Goals and Such

I don't really like New Year's resolutions. I always figure if you want to do something, resolve to do it right there and then. Don't save up all your promises-of-things-you'll-do for one big day. That seems like a recipe for failure to me (though there can be success in failure, too). However, this arbitrary counting of time we call a year (OK, not entirely arbitrary, but how many people really think about what it is we base the length of a year on?) can be useful for stopping to take stock.

Last year, I didn't do as well as I hoped with my goals. I had planned to have a lot more writing done and available for people to read, but I got derailed pretty early on, and I'm not even sure why. I did manage to write (or finish) three novels (two shortish YAs and one somewhat longer adult novel), so really that's not so bad. And I drew some dragons, made some books, got a die-cutter and expanded my card-making repertoire.

But this year, I'm not going to focus on what I didn't get done last year. Well, I am, sort of, but not really. Actually, I'm going to work on some much older things in addition to trying to write more new things.

Old Things to Work On

(Note that I didn't say "Old Things to Finish." I hope to finish them, but if I don't, that's OK. At least I will have more done than I did before).

This Blog. I'm going to aim for a regular weekly post again this year. This is the first one. I won't give myself any soft of word count goal. Just one post a week, even if it's just a picture or a favourite quote.

My Comic. A million years ago, I started an urban fantasy comic -- a webcomic in the sense that I intended to first make it available on the web, though except for lettering, it's all drawn the old-fashioned way and ultimately I want it in print. I worked on it off and on over the years, a little here, a little there. It takes me a really really long time to draw.

Then, in 2004, just before I moved to Nova Scotia, I decided to re-draw everything I had already done to fix it. And I did. Every week a new page, and I even kept going after I finished re-drawing. I made it to the middle of issue 3 (around 50-something pages) and then, for reasons I no longer recall, I stopped. I even still had a few more pages planned out.

So now, ten years later, I'm going to have another go at it. I still love my characters, and it's still a story I want to get to the end of. But I'm not going to re-draw it again, even though it's old art and I might be able to draw it better (and looking back, I really shouldn't have bothered re-drawing it last time; I should have put the energy into making new pages). If I still have all my old files, and I can figure out WordPress well enough to make it do what I need, I might even have the first page up today. I'm going to start from the very beginning, one page a week to start, and while old pages are going up, I'll work on new ones. We'll see how far I get this time. I'd like to at least get to the end of the current storyline.

My Serials. I've have two serial novels on JukePop Serials, both of which have been neglected, due to the mysterious derailment of 2013. One of them -- the one I write as Calliope Strange -- is actually finished. I just haven't posted it all. For that one, I'll put up at least one chapter a week until it's done. The other one, Reindeer Girl, is not finished, but it will be. It was meant to be a way of finishing a book I started a while back, and a way to get me writing regularly. It can still be those things. Maybe I'll manage once a week, but if I can at least get going on it again, however slowly, I'll be pleased.

Other. I'm sure there are other old things I'll revisit through the year, but for now, these will do.

New Things Ahead

Dragons. This isn't entirely new, of course, as it's something I started working on on 2013, but this year I want to make it a major focus. A couple of days ago, I made a Scrivener file for it so I can start working on the text, and yesterday I had another stab at a dragon illustration that's been kicking my butt. I still didn't get it, but I got closer. This is my fun thing, the thing I'm making entirely for myself, but I'll share it, and maybe others will like it, too.

Fiction. There are always too many novels in my head, but this year I'd like to see if I can write one or two more Others novels (as Nic Silver). There are two more I know I need to write for sure. One is what happens to Evgeny while Su is in Germany, and the other is the continuation of Su's quest to find out what happened to her little sister. Also, I'd like to get working on the next Kentaurs novel, which I had intended to write over the summer. And eventually, though perhaps not this year, we'll have to find out what the heck is going to happen to Dubhghall and Maddy after the events of Dark Stranger.

Publishing. I need to get White Raven Press back on track, starting with a new website. I have a handful of novels and collections to get into print, and one to put up digital. Maybe two, but Deer Mouse is an experiment in submitting to a traditional publisher, so I'll have to wait till I hear back.

Painting. Last year I bought some exciting new art supplies, and promptly had no time to play with them. So this year, that's what I'll do. Play. Learn some things. I have a selection of casein paints, and I've already prepped a whole pile of boards to paint on. Maybe something will come of it, or maybe I'll just have fun. Either is good.

Craft. My goals here are just to keep on making stuff, and make more of an effort to market and get work into stores. I hope to do more hand-papermaking, so likely I'll have more cards printed on my own paper, and probably more linocuts rather than polymer letterpress. But again, we'll see how it goes. Also, I plan to play around with more 3D sculptures using die-cut elements. My first batch of dragons came out well, and were well-received. Also, they were great fun to design.

Photography. Some of you may know I studied photography (as well as printmaking, design, and book arts) in art school. I haven't done a lot of photo recently, asked from snaps to sort of visually journal things I see. I have some ideas for projects tumbling around in my head, but I just upgraded my iPhone, and I got a set of Olloclip macro lenses for Christmas (I had their 3-in-1 macro/wide angle/fish eye for my old phone, and will probably pick up the one for my current phone eventually), so I think I'm going to focus on shooting iPhone pictures. No pressure on myself to make great pictures, just something fun. And if they start turning out well, maybe I'll get more serious.

More…

I'm sure there were more things I was going to say, but I've gone on way longer than I meant to, so I'll stop. Basically, I plan to have fun this year, and finish more things -- some old, some new. The only way I can fail is if I stop writing/drawing/crafting completely, and that's pretty unlikely.

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!))

2011: Achievements

Way back at the beginning of the year, I wrote a post boldly proclaiming my goals. I'm pretty sure I didn't hit any of them. But let's look back:

• I will write one new short story a month
• I will write fiction for at least an hour, 5 times a week.
• I will blog at least once a week, but aim for three times.

Yep, I failed on them all. Except "failed" is not really the right word. No, I didn't meet any of the three goals, but if you look at the intent behind all of those goals, it was primarily to get me writing regularly again. And at that, I was actually very successful. It just took a lot longer to get back in the habit than I had thought.

At the bottom of that same post, I also mentioned some immediate goals:

• put together a simple but eye-catching cover for short story #1: "Come-From-Away," either photo-based (it's set in St John's, NL) or something I drew.
• Get the story formatted properly for e-pub.
• Get myself registered on the appropriate sites and publish away.

Not only did I get that done, I did it over and over for 12 short stories, two mini-collections (one of two and one of three stories), three YA/middle-grade novels, and a collection of eleven stories. And that's only what I did under my own name. Under two pen names, I also got five serial novel chapters done, published, and published again in a magazine (well, three of them so far in the magazine), finished a novel, and wrote substantial parts of two novellas.

In another post a couple of weeks later, I added another goal to stop sending out the same short stories over and over and e-publish them instead, clearing the decks, so to speak, for new work. And that I did.

So I actually got a lot done this year, especially if you add in that I taught several letterpress and books arts extended studies courses, did a whole lot of letterpress printing and even (finally) got some of it into shops in Halifax and Mahone Bay, had some litho and intaglio prints in a group show in New York (okay, Brooklyn, but still), did a lot of freelance writing and little bit of freelance editing, and got considerably more comfortable using Adobe Illustrator.

There are still a few things I'd have liked to have accomplished, like getting the second issue of Fey into print form, and doing the same for the novels, but those are now at the top of my list for next year.

More New Books, Plus a Kickstarter Campaign Worth Supporting

New Book: Frisland Stories: Eleven Tales of Folk Magic

Frisland is--or was once--an island in the North Atlantic, created by the gods of the sun and moon on a whim, and full of subtle magic. Now and then, there are dragons, but more likely you'll encounter magical foxes who are really fairy folk, people who can turn into reindeer, or a woman who built her beloved a pair of wings so he could fly.

Frisland Stories: Eleven Tales of Folk Magic includes all eleven Frisland short stories, including the two previously published in Two Tales of Frisland:

• Hollow Bones
• Remembering to Fly
• Sealskin
• Sharper and More Fragrant
• Cobbleshore Knit
• Daughters of the Sea King
• Fox Point Dragon
• Perilous Child
• Raven's Wing
• White Foxes, Full Moon
• Great Skerry

Buy from Smashwords
Buy e-book from Amazon
Coming soon in paperback from White Raven Press.

New Book: Vixen

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.

Buy from Amazon
Coming soon in paperback from White Raven Press.

Doctor Fantastique's Show of Wonders Kickstarter Campaign

Doc F's is the magazine that publishes my (as Calliope Strange) serial novel Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective. They're trying to raised enough cash to have the first issue of 2012 offset printed, to avoid the enormous cover price the POD magazine costs. There's lots of great fiction in here besides mine, plus articles, reviews, and more on steampunk-related topics.

Support Doc F's Kickstarter

Book Review: Unexpected Destiny by Ariana N. Dickey

I meant to have this posted ages ago. My, how time flies. Anyway, here's my first (and so far only) review for Self-Publishing Review, which describes itself thusly:

Self-Publishing Review is a central site devoted to self-publishing news and reviews. It is also a social network where writers, readers, and everyone can join and connect. . . . The aim of the site is to improve the attitude toward self-publishing and help authors find readers.

---

Book Review: Unexpected Destiny by Ariana N. Dickey

First impressions are vital with self-published books, especially first novels with few user reviews. Unexpected Destiny has a fairly bland cover, rendered unfortunately dark and murky by Lulu's printing process. The interior layout is mostly professional-looking, with a few odd formatting choices (most notably in the way non-human dialogue is set, which is not only strange, but inconsistent). Typos are mercifully few, and though I did notice a slight increase the farther I got into the book, I've seen much worse in mass-market paperbacks from top publishers.

But I don't expect you really care that much about the physical book, as long as it's not distractingly badly done. You probably really want to know about the story, the characters, the writing. Curiously, those things, the things that make you want to read a book or not, mirror the book's physicality. By which I mean, there's a lot of heart in Unexpected Destiny, but it's very apparent that this is a first novel.

Ms Dickey has no lack of imagination. The pages of this book are bursting with colorful characters, made-up fantasy species (and some that are more obviously based on myth or folklore or previous authors of high fantasy), and lovingly-imagined locales. The plot proceeds at a breakneck pace, sending the three main characters off on a quest and putting them in harm's way immediately--a different sort of harm on every page, it sometimes seems.

Our three heroes, Ely, Colin, and Faythe, are the latest reincarnation of the Blessed Ones (yes, in caps every time). It is their destiny to free their world from its tyrannical king and the depredations of some nasty gods and their even nastier minions, or to die in the attempt. Which makes me wonder exactly how their destiny is unexpected, since we (and they) know about it in the first chapter. The heroes have a magical map they must follow in order to meet said destiny, and it takes them from place to place where they save people, get attacked by people, kill a lot of people (both on purpose and by virtue of others trying to help them and dying), and learn how to harness their Blessed powers. It often feels like the writer also had a map, or a plot outline, that she followed from incident to incident, in as much of a hurry to get to the next plot point as her characters are to get to the next location on their map. Quite often, I wished she would just slow down, breathe and enjoy the journey.

Unexpected Destiny certainly isn't a bad book, but I can't quite say it's a great one, either. I give it 3 out 5 stars because though there's a lot of promise here, it's promise a good editor could have gone a long way towards bringing out. The writing is grammatically competent, but there are too many stock phrases and clichés, too much telling and not enough showing, for it to ever become truly absorbing. And though the story does reach a sort of resting place, it's not over, as this is the first in a series. To get the whole story, you have to read the rest of the series, which isn't out yet. I certainly wish Ms Dickey the best with her writing, as I think she could produce some fine stories if she's willing to put the work into developing her craft.

New Book: A Madness of Kentaurs

A Madness of Kentaurs

Octavian wants two things: to see the kentaur herd pass by on the plains, and to have a horse of his own. Ixion is a kentaur shaman-in-training, considered special by his people, but also set apart from them. During the season of madness a runaway horse brings the two together, where they learn that humans and kentaurs have more in common than they thought, and that their nightmares are connected.

It is the time of year when once wild things become wild again, still wild things become wilder, and civilized things shut their doors and pretend they had never been wild.

During the season of madness, the kentaurs of the Pelion foothills—those half-horse, half-human creatures that humans call “centaurs”—journey from their home villages to the sacred lands across the Acheron River. Horses find the kentaur herd irresistible and often run away from their human masters to join the herd. One day, Octavian, stable-boy and floor cleaner at the local inn, gets carried off by the innkeeper’s horse, and ends up trapped in the kentaur herd. He is placed under the charge of Ixion, a young kentaur shaman-in-training, who begins to teach him that kentaurs are not the barbaric, half-sentient beasts he had thought they were.

And then the dreams begin. Dreams in which ancient, cold things with too many teeth steal the boys’ tongues and threaten to steal their sanity. Now Octavian and Ixion both have to learn enough about the otherworld to make it though a grueling initiation ceremony across the Acheron, River of Woe. But first, Octavian has to gain acceptance from the kentaur herd.

Buy from Smashwords

Buy on Kindle

Coming soon in paperback

September Giveaway: Pretty, Shiny Thing Plus Secret, Mysterious Extra Thing

OK, it's time for my September giveaway! This month I'm going to send a copper pendant to one lucky winner, plus their choice of any story or novel of mine from Smashwords, and some other mysterious item I will decide on at the last possible minute.

The winner can choose an OsteoSophy animal skull pendant, either one I've already made, or a custom one of their choice (or they can opt to have a bracelet or brooch or keychain instead).

See more of these in my Etsy shop.

 OR

The winner may choose a copper feather pendant instead -- again, either an existing one, or a custom-made one. These are larger than the skulls and made from thinner copper.

More are currently in my other Etsy shop (it made sense at the time).

To enter, just comment on this post with your choice of pendant--tell me which you'd like and what animal or bird. Tweets and Facebook posts and the like are much appreciated, too, but not required.

A Couple of Covers

I haven't got anything exciting to report, alas, though I have a lot of things on the go. My alter ego, Calliope Strange, did finish writing chapter 4 of Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective, though, and it's now in edits. Here's the cover:

And my other alter ego, Nic Silver, has been working on a new urban fantasy that's probably going to be a trilogy. But first the first book, then we'll see. I posted a cover mock-up in an earlier post, and I've been playing around with some other ideas. Things to make it more obviously urban fantasy, mostly. The painting in the image is by Franz Marc, and German Expressionist whose work I have recently fallen in love with. He was a painter and printmaker in the late 19th/early 20th century who was (rather obviously) influenced by Cubism and Futurism. Anyway, this is the current version, but it still needs some tweaking:

Yeah, the blacks in the photo are too green, and the type needs something yet.

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.

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.

Latest Covers

Warning: Contains writerly stuff. If you're here for bookbinding or letterpress printing or pictures of Nova Scotia wildlife, you might want to skip this entry.

So a few days ago, I posted the last of the Frisland cycle of short stories to Smashwords and Kindle. The penultimate story, "Raven's Wing," I had started but never finished, so I finished it. Here's the cover:

The image is one of a pair of lithographs with Celtic raven imagery that I did a few years ago. I think it makes a rather handsome, if minimalist, cover. Actually, a lot of my covers are minimalist, as most of them will only ever be ebooks, since they're for short stories.



The very last story, "Great Skerry," got a photographic cover:

The photo was taken near Burgeo, NL, which was one of the inspirations for Cobbleshore, where many of the Frisland stories are set.



Now that they're all done, I'll be publishing a collection of all 11 stories in ebook and paperback, but first I want to get novel #2 done and out, plus The Coming of the Fairies in paperback. In case you missed it, the cover for that looks like this (I think it looks less good as a little ebook cover, so if you want to see it looking better, click on it to make it bigger):

So the last few days I've been working on getting The Secret Common-Wealth, my second YA/middle grade fantasy novel (also about fairies), formatted and ready for e-publication. Originally, I had planned a watercolour cover, but I'm not so sure my limited skills are up to the task (then again, they might not have been up to any book covers, but I did them anyway). I started playing around with scanning hand-bound books and adding gold-looking text, and ended up with this:

Which sometimes I like, and sometimes I don't. My biggest issue is, I think, that there aren't any of that sort of fairy in the book. No sparkly little winged women, no matter how fierce. The fairies in this book are Scottish sidhe, tall and elegant and amoral. (Also, the image really belongs to my comic, Fey, which I write/draw as nico.) But when I first made the little fairy woman gold, it looked so cool. Anyway. I don't want to take weeks to finish the cover, like I did with Coming, so I think I'll use it for now, and maybe work on it and make it better between now and whenever I manage to finish the paperback formatting.



Next on my list of writing to finish is chapter 4 of Aeryn Daring & the Scientific Detective. Then the third and final section of "Brother Thomas's Angel," which may very well bump it up from a novella to a novel, which is perfectly fine with me. Next to edit and make a cover for and publish is The Madness of Kentaurs (or is it *A* Madness? I always forget), and of course Frisland Stories.

Still Alive

Oops. I seem to have forgotten to post much lately. Anyway, the news in short, with writing, letterpress, book arts and everything all mixed up:

• Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective will be serialized in Doctor Fantastique's Show of Wonders, beginning with the June issue, due out June 20th. I believe they may have a print edition in the works as well as the online magazine. AD will continue to be available chapter-by-chapter on Kindle, thanks to Doc F's very writer-friendly non-exclusive rights contract.
• I just finished binding more exhibition catalogues for the lovely Sandra Brownlee, a local textiles artist. That's one of the things that has kept me busy.
• Last week I did a super-basic lunch hour bookbinding workshop for Extended Studies at NSCAD, for a huge turnout of around 25 people. It went well, I think.
• I will be teaching more Extended Studies classes at NSCAD in the fall. So far, the tentative lineup is Intro Letterpress (adults), Intro Letterpress (teens), Pop-Up Books (adults) and a weekend Pop-Up Holiday Card workshop (adults).
• I'm still listed to teach the credit Intro Letterpress for NSCAD in the fall, but it is in serious danger of being cancelled as of this coming Friday. If you or anyone you know wants to take it, please sign up right away.
• Paperback layouts for The Coming of the Fairies and the print version of Aeryn Daring chapter 1 proceed slowly, but are coming along. Ebook formatting for The Secret Common-Wealth is coming along quickly, but the book still needs a cover.
• I need some summer income. If you know of any writing/proofing/editing jobs, illustration jobs, or other work you think I might be able to do, please let me know. I work hard and I work fast.

Smashwords is Anti-Serial

Yesterday I happily uploaded chapter two of my serial novel, Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective (written under the pen name Calliope Strange), to Smashwords. This morning, I learned that Smashwords doesn't allow serials.

Here's the relevant passage from the Terms of Service:

9d. You further warrant the book represents a complete work:
• this is not a work-in-progress;
• the uploaded file is not a partial sample or sample chapter, or is not a collection of sample chapters
• the uploaded book represents a complete story with a beginning, middle and end;not a short serial

I suppose I can understand why; they don't want unhappy customers who've bought a chapter or two of something, only to find that the rest of the work never appears. On the other hand, serials have a long history and it seems a shame not to allow them to flourish. The age of ebooks seems perfect for the serial: bite-sized bits of fiction to read on the morning commute, which over time add up to a complete work.

I'm also publishing this book on Kindle, but I haven't found any similar restrictions in their Content Guidelines, so unless they tell me I can't do it, I'll keep posting them there.

So what now? I'm glad I can keep publishing on Kindle, but I want the chapters to be available on other platforms, too. But I've got a few ideas. First, I can publish each chapter on my own website (once my website has actually got some substance), as well as selling the printed version on Etsy and ArtFire (and on the website). Or I can find an online publication that might want to publish it as a serial. Then, once the whole work has appeared, I can publish the whole book on Smashwords, Kindle, and wherever else (plus a POD print version).

So here's my To Do lost for Aeryn:

• get website up
• add individual chapters in various formats for purchase via PayPal
• format and print cheapo print versions
• print deluxe versions, complete with letterpress covers and colour insert

Any suggestions are welcome, too.

New Cover

It's not Wednesday, but I'm going to write about writing anyway, because this is now finished:

It's the cover for my YA/middle grade urban fantasy short novel The Coming of the Fairies. The eBook version will be out very soon--just a couple of small tweaks to the manuscript and some front and back matter to add. The print version will be a little longer--aside from an entirely different format, it needs a back cover and spine, plus the ISBN application has yet to be sent in because the web page isn't finished and I need somewhere to send the ISBN folks when I apply.

But, yay! This one's almost out of my hands in into the world.

Writing Wednesday: Sharper Pearls

So yeah, I didn't quite get around to posting the final sea things cards update, but I'll get to it soon. I also have some pictures of our resident porcupine wandering around in the front yard to share. But it's Wednesday, so it's writing update time.

I got my story "Sharper and More Fragrant" added to Smashwords and Kindle (it's up now at Smashwords, from whence it will be distributed to various other venues; the Kindle version should be live in the next day or so). This is the story that eventually led to the novel I'm back at work on, formerly known as "White Foxes, Full Moon" (which title I'm now using solely for the short story that I later expanded into the first third of the book), and which is now probably going to be called Reindeer Girl, Fox Woman. Maybe.

I also formatted and posted "Cobbleshore Knit" but it's still in conversion. It should be completed by later today at Smashwords, and in a day or two on Kindle. "Cobbleshore Knit" was originally written with a completely new character, but I re-wrote parts of it once I realized the drowning man was actually Torin Danickson, the young man who captured the selkie girl in "Sealskin." It's a standalone story (at least I hope it is), but obviously connected.

And that puts me nearly halfway through the stories that make up the Frisland cycle. Unless I write more. I'm trying now to complete a half-written story that connects "Hollow Bones"/"Remembering to Fly" with "Great Skerry" (and also, in a background sort of way, to "Fox Point Dragon").

Phew. Sorry about all those titles all at once.

In non-Cobbleshore news, but still in Frisland, I should soon have the second part of Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective written (under the pen-name Calliope Strange). The cover is nearly done, too, largely because it's the same as the cover of chapter one, but in a different colour with a different flying machine image. I'm lagging a bit on the printed versions, as they require an entirely different sort of formatting, and also because I want to include an image in each chapter that will be full-colour in the deluxe (letterpress-printed cover) version and greyscale in the cheapo (photocopied cover) version. And I have yet to draw them.

And in completely non-Frislandish news, I have a new story in my head called "A Pearl Beyond Price." It's a fairytale thing with sentient dolls (creepy), weird sex (really creepy), and possibly incest (really, really creepy). All the creepiness means it gets to be by Nic Silver, instead of by Niko Silvester, because despite the fact that Nic and Niko are both me, Niko writes nice things and Nic writes weird shit. Nic Silver also wrote Brother Thomas's Angel.

Writing Wednesday: Remembering and . . . Something Else

Just a quick update today as I have a million things to do for a craft fair this weekend, and still have to keep up with my PSP gig. So, point form.

• another short story, this time "Remembering to Fly," is available on Smashwords, and eventually in the Kindle, Nook, Sony and iBookstores. It's currently listed at 99 cents, but I may add a coupon to make it free, because it's really very short (around 1500 words).
• I am falling behind in my short-story-a-month goal. First "Brother Thomas's Angel" turned into a novella and then I got busy with other things. So I have about 3 stories to write in May to catch up.
• I'm also falling behind in my writing 5 days a week goal, but I'll make that up as soon as this craft fair is over (they have a tendency to take over everything for a while, no matter how carefully you plan ahead).
• I have now caught myself back up on White Foxes, Full Moon and am about to write brand-new stuff and get this thing finished. I'm also probably going to change the title to distinguish it from the short story that I expanded into the first part of the novel. For now, I'll use Reindeer Girl as a working title, until something better presents itself.
• I'm no longer writing about anime/manga and folklore for Mania.com. My last articles should be up early in May if they aren't already. They're cutting back on freelancers, and while they're happy to keep publishing my stuff, they won't be able to pay me anymore. And while I love writing and anime and folklore, I can't afford to work for free. So.
• Still haven't heard back about the reviewer job I queried about.
• Applied for another freelance gig, but I won't say what it is until I know if I really have any chance. My application was good, but we'll see.

And I think that's it for today. Back to working on letterpress and bookbinding stuff for the craft fair. An update on that tomorrow or Friday, I think.

Writing: Angels, Anime and Steampunk

So my actual writing of new fiction isn't going spectacularly well. This past week was long and busy with letterpress rather than writing. But, I do have a few things to say (and didn't say them on Wednesday because I was out much of the day and got home very late and very weary, and the same thing happened on Thursday). I have managed to write a couple thousand words on "Brother Thomas's Angel"-- part two. I can't tell how long this part will be, but I'm starting to have some of the other characters' voices come clear, so it's possible that one of them may take over for a part 3 once the angel is finished with his bit. I'll figure that out when the time comes.

Another bit of not-so-new news: I've been writing a couple of columns for the media/pop culture site Mania. I'm doing a "Creator Spotlight" series on anime and manga artists/writers/etc and I'm doing articles on the sources of anime and manga in folklore and myth. Here's what's posted so far:

• Creator Spotlight: Moto Hagio
• Creator Spotlight: Kazuo Koike
• Folklore and Mythology as a Source for Anime and Manga
• Laputa, Atlantis and Floating Islands: Ancestors of Ghibli's Castle in the Sky

The next two are submitted and should be up this week or next.

And finally, the first chapter of the serial novel Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective (under my steampunkish pseudonym Calliope Strange) is now up on Smashwords and processing at Amazon Kindle. Apple iBooks will follow in a few weeks, as well as Sony eBooks and a couple others. For now, you can find all the various formats on its Smashwords page.

Writing Wednesday: A Week Already?

Wow. That week went by fast, and I managed not to post any non-writing posts, too. Sorry about that. I even have non-writing things to talk about. Soon, really.

So in writing news, on a long drive home one day I realized that "Brother Thomas's Angel" is not finished yet. It needs at least another long part, this time narrated by the angel. I know most of what needs to happen, and I've almost got the angel's voice down. But I have not managed to write any of it yet. Still, today/tomorrow's to do list is almost all crossed off, so I hope to make a really good start on that in the morning, if I don't get to it tonight (fading fast now, though, and thinking about bed with a book and then zzzzz).

I also heard the latest on the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award late yesterday, and The Secret Common-Wealth didn't make it to the next round. Oddly, it's kind of a relief. I have other plans for it that I can now carry on with.

And finally, as I write this "Three Variations on 'Sleeping Beauty'"--a mini-collection of three short fairy tales that together barely equal the word count of a hefty short story--is processing at Smashwords and awaiting approval in the Kindle store. The iBookstore will follow eventually. I'll post links here next week, probably.

Oh, and speaking of iBookstore, "Come-From-Away" and "Burnt Offerings" are both available there now, with "Hollow Bones" to follow shortly. I don't have a direct link, but go to iBooks on your device, and search for "Silvester" in the iBookstore and they'll come up at the top.

And one final thing--really--I have an official Niko-Silvester-the-writer page on Facebook now. If you go and "like" it, I'll be posting free story coupons soonish. I'd like to offer free stories in exchange for a review on Smashwords or wherever.

Writing Post Not On Wednesday Again: Finished, Sort Of

So this time I didn't write about writing on Wednesday because I didn't have much to report. I had a rather unproductive week, I'm afraid. But since then I've finished the longhand draft of "Brother Thomas's Angel."

Incidentally, I don't really recommend writing longhand. Some writers, like Neil Gaiman, for example, write a longhand draft first and then do initial edits as they transcribe that draft to a word-processed one. That's what I always used to do. Until I had to write some stuff under deadline and simply didn't have time to do it twice. And I discovered that I don't write any differently when I compose on the computer. But besides simply writing speed, there's also physical health to think of. I essentially have permanent tendonitis in my right wrist from many, many years of madly scribbling longhand. I've been writing since I could hold a pencil and make the shapes of letters, and it's hard on the bod. My wrist has a noticeable bulge on the top where the tendonitis has formed a ganglion. I could have surgery, but it doesn't bother me much most of the time. When I refrain from doing everything longhand. Typing has its own problems, of course, but they're generally not as bad, and are more easily preventable.

But anyway. A draft of my latest story is done and I'm working on transcribing it. I'm not really sure how long it is, but I'm almost at 2000 words, and I still have a long way to go. It may be a novella.

On the print front, I submitted a few stories to magazines recently and got a couple rejections back (not unexpected ones). I'm still waiting to hear back about two stories.

And in ebooks, I haven't put anything else up yet, but I'm working on covers for a trio of short stories based on the Sleeping Beauty fairytale and for part one of Aeryn Daring and the Scientific Detective (the serial novel based on my in-limbo comic The Fabulous Forays of Aeryn Daring). The individual parts of Aeryn will probably get simple typographic covers and then when the whole novel goes up it'll have a more elaborate cover and will also be available in print from White Raven Press. And it'll be under a pseudonym. Not because I am trying to hide authorship, but because of the way it fits into a larger body of ongoing work that includes printmaking, metalwork, bookbinding and whatever else.

And I think that's it for fiction. For non-fiction, you can read my latest article for Mania, "Laputa, Atlantis and Floating Islands: Ancestors of Ghibli's Castle in the Sky," here.