• Re-reading Shell has made me think I'm going in the wrong direction with the packaging. I might do something far more understated. From the distance of a few years, it's easy to think of it as Dlane's book... but it's Thenet's, and the eperu aesthetic is austere. I'll have to do more new work for it, but a lot less than I was planning, which will mean the book will come out faster.

• Still trying to figure out a good way to scan oversized art. Kinko's has an oversize scanner, but the last scans I got back from them had digital artifacts. I ended up stitching "Hadara and the Sun King" together by hand, which was... not... fun. *sigh* Getting a scan of "Willow" I can actually print has so far been a non-starter.

• Right now "Just Because (I Love You)" is on the painting board because the paper I want to put the baby+dragon piece is in the mail. Hopefully it'll come soon because I'm utterly intimidated by "Just Because." That order also contains replacement brushes for the three that I've destroyed finishing these last two paintings... yes, I'm still trying to get a good scan for the postcards to send the people who sponsored those brushes, and they're already being replaced! *shaking head*

• I'm just now going through sketchbooks 11-20 for the Retrospective... if you want me to scan more pictures from this set, you can do that here. Remember to tell me your LJ Name so I can list you as a sponsor!

• Also, I've figured out the third illustration for the Admonishments and am trying to put that together now. I can tell it's going to be late, though. It's complicated.

• Related to all this scanning/archiving of artwork... I found somehow that I got water into one of the portfolios I use to store old originals, which ruined my original of "Ragna." I need to get more of these things out of my house before I destroy them. :P

• Finally, arielstarshadow has cracked the top five commenter list, and in doing so has asked so many questions or made so many leading statements that I'm just vibrating with the need to write or draw things. Comments are love!



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Tags: art, books, writing
Current Mood: sigh

A couple of days ago I went to a couple of genre websites I used to read religiously, sites that specialized in reviewing new and existing books... and I felt lost. It was like I was reading some alien language, or looking at something through a smoky glass. I felt completely removed from it. Yet another "subversive" book, undermining the tropes of the genre. Yet another Tolkien come again. Yet another ground-breaking book... breaking ground for... what? More of the same. Everything felt so... derivative. Of itself.

It reminded me suddenly of how I felt about furry fandom a few years ago... that sense of people feeding off one another, everyone crowded into a small pond, writing for one another, reviewing one another.

And I thought: "This is my genre?"

Not anymore.

And yet, you know... I still love science fiction. I still love fantasy. I still love wizards and dragons and boys with swords making their fortunes. I still love gallant space captains and multi-generational empires and robots. But the mainstream of the genre feels like an insular fortress and I'm not interested in what's behind its walls anymore. When I read these days, it's either authors I've already tried and still like, like Jack Campbell writing his Jack Geary military space operas, or it's new things I had to hunt around on the fringes to find, like alex_beecroft's The Witch's Boy.

More and more the thing that fills that void, oddly enough, is the RPG. Not because I have the time to run a new campaign... but because I know a lot of people who do, and they often say, "What would you be in this system?" or they describe their own characters. Or I look back at my older games and find something new in them. Or I read rulebooks—akaihyo sent me one recently. I get my playing online when I can, with a couple of people who make it worthwhile. This is the place that feels open-ended to me still, where you can go "Wow!" at things that people make, and where if you don't like what people make you're completely free to make up your own.

It makes me think a little about the future of storytelling, and about tailored or custom-fitted stories, where you have some influence over what you want to see; not entirely, because then how could you be delighted and surprised? But enough to be invested in the story.

If you'd told me a few years ago that I'd be uninterested in the genre mainstream industry, that the offerings in the bookstore would mostly be boring me, that I'd be turned off by the way many of those authors talk about themselves and their work, I would have been shocked. I wanted to be them. I don't anymore.

I have a copy left over of The Aphorisms that I bought to send to one of those sites. I haven't yet. I don't think I will now. What to do with it now? The possibilities seem endless. I think I will make a gift of it.


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Tags: gaming, writing
Current Mood: vaguely disappointed

I ran into this quote from Lois McMaster Bujold:

I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset.)

Do you agree?


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Tags: poll, writing

Dlane at Dusk

Today I printed out the manuscript for Shell to edit, something I'm hoping won't take very long (how many times have I edited this book by now?). While I'm not planning on releasing this one until autumn, at the rate I'm working I realize I have to start on it now. Some thoughts, then:

• I worked out the price; looks like I can do a color cover, B&W interior on cream paper for about $7-8, the same you'd pay for a normal paperback. I am pleased!

• The cover is going to have to be "Dlane at Dusk" (above)... that's the iconic picture of Dlane, whether or not the book is told by someone else. I think, to make it work, I might do an Art Nouveau style frame for the title/author/back cover blurb.

• I'm not sure whether to use some of the old B&W imagery I've already done as interior illustrations or do new pencil pieces... I know I want to add some calligraphy and maps and other inserts, I'm just not sure about the drawings. If I do new ones, I have to start now, given how slow I'm working.

• I'm not sure yet whether I want to serialize this online or just have the first three chapters or so available. If I serialize every novel I've written (even discounting the ones I think are no longer viable), we'll be here years before we get to anything new.

• I do, however, want to drum up donations for this one so I have an "advance" to cover the time I'm going to spend working on putting together the interior. Not sure how I'm going to do that if I don't serialize it.

Anyway, just the things I'm mulling over now while I still have plenty of time to decide. But I keep realizing that the trade-off for giving away all the control for these things to other people is... that I'm giving it away. Being able to choose whether to include illustrations and which, whether I want alien calligraphy in the book or not, whether to include maps, glossaries... to be able to give you the whole story, not just the writing part... really, I'm happier doing it this way and I think the product is better for it too. Hopefully those of you who bought the hard copy of The Aphorisms agree. :)


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Tags: books, jokka, marketing, the worth of a shell, writing
Current Mood: very tired

I'm reading By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers and Olympic Champions, which dracosphynx sent me, and it's been delightful... I'm usually a slow reader of nonfiction, but this one's been pleasurable.

Anyway, there's a chapter on the mystique of the "secret thrust," the one winning move that will always get your opponent, wherein we hear of Egerton Castle, who wrote in the 1860s or so:

Castle lived by his pen, turning his hand to any topic from English bookplates to landscape gardening. He wrote plays for Sir Henry Irving, for nearly a decade was on the staff of the Saturday Review, and together with his wife, Agnes Sweetman, penned more than twenty historical romances, several of which became best-sellers. Some had splendid titles—his last, posthumous novel was Pamela Pounce: A Tale of Tempestuous Petticoats—and several drew upon his love of swordplay, one dealing explictly with the botte secrete. At the climax of his short story "The Great Todescan's Secret Thrust" its hero confronts the evil Todescan: "Never, for the smallest breathing-space, did the provost's terrible long blade release his own. He felt it gliding, seeking to bind, fiercely caressing; felt the deadly spring behind a tiger's crouch; felt the invincible, unknown thrust ready against his first weakening."

The book goes on to discuss whether the secret thrust described in this short story was actually very secretive, or even very effective... but as you can imagine, the rest of the discussion was totally lost on me.


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Tags: fencing, humor, writing
Current Mood: !

I wonder a little what I'm going to do when I'm done with the Admonishments. I love spending time in Kherishdar, and there's certainly things I could do there: I've considered stories from the point of view of the fathriked, or even a book of castes, where I tell one story from the point of view of one person of each caste-rank, from the lowest of the low to the emperor.

But it's tempting to do aught else... to visit some other aliens and see if they have stories worth telling in 2 pages or less. God knows I have enough of them... the Aliens Page lists ten, but those are really just the best developed or most obviously alien of them all.

Writing for the web is a very different skill from writing for print, just as writing novels is a very different skill from writing short stories. I'm intrigued by this difference... I think I want to continue exploring it, while still making the short fiction and novels available for people to read.

Just thinking ahead. Wondering what to do next. Sometimes that's the most fun, you know? :)



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Tags: writing
Current Mood: drifty
Current Music: De/Vision - Not Made of Gold

Detaching from the need to be "successful" in some measurable way as a writer has taken me the better part of a decade, and to get to that place the universe basically had to shatter all my illusions.

So, with only a few pangs, like memories of who I was, I find myself trying to explain to all of you why I don't feel any urgency about selling my book...


...and then a day later, I hit 50 copies sold.

I'm not sure whether to laugh or shake my head... so instead I'll do the one thing I know I feel: say thank you, thank you, most deeply. Of all the blessings my writing and art have brought me, the most durable and the most astounding has been the opportunity to interact with so many wonderful people: all of you.

And I will go buy the chocolate, for sooth, and photograph it for both our enjoyments. :)


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Tags: books, life, writing
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: some Celtic guitar thingy

I was riding my bicycle a week ago or so, in the late late afternoon when sunset is threatening but it's still light out... enjoying the quality of the light, so luminous without heat. There's a long slope alongside a pond where you don't have to pedal and I sat back as I sailed past, listening to the click-click-click of the bicycle chain and the distant piercing whistle of a heron... watching the breeze ruffle the surface of the water into shining folds, smelling star jasmine and cut grass.

dracosphynx and I have been having a discussion about whether I'll sell 50 books (at the time, I was at 44 sold and no movement for weeks). But out there in the quiet, some part of me detached from the idea that it was important to sell as many books as possible. It had been gnawing at me that I haven't had time to put together the marketing for The Aphorisms, and that beyond sending out the review copies I haven't really pushed it.

And I wondered: why do I have to push? Why is it important? Five books or fifty, it is what it is. When I have the time to put together fliers and letters and send out newsbits to websites, I'll do it. But I don't right now, and it's not a big deal. There's so much temptation to mistake your successes for your identity... to look at what you do and say "That is who I am." But it's not, not really. Nothing external truly is.

People will find the work... or not. And I'll still be here, and so will the books. In the mean-time, I have living to do... or else what will I write when I finally sit down?


( Of course, the moment I stopped fretting about it, I sold three more... figures. I think the universe just wants me to have another cup of chocolate. :) )


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Tags: books, philosophy, writing
Current Mood: easy-tired

Meanwhile, in other news... I periodically hunt around the web for mentions of my name to see how well my marketing's working. In the process, I ran into a discussion of the Jokka stories on a discussion board, wherein I was called a bad furry copy of Ursula Le Guin ("Just because it's a step above the quality of bad furry fanfic doesn't mean it has anything profound to say"), which was... bemusing enough.

But then they called me a misogynist. Which hit me somewhere between the eyes.

The response: "MCA Hogarth isn't a man, you idiot."

"Even better. Another woman full of self-hatred and with gender issues."

There was a brief discussion where evidence was raised to prove this point based on the Jokka stories, at which point the thread devolved into the usual forum trolling.

I admit I was stunned into silence by the discussion, and I spent a few days thinking about it. The temptation to say "That's not what I meant!" is strong, but also pointless... because I wasn't trying to say anything when I wrote those stories. Not on purpose. And you can't defend yourself against accusations based on your secret feelings.

For all I know, they're right. It makes me wonder.

Everyone brings their own thing to the art, and you don't have any control over what they think or take away from it. I suppose that means there will be people convinced I hate women (or myself)... along with all the other amazing things that have been assumed about me based on what I write (including at least two people who think I have Lisinthir's kinks, which is... uh... a pretty impressive assumption).

Still... being called a bad furry copy of Ursula Le Guin... there are worse things. I guess.


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Tags: philosophy, writing
Current Mood: O_O

ruggels put forth this link about Harper Collins deciding to try launching a publishing branch that accepts no returns on books... but also pays no advances to authors.

I thought it was worthy of its own entry, because the writers on my list might find it... unexpected.


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Tags: marketing, technology, writing