Confirmed. I have to say I’m flinching at this. Crystal Skull was just…so incredibly, unbelievably bad. So bad ‘South Park’ eviscerated it. Even with Lucas out of the picture now, there were still too many multiple movie sins for me to think the new one will be better. Harrison Ford proved in the new ‘Star…
Read More Indiana Jones 5?Publishing…good, effective publishing…has defined stages. Ignoring those stages can lead to career-stalling gaffes like: Querying before the mms is polished, or even completed. Not researching agents and publishers before querying them. Querying publishers before agents. Not understanding that commercial publishing can have a backlog and/or schedule of years during the publication process. That’s been the…
Read More The Waiting Game1. Mission Foods now has Gluten Free tortillas that approach the taste and feel of wheat tortillas. This is important. I am from the Southwest, and I know one great secret truth of everyday cooking out here: no matter what the filling is, once it gets folded into a tortilla, it is a taco. To…
Read More Continuing positive notesAuthors, if you are ever close to titling a book* this way: ‘The Magnificent Spammer: the Spam Chronicles, Book Whatever’ You might want to rethink that colon and everything after it. While that title format was fashionable for a while, and self-pub gurus were claiming it could help with SEO and finding books in a…
Read More Trends in titlesSo, right then, the news: Samhain is shutting down, after realizing that their sales were foundering over the last two years and they couldn’t keep up with the changing book industry. Samhain was one of the strongest (until now) of the digital erotic romance pubs, known for a great catalog of LGBTQ titles as well…
Read More Samhain, KDSpy, and Ebb tides in publishingWhat I like about Spring: perfect weather, spring cleaning (both physical and mental), taking self-publishing workshops, finishing new art, plotting out new books, and finding new authors and art galleries to follow. What I don’t like: knowing that summer temperatures will be hitting early this year, spring cleaning, doing a cost analysis on what I…
Read More Spring ThingsIt hit 90F in Phoenix this week. I had a box of artwork in the back of my car that I had to offload, or the contents might suffer in the heat. I drove home from work with that box almost a comfortable presence sitting unseen at my back: until I took it inside the…
Read More Old friends, new roadsWell, it was several months in the making, but I’ve finally begun uploading artwork to Crane Artifacts, my sales portal at Handmade at Amazon! Depending on this portal’s performance over the next six months, I’ll probably gradually be shifting a lot more art and jewelry to it and one more that I can’t wait to…
Read More Crane Artifacts, Handmade at AmazonWell, this has been a good launch day: Maestro seemed to have hit the ground running, thanks to some very good marketing by NineStar, at least two great reviews, and some fans coming out of the woodwork. I have fans. Wow, folks, thank you so very, very much! Kristin at GayBook Reviews pretty much distilled down…
Read More Maestro news, Day 1Shameless promo ahead. I know a small jewelry findings supply company that has impressed me with its quality and service. I wasn’t aware they made this YouTube ad for a sale yesterday, and I hope they’ll continue the sale for a day or two. At any rate, Plazko.com is a good little company, and their…
Read More A Not-A-Super B**l CommercialCounting down to the epub, Kindle, etc release of my M/M/M contemporary erotic romance novella on Monday, February 8. I’ll have more on this over the weekend, and more on the necklace featured here on my Tumblr page. The skinny: comment here or on Tumblr on any of my Maestro posts, from now until March…
Read More Maestro on Monday!Good news, everyone! My release date for Maestro, my M/M/M contemporary erotic romance, will now be February 8, 2016. That means two things: my teeny little novella will no longer be lost in the stellar glare from the February 2 release of C.A. Pacat’s long awaited third book in the Captive Prince series. (And by…
Read More Countdown to Maestro!So in (slow) preparation for loading some art on my dormant Handmade at Amazon site, I’ve been doing some research on what’s already there. Some gorgeous, inspirational stuff, worthy of scrutiny. And some…that is not so much. Apparently, in the rush to sign people up, and with possibly not enough experience in the jewelry/handcraft industry,…
Read More Handmade or Buy/Sell?On the eve of several business launches, I am deactivating my Crane Hana FB page. Lest that seem counter-intuitive, let me explain. I barely use it (I might check it once a month). I really do not like a lot of FB’s policies over the ‘Real Name’ issue. Content on FB is not freely available…
Read More Deactivating Facebook pageWell, now that the 1.5 billion-dollar Powerball frenzy is temporarily over in the US, I can admit I’m one of the players that lottery officials hate. I don’t buy many tickets, and when I do, I buy only one per game. The jackpot has to reach a certain level before I even consider spending money…
Read More Lottery FatigueI’d post it here, but WordPress and I have a media upload issue that is not getting fixed until this weekend. So here is a link to the NineStar Press page for Maestro, where you can see the pretty pretty cover in large size. I’ll wait with the final blurb until they get their copy…
Read More Maestro Cover has a link!This will be a stub post until I have all my data and editorial points lined up (and this will be an entry in Filigree’s Rule, too). The summary: If you are a young writer, please don’t engage in elaborate sockpuppet catfishing schemes to get reviews for your novel. At some point it’s going to…
Read More Two Fried Catfish, pleaseOne month from now, on 02/02/2016, my little M/M contemporary romance novella Maestro will be available from NineStar Press. I’ve seen the cover. It’s gorgeous. In a week or so I’ll start up some cool promotion stuff, including one of my handmade beadwoven necklaces in NineStar’s rainbow color theme. My fantasy novel Singer in Rhunshan…
Read More Hello 2016Yes, I took the plunge, got juried in, and am now building a seller profile and gathering inventory for another online art sales venue: Handmade at Amazon. My store there will be called ‘Crane Artifacts’. Looks like the first items I’ll offer there are bead-knotted semiprecious stone necklaces, glass micromosaics, and some fiber art pieces.…
Read More Coming soon: my art on Handmade at Amazon.comKate is both a friend of mine from AbsoluteWrite and a fellow Loose Id author…but I have to tell you, I’d plug this book even if those were not factors. First, there’s the blurb: Buy a whole body…or just the parts. Then, the cover, from Kate’s blog tour list: Then the jacket copy: Special Agent…
Read More Flesh Market, by Kate Lowell