Pay-What-You Want Lithographs

For details on how this sale works, please see my previous post. The short version is, I need cash quick, so I'm having a sale. If you want something, leave a comment. You pay shipping and whatever else you want above that, and I send you prints. (Local folks have the option of pick-up instead of shipping.)

The prints in this post are all hand-pulled lithographs. Some are stone lithos, and others are from aluminum plates. All of them are limited edition and will never be reprinted. Intaglio, relief, and letterpress will be posted in separate posts, as will artist's books and blank journals, jewellery, and a few other things.

The Evolution of Flight

5- colour hand-pulled lithograph (3 colour stone reduction plus 2 aluminum plates)
15 inches wide by 20 inches high on 100% rag printmaking paper
edition of 11, signed, numbered, and dated on the back
8 left (numbers 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, and 11 if you have a preference)
original retail $120

Pterothopter Mk I

3-colour hand-pulled lithograph (2 colour stone reduction plus 1 aluminum plate)
20 inches wide by 15 inches high on 100%rag printmaking paper
edition of 4, signed, numbered, and dated on the front
4 left (numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4)
original retail $120
I also have one trial proof of just the black layer (complete with typo)

Lament for Lost Lenore, State I

hand-pulled stone lithograph
10.5 inches wide by 8 inches high on 100% rag printmaking paper
edition of 6, singed, numbered, and dated on the front
3 left (numbers 4, 5, and 6)
original retail $35

Lament for Lost Lenore, State II

hand-pulled stone lithograph
10.5 inches wide by 8 inches high on 100% rag printmaking paper
edition of 10, singed, numbered, and dated on the front
7 left (numbers 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10)
original retail $35

Lament for Lost Lenore, State III

hand-pulled stone lithograph
10.5 inches wide by 8 inches high on 100% rag printmaking paper
edition of 10, singed, numbered, and dated on the front
7 left (numbers 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10)
original retail $35
Note: the yellowish colour is glare from my lousy photography. The image is actually just black on white.

Quoth

hand-pulled stone lithograph
10.5 inches wide by 8 inches high on 100% rag printmaking paper
edition of 3, singed, numbered, and dated on the front
none left, but I do have 2 proofs on lightweight Mayfair drawing paper (one has a slightly bent corner)
original retail $35

Nevermore

hand-pulled stone lithograph
10.5 inches wide by 8 inches high on 100% rag printmaking paper
edition of 7, singed, numbered, and dated on the front
3 left (numbers 5, 6, and 7), I also have one proof on lightweight Mayfair drawing paper
original retail $35

Check back shortly for more prints.

The "Oh Crap I'm Overdrawn" Pay-What-You-Want Print Sale

Originally this was going to be the "Oh Crap I have a Self-Employment Tax Bill" sale, but circumstances have, well, changed. So Yeah. Basically, if you were thinking about buying some of my work, this is a really, really (*really*) good time. You get prints (and other goodies) for cheap, and I can start digging myself out of the hole.

Here's how it works: I'll post pictures and specs for prints (and these are all hand-pulled prints made in limited editions, and not digital prints), artist's books, jewellery, and other odds and ends of art. If you want one, or several, comment on the post with your country and postal code or state, or send me an email (to anagramforink at gmail) with your mailing address. As long as you cover shipping (unless you live in Nova Scotia and want to pick them up from my house or from the Dawson Printshop in Halifax), the price of the print is whatever you want to pay.

I'm going to put the original retail for each print in the info, but that's not to get people to give me more money, it's just there as a reference for folks who want to know. Really, cover shipping and you can have the prints free (though I hope you'll chip in a little something I can give the bank).

Shipping costs will vary quite a lot depending on the size of the print and whether it's shipped rolled or flat. Tiny prints can go for as little as a couple of bucks, while bigs ones can be $20 or $30 (or more if you want tracking). The more prints you buy, the less shipping per print. When you send your address, I'll give you a shipping cost (as determined by the Canada Post shipping calculator and rounded up to the nearest dollar).

This'll be first come, first served -- and I'll include the number of each print I have available so you can figure out from the comments if there are any left -- but if you already know something you want before I post it, go ahead and email me or comment on this post, and I'll set it aside for you.

There are a few prints I won't be including in the sale -- though I may put them up at a discount. If you're buying anything else, though, it might be a good time to save on shipping. These will mostly be really recent work.

I prefer payment via PayPal (I'll let you know which email to send it to when I give you the shipping cost), but if you're local, cash and cheques are good, too, and I can even do VISA/Mastercard via Square for locals (in person so I can swipe your card) or PayPal for farther away folks.

Finally, if you know anyone who might want some cool science, nature, and history inspired art, please pass this along. Purchases from my Etsy shops will also help) though a lot of what's in there will eventually make it to this sale. Even digital print purchases or buying my ebooks will help in the long term (though not immediately). I'll try to get all the prints posted today, but it may take a couple of days. I have to dig through my big box to see what I have, and some of them will need to be photographed.

Edited to add:
You don't have to tell me how much you're paying when you tell me what you want to buy -- I'll send you a list of shipping options once I know what you want and where you want it sent. Then just send your payment via PayPal (or let me know how else you want to pay) with a note to say which shipping option you choose. As long as the amount covers the shipping, I'll send out your prints.

Here's What's For Sale

• lithographs
• intaglio prints 1
• intaglio prints 2
• relief prints and letterpress
• artist's books
• blank books
• jewellery and original art (plus commission info)
• one more original art piece

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.

One More Cover Post

I decided that while I liked the covers with just the art, there really needed to be some indication of genre, so I added silhouettes. I've only done the first three, since I haven't written the rest yet. (I'm also adding links to Amazon and Smashwords, just in case... you know, you might want to buy one -- they're also available from Kobo, the iBookstore, Sony, Barnes & Noble, the other Amazons, and a few smaller places.)

Vixen (The Others #1)

buy from: Amazon | Smashwords | Paperback

Hexen (The Others #2)

buy from: Amazon | Smashwords

Familiar (The Others #3)

buy from: Smashwords (pre-order)

Future Others Series Covers

Familiar: Cover and Blurb

She's rescued her lover twice, once from imprisonment and once from a demon.

Can she save herself from her own nature?

To save Evgeny, Su had to allow herself to be bound to her hexen best friend Alex as a witch's familiar. They meant to reverse the spell as soon as Ev was safe, but it turns out a familiar binding is for life -- or even beyond if the familiar is a hexenfuchs like Su.

As the binding draws tighter, like a leash around Su's throat, she and Alex travel to Germany to search for a solution in Alex's hexen ancestry.

But half of Su's ancestry is German, too, and their destination is right in the heart of hexenfuchs territory. Su and Alex are joined by much more than a familiar binding, it seems -- they're bound by a destiny that keeps repeating, trapping witch and familiar in the same tragic events.

Good thing Su doesn't believe in destiny.

Hexen: New Cover, New Blurb

If the only way to save your beloved is to sacrifice yourself, would you do it?

With the vampire council defeated -- for now -- Su and Evgeny deserve their Happily Ever After. Unfortunately, something unknown and horrifying is gradually taking over Evgeny's mind. It seems to be connected to his developing powers as a witch -- powers he shouldn't even have -- but it also seems to have a mind of its own.

And it's angry, cruel, and set on hurting Su.

But this time, Su isn't alone. With the help of her werewolf neighbour Magne, her witch ex-girlfriend Alex, and her own developing powers as a fox-woman, she just might be able to save Evgeny.

The trouble is, she could lose herself in the process.

***

And the (rather embarrassing) current cover:

Now that she's rescued Evgeny from his captors, Su figures they ought to get their Happily Ever After. But life just doesn't seem to work out that way. Because not only does Su now have a fox's tail -- which makes getting dressed awkward, to say the least -- but there's someone still after Evgeny.

This time, the enemy isn't so obvious, and instead of trying to take Ev prisoner, whoever it is is trying to control him from the inside. Something nasty keeps taking over Evgeny's mind and if Su can't find out who it is fast, and stop them, the man she loves may disappear forever, replaced by a violent, woman-hating demon.

Vixen: New Cover, New Blurb

What has glowing eyes and fangs, but isn't a vampire?

She doesn't know, either.

A year ago, Su woke up on a park bench with no memories, but it didn't take her long to figure out she isn't exactly human. The problem is, she doesn't know what she is, and neither does anyone else.

Now, cut off from her past, she gets by as a pickpocket, keeps to herself, and tries to stay as far away as possible from the vampires who find her scent irresistible.

Until Evgeny stumbles into her life, awkward and newly-born as a vamp, with as few memories as Su. The other vamps are even more interested in him than they are in her, so together Su and Ev take a stand to save both their lives.

And they uncover a plot that endangers all others -- vamp, were, witch, and whatever Su is.

***

For comparison, here are the current cover and blurbs (the first is the original, the second is the back cover text from the paperback edition).

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.

***

Su knows it's a bad idea to take home strangers you meet in the bar. It's an even worse idea when the young man is a newly-made vampire. Except it's her fault he's alone and unprotected.

But Evgeny isn't an ordinary vampire. He's something other vamps very much want to get their hands--or their fangs--on. When he's kidnapped, Su can't just let him go. Because she's not about to let her new friend be cannibalized by his own people. And besides, Su isn't an ordinary woman.

 The trouble is, she doesn't actually know what she is.

 *** 

If anyone has any suggestions for improvement, I'd love to hear them.

Blurbs for Nic Silver

Apparently, it's a long weekend, which is always a little disappointing for me, since as a freelancer the whole concept of "weekend" or even "days off" is a sort of mythical thing that other people have.

But sometimes I pretend weekends are real and use them to take time off from the work I have to do to get a paycheque, and switch to the work I want to do, the work that brings in dribbles of money now and might (I hope) get me more in the future.

So this labour day weekend, I have some things -- some non-freelance paid work things -- that I aim to get done. Or at least worked on thoroughly. And most of those things relate to the books I write under the pen name Nic Silver.

I started today working on book covers. Though I kind of like the cover I did for Vixen, I've never been entirely happy with it, because my main character is half Asian (and looks mostly Chinese) but my cover model is very white (and is me, actually). And the cover for Hexen was meant to be a placeholder until I could get something better done (also see comments on Vixen cover). Now that I'm getting ready to put Familiar up as a pre-order (it's written but needs final editing), I need another cover, and I figured why not re-do them all at once?

So I used the same layout and images I already had, except I took the person off the cover. Originally, I intended to find or paint new images of Su to add on there, but now I'm thinking that might not work so well with the lovely classic paintings and prints of foxes I'm using (except book 2, and some future volume, which use my own prints). I may do versions with characters on the front, too, just to see how they look. After all, these covers don't really scream "urban fantasy" and I do rather want people to know at a glance what they're getting.

On the other hand, I find a lot of urban fantasy covers annoying and implausible. So.

Anyway, I now have five covers on my computer, more or less done (e-book versions only -- I'll have to re-tool them a little for print). Well, on one I used the wrong image, so I'll need to swap that out, but otherwise... New covers for Vixen and Hexen, and a cover for Familiar, plus covers for the next two books that I haven't even written yet, with the working titles Koldun and Sister.

The other thing I'm working on this weekend is blurbs. Again, re-writing the ones for Vixen and Hexen (again), and doing one for Familiar. I'll leave the ones for the unwritten books till they're written, since I won't know what actually happens until I write them.

I suck at blurbs, but I'm trying to improve. I'm very seriously considering taking Dean Wesley Smith's "Blurbs and Pitches" online class, but I have many things to pay for in the next few months I'm not sure I can swing it (damn house insurance!). But maybe. It would probably pay for itself eventually. Maybe even quickly.

Anyway. My next few posts will be new covers and new blurbs. And hopefully that will get me into writing on the blog more often again.

And now, here is a picture of some tomatoes from my garden, just because.

And . . . Done

55,075 words and the first draft of Dark Stranger is done. Now I'll set it aside for a while to work on editing the latest Nic Silver book, and to finish writing Reindeer Girl.

More Words

Dark Stranger is now at 52,943 words. It has exceeded the first draft of Milk Sister by about 600 words or so, and I'm not quite done. I think there's just the final scene to write, but I'll find out tomorrow (or possibly later today, depending on what else I get done).

Words, Words, Words

So apparently my villain talks a lot. I suspect this may be the principle defect of many villains, and the reason so many of them fail. They want to take over the world but mostly because they like the sound of their own voice and when you rule the world no one can tell you to shut the hell up.

Anyway. Dark Stranger is at 50,839 words as of a few minutes ago, and I think it's getting very close to the end. I had originally worked out my daily word quota to hit 70,000 words by my birthday, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be that long. Milk Sister was a slender 52,370 words or thereabouts (that was my word count before editing), so Dark Stranger should be around the same.

Another writing morning like this one (2603 words, or about 1000 words more than my daily goal) and I might very well have reached the end. For now. Because there are certainly things that won't be resolved when the last page is done.

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!))

Natural History Sketches: Skunk

One night after teaching letterpress in Halifax I was driving home on our rural highway and had to stop and let a skunk (Mephitis mephitis -- striped skunk) cross the road. It's not uncommon for skunks to be out in the dark hours (porcupines and raccoons are also very common, so I tend to drive slower than most people do in the dark on that road).

What was interesting, though, it that this particular skunk has such wide stripes that it was more white than black. It was so pale I even wondered if my "knowledge" that skunks don't change colour in the winter might be wrong.

Well, skunks don't change colour (like hares do), but it turns out it's actually not that unusual for striped skunks to be nearly white. A quite look through Google images showed that while the usual black and white pattern was the most common, a lot of skunks have stripes either thicker or narrower than the norm, so they vary from nearly all white to nearly all black. There's also a fairly rare paler colour phase in which the usually black parts of the animal are a pale brown.

Anyway, the next day I attempted to remember what I saw well enough to sketch it.

Image © Niko Silvester. Please do not use without permission. Thanks!

Natural History Sketches: Shrew and Mouse

I live in a rural area in a somewhat unfinished house that hasn't been maintained as well as it might have been. Consequently, we have mice in the walls. They're actually quite lovely little creatures: deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus). They're also native to Nova Scotia, so I feel a bit bad setting traps for them, even when they get cheeky enough to watch me from the top of a bookcase.

Every now and then my cat, who never goes outside, will catch one. Usually somewhere in the still-dark hours of the early morning. Then she lets them go in the bedroom, which has a sill on the door, so they run around and around the room while she chases them. Eventually she gets bored and they escape, or they go into shock so I have to scoop them up in the morning and release them into the woods. Every now and then she actually kills one.

(I know, I am a monster for not intervening. But at three a.m. I am pretty much a zombie and capable only of groaning and burying my head under the pillow.)

Once, I discovered the tiny body in the morning and instead of a mouse, it was a shrew (probably a masked shrew, Sorex cinereus). I still don't know how it ended up inside, because as far as I can tell, shrews are not usually house-dwellers. I can only guess that perhaps it got lost in the tunnels under the snow (there was a lot of snow on the ground at the time) and followed a mouse hole, or the dryer vent, into the house. Only to be captured by a housecat.

Shrews, if you're not up on your mammalian classification, are not rodents (which, of course, mice are). Though they do resemble mice somewhat, they're actually more closely related to moles. Masked shrews are very, very tiny. Even smaller than deer mice. Sadly, this dead little beast is the only shrew I've actually seen (though I did spy a living vole -- a mouse-like rodent -- a couple of times in one of our rock walls).

Image © Niko Silvester. Please do not use without permission. Thanks!

Natural History Sketches: Squirrels

You can tell what I think of these drawings in the comment I wrote next to them. Oh well. One of the points of keeping this journal is to get more drawing practice, which will -- I certainly hope -- help me improve.

North American Red Squirrel (Tamiasciurus hudsonicus)

These little guys are almost unbearably cute, but they're also accomplished thieves. Unless you buy special (rather pricey) bird feeders, they'll steal all the seeds. Fortunately, they're not too bad most of the year, and most of our birds aren't bothered by them (and we only have two regulars). I once saw a crow chase a red squirrel away when it got too close.They do get very gluttonous in the winter when they're stockpiling, and they'll leave the seed pile with their cheeks stuffed so full their heads look two or three times normal size.

In some parts of Canada, red squirrels have been driven out by invasive grey squirrels, but that hasn't happened here in NS (at least, not yet).

All images © Niko Silvester. Please don't use them without permission. Thanks!

Natural History Sketches: Pheasant

It seems it's been a while since I posted. I guess I'm not doing so well on my New Year's resolutions. Oh well. Here are some of the sketches from my big giant natural history notebook (which I also haven't been keeping up with as much as I'd like).

Pheasants (Ring-necked or Common Pheasant, Phasianus colchicus)

These lovely, big birds aren't native to Nova Scotia, and were actually introduced a number of times by people wanting to establish them as game birds. They're still relatively uncommon over a lot of the province, but somewhat common where I live. I've actually seen six or more birds, male and female, foraging together in the same field, but more often I'll see one on its own -- usually a male, as the females are much better camouflaged and therefore harder to spot.

There used to be one male that regularly came for the seeds we put out every day, but he hasn't been around for a year or two (or else he waits until no one's looking). Here he is in 2010.

All images © Niko Silvester. Please don't use them without permission. Thanks.

Corvus corax Sketch

Yesterday's entry in my new, giant natural history journal was the usual weather report and list of beasties in the yard. We had a new visitor, though: a raven.

Although we have a lot of ravens in the area, the closest they usually get to the yard is flying high overhead. For a few weeks in the fall they would gather in the evening in the woods just beyond out property line -- I could hear them gossiping and saw them fly over, but that was it.

But yesterday one stopped by to check out the seeds I put out and stayed long enough to pick some of them out of the snow with her enormous beak. She didn't stay long, though, because our resident crows, which are much, much more skittish than city crows, saw me watching from the window and flew off in a flurry of wings. That made the raven nervous enough to fly away, though she hadn't seemed concerned herself that I was watching.

This sketch isn't from life. I ran to get my camera, but when I came back was when the crows decided to cause a fuss, so I didn't manage a photo. Instead, I found a picture online that matched more or less the raven I saw. It's a pretty rough, quick sketch, but I think I succeeded in capturing, at least a little bit, the range of textures in the bird's feathers.

And, as promised, here's what the book looked like in its original  installation. Not very good photographs, I'm afraid, but I hope you get the idea.

Natural History Journal: Days 1 & 2

I don't really have much to show for my new natural history journal in a giant blank book project yet, but a few people have expressed interest, so here you go.

Here's the book itself, which some of you have already seen on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. It's big. Next time I think of it, I'll dig out a photo of the project I originally made it for, which was an installation for a wood type letterpress class I took in 2007 I think.

Here's a shot of page one. It doesn't say a whole lot. Just some comments on the weather (cold and snowy) and a list of birds spotted in the yard.

And here's a close-up of the blue jay feather drawing. As you can see, I need a lot of drawing practice. But that's one of the points of this exercise.

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.