March 2014

A little case of mistaken identity has been brought to my attention. I am not Diane Tessman. I am Marian Crane, when I wear my art hat. As a fiber artist, I periodically create sets of award ribbons for the Tempe Festival of the Arts, held twice-yearly in Tempe, AZ. These are generally sixteen category…

Read More Fabric art award ribbons

This morning I was delighted to listen to a Publishers Weekly webcast about the history, current state, and future prospects of digital publishing as it relates to LGBT and M/M romance and related genres. Brief (personal) definition: M/M is simply a romance or other story with a romance subplot featuring male homosexual relationships. LGBT fiction…

Read More Three digital M/M and LGBT romance publishers sound off

I am a total sucker for architecture at its bleeding edge, when it leaps beyond the ticky-tacky houses and strip malls that many architects have to suffer through at some point in their careers. The future of architecture, like everything else, is likely to be something most of us would never guess right now. Check out these…

Read More Sand skyscrapers

I’m sorting – when I can – the vast amount of digital, handwritten, sketched, and printed-out information that accrued over my years of worldbuilding the Lonhra Sequence. It isn’t pretty. If I’m to have any hope of self-publishing these stories, I need to do serious housecleaning with all the interlocking and/or contradictory versions I’ve written.…

Read More Housecleaning and dedications

…Only I don’t really have an ending deadline date,  because I know all about best-laid plans. Singer in Rhunshan will probably, at some point in the next few months, become a self-published fantasy novella. There were valid reasons to delay this step: my fears, my ego, the complexity of doing this right, my worries that…

Read More My self-publishing countdown begins…

There are some writer & publisher-related Tumblr blogs I follow and generally adore. But every so often, these sort-of, maybe, might-be tribes throw me for a loop. I have to step back and decide what I believe in. It’s a good exercise. There’s this musing from Liana Brooks, about artists who ‘alter’ existing books:  http://lianabrooks.tumblr.com/post/79549092120/do-not-destroy-books-confession-i-hate-book…

Read More Every book is sacred: art or travesty?

As I flirt more and more with the idea of self-publishing at least one novella in my Lonhra Sequence fantasy arc, I’m paying more attention to cover designs and fonts. All stuff I learned to use one way in commercial art, but the applications for print and e-book publication are slightly different. Once I had…

Read More The science of fonts

Based off my post yesterday about the decommissioning of the ‘Lifeinpublishing’ tumblr blog, some friends wanted to know how I feel about the recent charges that many new Young Adult dystopia novels and series are ‘derivative’. I have strong feelings about the direction YA has been going, especially in science fiction and fantasy. I have…

Read More YA dystopias, derivative or dynamic?

Years ago, after a particularly tense quarter at a company I used to work for, some defiant soul hung this sign up in the break room. It was probably inspired by the bi-weekly forced meetings all departments had to endure before getting their paychecks. Meetings that followed one of two paths from management, depending on…

Read More ‘The beatings will continue until morale improves’

I am honestly trying to decide how to feel about a business practice I’ve heard of recently: writers (often erotica writers) who file the serial numbers off their earlier published work, re-do it slightly if at all, and publish it as new fiction under another title (and often a new pen name). It’s called mirroring…

Read More When writers plagiarize themselves

Courtesy of Tor Books, the noted writer offers a love letter to epic fantasy, explaining to the rest of the world why some of us adore gigantic, sprawling, multi-plotted stories. It’s worth a read. Author’s note 3-4-2014: I haven’t read a lot of Sanderson’s work yet, though I can say that Warbreaker was a solidly…

Read More Brandon Sanderson on epic fantasy