupon will be for "Hollow Bones," which is the first story in the Frisland series of interconnected stories. If you stick around long enough, you could get the whole series free!

So, the prizes for this month's blog giveaway. . .

First, you'll get one of these:

Second, you'll get a choice of one of my YA/middle grade eBooks. Either The Coming of the Fairies

It is the summer of 1941, and fifteen-year-old Morgan Reilly has just moved to Newfoundland from New York to be with her father, an officer in the US Army stationed in St. John’s. Morgan adores fairies and has a collection of Victorian children’s books, so when she meets John O’Brien, nephew of her new landlords, she is intrigued by his story of being taken by the Good People when he was a child.

As the war escalates, Morgan and John are sent to the small community of Ferryland to stay with John's grandparents. It was there that John says the Good People kidnapped him, and soon after they arrive, he becomes withdrawn and strange. Morgan is more concerned with her own problems to worry too much about John--her father may soon be called into active duty if the US enters the war, and her brother has run away to England and joined the Royal Air Force.

Then Morgan has a fairy encounter of her own and it is up to John to find and rescue her. The Good People of Newfoundland are not the pretty winged beings of Victorian picture books, and Morgan is in real danger.

Or Milk Sister

Maddy has always been able to see things that other people can't, but she didn't know it might have something to do with the mother who died giving birth to her. Now her father has decided to move back to Scotland, and for the first time in her life, Maddy has a chance to learn about her mother's family and the strange circumstances surrounding her own birth.

Maddy was born on a fairy hill--the same hill that the the 17th century writer Robert Kirk wrote about in his book The Secret Common-Wealth, and just like Kirk, Maddy's mother may not have died there. Like Kirk, she may still be alive, living in the Otherworld, and Maddy may even be able to see her.

If Maddy can rescue her mother from the fairy hill, maybe her father won't be so sad all the time. But what if her mother doesn't want to be rescued? And who is the mysterious dark-haired boy who calls Maddy "milk sister?"

Third, you'll get some other little goodie that I'll decide on later, because I like to do things in threes and I like surprises.

So to enter, leave a comment saying which of the two books you'd like and include some way for me to contact you. And don't forget the free coupon on my Facebook page that'll appear later today. And you can follow me on Twitter @anagramforink. Please share with your friends--everyone likes free stuff, right?

Milk Sister: A YA Novel of Fairies and Family

While I'm still not 100% sure this is the right cover, I do rather like it, and I wanted to get Milk Sister uploaded this week, so I decided to just use it. I can change it later if I get ambitious.

You can get the ebook version right now, in various formats for just about any ereader, from Smashwords for a mere $2.99. It'll be available on the Kindle store once it's done processing.

Maddy has always been able to see things that other people can't, but she didn't know it might have something to do with the mother who died giving birth to her. Now her father has decided to move back to Scotland, and for the first time in her life, Maddy has a chance to learn about her mother's family and the strange circumstances surrounding her own birth.

Maddy was born on a fairy hill--the same hill that the the 17th century writer Robert Kirk wrote about in his book The Secret Common-Wealth, and just like Kirk, Maddy's mother may not have died there. Like Kirk, she may still be alive, living in the Otherworld, and Maddy may even be able to see her.

If Maddy can rescue her mother from the fairy hill, maybe her father won't be so sad all the time. But what if her mother doesn't want to be rescued? And who is the mysterious dark-haired boy who calls Maddy "milk sister?"

This is the second novel I wrote (The Coming of the Fairies was the first, though it really only qualifies as a novel because it's "middle grade"--or maybe YA. It's a little over 30, 000 words), and (I think) much better than my first. It uses a lot of the research I did when writing my Master's thesis and originally I hadn't intended for there to be so many fairy folk in it. In fact, as originally conceived, I was going to leave some events rather vague so the answer of whether or not the fairies were actually real would be left up to the reader (which is more or less what I did with The Coming of the Fairies). But the bloody fairies took over, and I think it's actually a rather better book for it. If you go through my blog archive, you can read a blow-by-blow of the writing process (look in past Novembers--I wrote the first draft for NaNoWriMo).

Also, my serial novel Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective, written under the pen name Calliope Strange (chapters available on Kindle) is also appearing a chapter at a time in the very cool steampunk magazine Doctor Fantastique's Show of Wonders. I believe it will be online for free soon, but you can also purchase it right now in e-format and hardcopy, here.

It's worth it for the super-cute illustration of Aeryn and Madman alone.

Monday Mailbox

 I had intended to blog about the book I made yesterday, but it's not quite finished. Instead, I'm stealing a meme from . . . um . . . somewhere. I saw this on a book blog (sorry to whomever I stole it from that I can't remember who you are), and basically you post the books you got in the past week, not necessarily in the mail (but somehow those are the best ones). Since I actually *did* get books in the mail today, I thought why not share them and make you all envious.

So, first, a few I picked up at the local mall bookstore last week. I went in to kill time while B got a haircut and ended up with an armful of remainders, all for less than $20. What I got:

 

Yes, mostly fiction, and mostly YA. I have read two and three in the row, and have been busy reading the two that come before the first one in the row (if that makes any sense).

Today, I stopped in to use the washroom at Chapters after dropping B off at the truck repair place so he could go to work, and of course I had to look around. I was good and only bought two books, one remaindered and one remaindered and then discounted to a whopping $2:



Then on the way home I stopped at the post office to mail a print to the Netherlands (the last of my Steam Ichthyosaurs) and pick up a parcel from Powell's containing the books I ordered almost two months ago with my birthday money (which got hung up in the post-strike/lockout backlog). In it was:



You may have noticed that two of the above have "cabinet of wonder" in the title. I have a peculiar attraction to cabinets of curiosity and own a few other books with similar titles. No doubt I will acquire more, by and by. Also, most of the ones that aren't YA are natural history, which should come as a surprise to exactly no one.

Tomorrow I hope to have that post about the very cool book I have almost finished.

Book Cover Woes

So I re-titled The Secret Common-Wealth to Milk Sister, which puts the emphasis on the main character instead of on a book she reads (though the contents of the book are rather important to the plot). Also, it doesn't sound like some sort of political treatise. And I decided I don't like the cover I made as much as I like the book, so I decided to re-do the cover from scratch. The first cover looked like this:

It was a fun experiment, if not entirely successful. But I wanted something with the main character, since the title now refers to her. I thought I could do worse than starting with the intaglio print I blogged about yesterday as a background image. There's an enchanted tree in the story, too, so it's not just a random image.

I started by adding colour in Photoshop. The layer blending I chose gave the image some nice darks around the edge, though the intensity of the background may be part of the problem I'm having now.

Then the main character. I rummaged around for a photo I could edit and use and came up with one of myself at my sister's wedding. I was seventeen and my character is only fourteen, but I think it's OK. The fact that I'm working with an image of myself might also be part of the problem. It's too weird.



So, first attempt:

Then I tried to fix a few things and make more of the background visible:

Then I tried to fix some other things:

The hair on her shoulder (badly Photoshopped as my hair was back in the original) was really starting to bug me.

And at this point, I'm not even sure what it was I thought I was fixing. And that's where it remains. With me really beginning to hate it, but without any clue of what to fix or where to start if I started over.

The part I quite like is how the title sits on top of the background (it looks better when bigger--you can click on the images to make them a bit bigger). So yeah. I think I need a break. I was really hoping to be able to upload the ebook on Monday, and I *can* always change the cover later, but still.