Category: novel
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Fun with marketing – my convention banner
I am so pleased to show off my first major marketing tool since the book got its cover – my banner for convention booths and signing tables. Artist Andrea Klores created a fantastic twilit look that complements the book’s edginess and theme. See it below in detail, and the final product at the end of this…
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My book has a cover!
I’m so excited to share my novel’s cover! Created by Duong Covers, it captures my old-meets-new theme in spectacular fashion. Speaking professionally, it’s also fantastic. In case you wondered why titles are getting so BIG on book covers lately, thank online bookstores and their 100ish-pixel-wide icons. Here, not only the title but the central art…
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Make time for new work
My main creative work since my book contract has either been editing my manuscript or developing my (approach to) social media. By any commercial measure, that’s what I should have done. Polishing and sharing best honors my creative expression. One has creative intention too, and each success makes one’s ground more fertile. Recently my editor Vivian…
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Books at AwesomeCon need flair
AwesomeCon‘s sales and promotional floor is so big that guides and maps never refer to it as a unit bound by walls, only to its subsections. All of it is dense with visual stimulus and novelty. Vendors sell comics, books, movies, posters, toys, models, clothing and accessories, even niche products like leather bondage wear or rings…
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Merge and purge (writing and language)
My first draft was 220,000 words of symbol-laden passages and over-described locales. Over years I steadily replaced sets of words with smaller stronger ones, refining the language to heighten the story and the emotional viewpoint. The never-quite-articulated goal was for the words to hold more weight relative to their size thanks to their structure. In…
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Big news – and some thanks
I am thrilled to announce I have signed a contract with WordFire Press to publish The Demon in Business Class, my first novel! I am so excited about this! But it’s some months away, with a lot to do between now and then. I’ll talk about it much more as the book launch approaches, and I…
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Robots vs. androids in fiction (go robots!)
Among the characters in my new novel is a collective of former package-delivery drones that, after a war, evolved themselves into a taxi service for their damaged city. From the earliest drafts, I saw them as small flying saucers, with only a central trunk/harness to carry goods or a seated cross-legged person. It took a little…
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NaNoWriMo recap (winner!)
National Novel Writing Month was a huge personal success for me, and a big confidence booster. I will miss my silicone NaNoWriMo bracelet tomorrow. By the numbers, 50,028 words, finished in the wee hours of November 27. On the twenty-three days I wrote, I averaged 2,175 words a day, due mainly to a big push…
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NaNoWriMo update at the halfway mark (yay)
I keep meaning to blog! And it isn’t that I am SO BUSY – NaNoWriMo has become so all encompassing that all my draft blogs are navel-gazing treatises on processes which inform the start of my day but go by the wayside when it’s ten pm and I still have seven hundred words to go.…
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My return to writing, via NaNoWriMo
I have long been absent from public life and social media. In July I had severe medical problems – short-lived, thankfully, but requiring rest. In some way, the medical problems deflated me. My mood, always a little low to begin with, got lower still. I could manage family obligations, and family joys, but I was…