Paper Fruit

I work as the Administrative Overlord for Clockpunk Studios, a small author-focused web design studio. It’s a cool gig, because Jeremy Tolbert, the web-wizard behind Clockpunk, is super-cool and passionate about his work. It’s been interesting gaining insight into a part of having a writing career that I hadn’t ever considered.

What I’ve learned is that good author websites are extremely important for authors of every level. I kinda knew this before, but my approach to my own website had been “it should look cool and I should blog about stuff, right? But not just myself? Something?” My perspective needed some refining. Because really, a well-designed, easily-navigated site will really attract readers, and keep their eye on you. Er, if you keep up on content. Which is a lesson I could stand to take to heart, come to think of it.

But! Content-generation is for authors; design is for the web-designers. Jeremy’s kick-ass at what he does, but, being aware that what the market wants is sometimes difficult to predict, he and I worked together to design a survey asking people who frequent author websites what they like and dislike about those sites. It’s quick, and super-helpful to us, so please take the time to answer a few questions about how we can make Clockpunk Studios even more kick-butt. The more we know about what people want, the better sites we can create to help authors get the word out there about their work.

We’re hoping to get 100 responses by the end of October. It’s October 15th, and we’re halfway there! So please help us keep up momentum by either taking the survey if you haven’t already, or reposting/RTing/blogging about it, whatever. Thank you!

And here’s the survey! 

Whee! Last week I remarked that I, at long last, had completed a piece of fiction. Well, huzzah, for I have now sold that piece of fiction! I’m super-happy to announce that my short story, “Ho Pais Kalos” will be appearing in Geek Love: An Anthology of Full Frontal Nerdery, edited by Shanna Germain and Janine Ashbless. I’m really honored to be a part of this project, along with Wendy Wagner, Camille Alexa, James Sutter, John Nakamura Remy, and other fine folks. Many thanks to the editors, staff, and everyone else associated with this project.

The other exciting thing I saw late last week was my final-final cover for A Pretty Mouth! I can’t believe it, but the book went to the printer last Friday. The final cover, which you can see below, has some new fonts going on (which I adore), and also added sparkly stuff in the form of blurbs from Laird Barron and Caitlín R. Kiernan. I’m starting to get butterflies over the imminent release, in a good way. I think. But it’s too late to change anything now, so that means the time for worrying about whatever is past!

BEHOLD:

I love it! And many thanks to Laird, Caitlín, and everyone else who blurbed/edited/helped/read/everything-elsed with this project. Also, just a reminder, but I will send a .pdf to those interested in reviewing the book on their blog, on a review site, or on Amazon (when the page goes up).

Speaking of Calipashian goodness, one of the stories in A Pretty Mouth is now available for purchase! The Book of Cthulhu II is now shipping from Amazon and has also been spotted in bookstores. So, if you’re desperate to read “The Hour of the Tortoise,” get it now! You’ll also be getting stories by Neil Gaiman, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Livia Llewellyn, W.H. Pugmire, Laird Barron, Orrin Grey , and many more.

Finally, Coming Together: Arm in Arm in Arm is out! The kindle price is only $3.99, and that goes to Oceanea, a charity devoted to helping the oceans. Go buy it! I have porn in there, it’s Lovecraftian, it’s weird, I dunno. I also have a .pdf, so if you’d like to review the book, please email me and I will send it to you if you’re one of the first five people to email me.

My mom’s in town, and we’re about to get some lunch, so that’s all for now!

Things have been both slow and hectic in my life of late. I’ve finally—finally—completed a piece of fiction, a short story around 5k words. It’s the first I’ve managed to write since Dad passed away. Not sure if my lack of writerly vim and vigor is related to his passing or to some anxieties regarding such heady, nebulous things as My Future that I’ve been feeling of late, but hopefully the worst of the drought has passed.

In more exciting news, last week I turned in my final proofreading pass on A Pretty Mouth, and I came away feeling very confident and enthusiastic about the project’s imminent publication. I still love the title novel as much as ever—maybe even more than when I wrote it, now that I have some distance from typing The End. Not sure about the hard date it will be available, but it will be mid-Octoberish, and I’ll definitely have copies to give away at MileHiCon. I’ll also be doing a few readings in Boulder and Denver, which I’m excited about. I really enjoy readings.

As I’ve been battling writer’s block (barf!) and proofreading A Pretty Mouth, other people have been doing cool, less navel-gazey stuff. Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles of Innsmouth Free Press are trying to fund a new anthology, Sword and Mythos which … well, the title should tell you everything about the theme you need to know. I think this is an amazing idea, selfishly (I write S&S and Lovecraftiana, and would love to see a market open up for that combination), and also more in a general sense of What The Community Needs.

Why? Well, because Silvia and Paula are two editors who really care about not just including, but featuring alternative takes on established genres in their anthologies. That means it’s awesome they’re attempting this project, because if you like S&S, but desire fresh, new entries into that genre, it can be challenging to get your fix. Not impossible, by any means, but definitely challenging. And when you throw in the monkey wrench of S&S plus Mythos fiction … yeah.

I think that’s why Silvia, in particular, seems incredibly passionate about, in particular, the S&S aspect of this project. Over at her blog, as a way of drumming up excitement for Sword and Mythos, she’s been writing essays about why fresh new takes on S&S/mythos fiction are important. So far she’s talked about people of color in S&S (and did a separate piece on racism in the genre), the prevalence of beef/cheesecake in S&S, princesses and regular ladies in S&S, and a few more.

So yeah! Read Silvia’s stuff; consider throwing them some cash if you can spare it. I know those dollars will be well-spent. Plus, you can get cool rewards for donating, like free e-books/paperbacks, a hardcover copy of Fungi, the forthcoming all-fungus release from Innsmouth, a coffee mug, and lots of other treats.

This last weekend Jesse, Raechel, John and I all ran the Colorado Warrior Dash together! Warrior Dash is one of those obstacle-races that are becoming more and more popular (others include the Rugged Maniac, the Spartan Dash, the Tough Mudder, etc.), and those who sign up run and then climb over/under various obstacles, high-step through tires, leap over fire, and various other feats of strength and agility.

The aforementioned people are all very awesome/tolerant, and thus I managed to convince everyone to run the race as ponies from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I ran as my favorite pony, Rainbow Dash (I am nearly 31 and just typed that, YES I KNOW OK LEAVE ME ALONE), and Jesse went as his favorite pony, Pinkie Pie. John and Raechel, who aren’t, er, quite as enthusiastic about the show were, respectively, assigned Applejack and Twilight Sparkle.

I like to sew, sort of, so I took care of the sewing/customizing of everyone’s outfits, and I must say I am really proud of how they turned out out:

Check it out! Big ups to Raech for my and Jesse’s hair—she did all the bleaching and coloring, including the painstaking process that produced my spectacular rainbow mohawk. Now for some closer-ups. First, AJ and Pinkie:

Dash and Sparkle:

So! Yeah!

The race did get a bit muddy at the end (if you count having to swim through a pit of mud, under barbed wire, “a bit muddy”) but thankfully there were showers and we got the worst of it off before changing into warm dry clothes. The aftermath, drying on the hood of my car, is pretty epic:

Overall, Warrior Dash was a lot of fun. There was some unfortunate bottlenecking at times (the culvert crawl in particular was a nightmare; I think we were delayed 10 minutes to do what turned out to be the most un-fun obstacle in the entire race) and I felt some of the challenges were a bit repetitious. Even so, I had a great time and I’m glad I did it. I’m excited about checking out other obstacle races in the future, too—if I can overcome the recent flare-up in my ongoing knee issue. Boo to that, but yay to fun stuff (even if it induces said flare-ups …).

Dad passed away. I got there in time to say goodbye, and help Hospice as much as I could, and be there for my mom, who handled things like a champ … but that’s about it. He went into a coma the day after I arrived, and did not come out of it again.

His last conversation was with my mom, and I’m glad they were able to say a few last things to one another. And I’m glad he went peacefully in the end. He deserved it, after fighting an unwinnable battle for 30 months.

I miss him like hell. It was strange having so many family friends gathered together without Dad there. I don’t know if I’d ever felt an absence so keenly before. He was always so very present during gatherings like that, keeping people on schedule, teasing everyone and taking it in equal measure, laughing, telling stories, cooking amazing food, and handling any and all situations that required knowledge of which roads to drive on, what technology to use, or which cars to take. And he loved it. One of the speakers at his service remarked upon how much Dad enjoyed everything about life, citing as an example his enthusiasm over even the little things, like buying a new kind of light bulb. It’s so true, and it made me smile—as did hearing his former co-workers at the Tampa Courthouse giggling over my dad’s love of his pedometer (“I’ve gotten in 12,000 steps today!”) and always eating the same sandwich for lunch every day (“It’s good. Why change?). And I know Dad would have wanted us to be smiling. He loved to laugh, and to make people laugh, too.

I think it always surprised him to see how much he was loved by so many different kinds of people. Dad always thought of himself as being a gruff, matter-of-fact kind of person, the guy you’d go to when you wanted to hear how it really was. And we who loved him saw him as that, yes, but also as an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy, a photographer, a brilliant financial and legal mind, a great appreciator of the natural world, a husband and a father, a mentor, and a friend. And that doesn’t even begin to cover it. He was the definition of unique. I loved him so much, and still do, and always will.

I conquered my second 14er last Tuesday: Mt. Bierstadt, the mountain that conquered me this past January. I went up maybe a third of the way with Courtney Schaffer and a few other friends, but the snow, cold, and need to slog through two miles of fresh powder along what, in summer, is just the road up to the parking area, made things a little hairy.

When it’s not freezing cold and snowy as hell, Bierstadt is no big deal:

Bierstadt is the mountain on the right. If you click on that picture you can see a little protuberance on the left-ish side of that big round mountain; that’s the summit. It’s a short hike (maybe 7 miles round-trip), and it’s essential in the summer to get up early to do it. Bierstadt’s closeness to Denver and relative ease makes it very popular, and the threat of thunderstorms in the summer means it’s much safer to start early. My hiking partner Jesse and I met up at four thirty A.M. and hit the trail at six thirty. We were not the first up there by any means.

To hike Bierstadt, you go through that valley on a series of bridges over the marshland, then wind up the ridge that’s in the sunlight in that picture. After that you head up up up but the ascent is never particularly dramatic. You do, however, reach one heck of a false summit:

Neither of those bumps is the top. Bwahaha!

Still, the absence of any hard or technical climbing to the summit makes it a breeze to get up that final ascent. You just kind of find patches of dirt and stable rocks to mountain-goat/scrabble up the whole way. I managed it easily in my Vibrams (the hiking kind).

Then you’re at the top! Someone had brought a poster to document their trip, and were passing it around:

Here’s the view from the top of where we’d come from. If you look to the right of the lake you can see a little loop of road. That’s the parking lot!

The back of Bierstadt:

Epic, amiright? That’s why people do 14ers if they’re not into the machismo aspect of the sport.

So then you go back down. No big deal, right? Well, it wouldn’t have been except that I misstepped and sprained my friggin’ ankle about a quarter of the way down. Well, I think I sprained it; it might be a bone bruise. Whatever it is, it’s still hurting. Whatever, anyways, the injury meant I had to hike about three miles back to the car. Here’s about where I sprained it:

That looks far, but it’s really just off the summit. 14ering makes for weird perspective.

The injury was not comfortable, and yet … it’s kind of awesome knowing the amount of pain I can endure and still get myself to safety, if things ever got really real on a hike. It was a hell of a lot easier with Jesse’s help though, mad props to him for tolerantly inching his way down the mountain with me in my hobbled state.

I’m off to Florida, and sea-level tomorrow, where I will continue rehabilitating my ankle!

I can never get to these con posts in a timely fashion!

Anyways, ReaderCon was awesome! I’d never been before, but certain people, among them Nick Mamatas, Geoffrey Goodwin, Michael Cisco, Caitlin Kiernan, Jeff VanderMeer, Livia Llewellyn, Nathan Ballingrud, Mike Marano, and John Langan made it an awesome and memorable experience. There were many, many others—lists like these only serve to exclude—but those mentioned above really made me feel welcome and at-home the whole time. Also I got a tutorial on push-hands and Chen-style Tai Chi from Nick and Michael Cisco which was kind of the coolest thing ever.

I only saw two panels: One on Frankenstein (that, sadly, was ruined by the moderator being a blowhard and a jerk to Genevieve Valentine), and one on “Wet Dreams and Nightmares” which was awesome and weirdly raunchy. Otherwise I worked the Prime Books and Clarkesworld tables, wandered around, and tried to find food I could eat. On that front, the first day and a half were pretty dire, but Geoffrey took me to a Trader Joe’s on the second night which enabled me to get provisions for the rest of the con. Oh, and Genevieve totally brought me a vegan brownie from the Tiptree bake sale because she is amazing.

Now I’m home again, catching up with reality. I had/have some deadlines going on, but the Major Thing I wanted to accomplish before ReaderCon was accomplished. Yay for that.

More anon, including pictures of the 14er hike I did on Tuesday that left me with a sprained ankle!

I’ve got A Thing That Must Be Finished that I’m working on right now, and it’s taking up all my brain-hours, so it’s not that this blog is defunct, it’s just that I’m super-busy. Anyways, I love you all. If I met you/saw you at Denver Comic Con, thanks for making it a great experience! Special shout-outs go to Jason Heller, Carrie Vaughn, and Classic 60’s Batman. You know who you are. I had a fabulous time, and the Strong Ladies-themed panel that I was on was certainly the best panel I’ve ever been on.

Bye! Later!

Well, okay, I can show you TWO of the covers I’ve seen in the last few weeks. One—the cover for A Pretty Mouth, which is currently undergoing copy edits and shaping up to be the weird, pervy, nerdy book I always dreamed of one day publishing and thus confirming everything everybody always thought about me—is not finalized, and so I can’t show it. Yet. But omfg, it’s amazing. I … might have cried a little when I saw it.

But! There are two other totally rad covers I can show you. First up, from Innsmouth Free Press, here’s the cover for Fungi. I think they revealed this whilst I was traveling in Florida. Check it!

So fuck yes Team Innsmouth! This is obviously insanely cool. Super-stoked to be in this alongside so many fine peoples.

Next up! The first story I sold this year, “The Poison-Well,” will be appearing in The Lion and the Aardvark, forthcoming from Stone Skin Press:

“Aesop’s Modern Fables” is pretty self-explanatory as to what this project is. They aren’t all retellings—mine is original, for example—but all are supposed to be Aesopian stories, relevant to the modern world. I mean, as an armchair classicist, I must say that there are plenty of Aesop’s fables that are still relevant to the modern world, of course, but yeah. Anyways, “The Poison-Well” is sort of more … let’s say deeply misanthropic Beatrix Potter than Aesop, so I’m glad editor Robin D. Laws thought it was a good fit!

Cover mania! Yay!

And seriously, I cannot wait to unveil the sweet, adorable cover for my sweet, adorable little book…

Man, what a great con. Probably the best con I’ve ever been to! And not just because Portland is the best city ever: Because the people were all really nice, the programming was fabulous, and most of the films were excellent.

It’s been over a week since I left, but I’ve been in and out of hospitals and trying to help my mother as much as I can while my dad’s going through some challenges with his pancreatic cancer. So rather than doing an articulate, fresh-off-the-high-of-awesomeness post, here were the highlights:

• Meeting people. I know I’m going to leave someone off and feel bad, but here goes. I got to meet my editor Ross Lockhart from Night Shade, my editor Cameron Pierce from LFP, his wife Kirsten (who’s my copy editor for A PRETTY MOUTH and she is fabulous), and various sundry people I’d only met online before, like Andrew Fuller (the programming chair for the con), Wendy Wagner, who is even more amazing IRL, which I did not think possible, Gwen Callahan, who runs the Arkham Bazaar and also the con itself I believe, Wilum H. Pugmire, a writer I’ve respected for many a year, Cody Goodfellow, who is a hoot, Jay Lake who I met but briefly whilst we were co-paneling, E. Catherine Tobler, who is a Colorado local who I met in Portland for the first time, Jeff Burk, a fellow Bizarro person, Rose O’Keefe, the publisher/CEO at Eraserhead, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, my editor at Innsmouth Free Press. Whew! But seriously, they were all amazing and fabulous and I loved meeting them, getting drinks and eating foods, and generally having a good time. Thanks all of you for making me feel so cool and welcome and one of the group!

• Watching Stuff. Stuff like Wilum’s reading (fabulous!), stuff like the Editors’ Panel where I got to see Ross, Silvia, E. Catherine, Jeff, and a few other people talk awesomely about publishing. Oh, and movies of course. So many movies! I got to watch The Whisperer In Darkness, which was goddamn fantastic. Wow wow wow. Everyone should see this, it was well-produced, beautifully scripted, the special effects were great, the music was amazing, wow. I was genuinely creeped out at times, and while Lovecraft is great at cosmic horror, he doesn’t really give me, you know, the heebie-jeebies so that’s an accomplishment. I also saw a lot of the shorts, which were on the whole awesome. I liked Coda, a short film the aforementioned Andrew worked on, Re-Animate Her, Black Pharoah, GAMMA, Bedtime for Timmy, The Shadow out of Time, and the fabulous (if baffling) clip from The Evil Clergyman, part of an anthology that is being released later this year. I had mixed feelings about Monsters, I guess, because of a lot of reasons, but it had fabulous special effects so I came away feeling neutral about it. Really the only total dud for me was It’s In the Blood, which I watched because it had Lance Henriksen in it, but oh, dear. Full disclosure: I’m never going to be won over by the premise of “father and son go into the woods to figure out their feelings and talk about dude stuff” so maybe the film just wasn’t for me, but the graphic rape of the only female character, and menacing non-Caucasian villain didn’t help me come away with many positive feelings. Extra points taken off for Lance pretending to be a girl having an orgasm for maybe five exceedingly uncomfortable minutes, and the line “if you want to become a man you have to kill the boy inside you.” Or something. Close enough. But you know, it won an award, so maybe it just wasn’t for me. Fair enough. Anyways, my meh over that film aside, the movies were by and large excellent. John got to see Die Farbe, which he said was awesome, so yay!

• Foods. Voodoo Doughnuts. Sizzle Pie. Hungry Tiger Too. Sweet Pea. Blossoming Lotus. Some coffee shop with fabulous sandwiches that I can’t for the life of me remember the name of. Some pub with great beer and, unexpectedly, a vegan pot pie. More Voodoo Doughnuts. Fuck yes.

• Miscellany. The VIP reception. Getting to hang out with everyone at The Moon and Sixpence and Tony Starlight’s and the Lovecraft Bar during afterparty stuff. Hanging out with Bizarro peoples. Getting a Miskatonic University t-shirt. Signing stock at Powell’s. And doing it all with my husband. John had never come to a con with me before, and getting to introduce him to people was amazing.

I want to come back to the Lovecraft Film Festival every year I can. It was so, so fun, and I feel so lucky and honored that I was invited to come speak and read and just simply hang out with such fabulous people. Thank you everyone who was involved in making it such an amazing experience. I miss you so much already—but hope to see you next year!