The Blue Night Blog

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All September my fellow authors and bloggers are celebrating science fiction romance. Lisa Lace is today’s featured guest, over on Bitten by Romance. Follow the button, stop by and leave a comment! You could win a copy of my debut M/M erotic romance space opera, Moro’s Price. It has these two idiots in it. Or…

Read More Tour of the Universe, day 7
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If you’re in the US, that means Labor Day weekend – so in between celebrations, wander over to Bitten By Romance’s science fiction romance blog tour. Today, they’re featuring Rinelle Grey’s isolated, dying planet Zerris, and the tough choices its unwilling colonists have made to survive.

Read More Tour of the Universe, day 5
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Howdy, howdy! From here, you should either click on the button above, or follow the link below to visit with C.E. Kilgore. She loves romance set in wild new environments and cultures, where the setting can be as vivid as the romance. She writes: “The Corwint Central Agent Files series takes place on over a dozen…

Read More Tour of the Universe, day 3
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  Come on over to Bitten By Romance, for a tasty bite of Carol Van Natta’s ‘Galactic Concordance’ science fiction romance. She shares a major setting today: the city of Spires, on the planet known as Concordance Prime. Visitors who comment will be entered into a chance to win one of 2 ebooks in her series.…

Read More Tour of the Universe, day 2
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Okay, I’m shamelessly weepy right now, but I managed to keep the tears down long enough to put an archival cover on a brand-new hardback book that just arrived. What’s the book? The Shepherd’s Crown, the last ‘Tiffany Aching’ novel from Terry Pratchett. The final Discworld novel. I’ve blathered on about him before, but I…

Read More The last Tiffany Aching novel
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A nod and sad goodbye to horror film director Wes Craven and scientist Oliver Sacks. We knew they were both failing, but it is hard to see them go. Both of them broke new ground in their fields, fearlessly and with grace, unafraid to include some very human touches in their work.

Read More Farewell, Wes and Oliver
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Turkish has a whistled version, used often in the mountains of northern Turkey. It’s eerie and lovely, and seems to do interesting things to the brains of people who listen to & understand it. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/whistled-language-uses-both-sides-brain?tgt=nr Why am I excited to blog about it? I have another data point for ‘singspeech’, my made-up Sonnaroi constructed language.…

Read More Cool whistled language article
Aside

Publishing is such a weird business. I have fairly strong internet analytical evidence that a review I wrote over a year ago has been responsible for at least a couple hundred sales…of someone else’s book. I’m happy for them. It’s a good book. At the same time, I wish my self-promo could go so well…

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Okay, so I have this silly fantasy of attending an actual large convention sometime next year, and maybe wandering around in some steampunkish hall costumes. I’ve been on the lookout for weapons props I can repurpose. I recently found two candidates at my local Goodwill thrift store, both for under $1 each. This toy dueling…

Read More A pistol of a project
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If anyone wants to follow the next stage in a ridiculous Culture War battle, the 2015 Hugo Awards will be announced tonight starting @ 8pm Pacific time. Streaming link here. http://www.ustream.tv/hugo-awards Added 8-22-2015, 11:30 pm Pacific time: the Hugos have happened in many record-breaking ways. The parties and post-game analyses are well underway. I can…

Read More Hugo Awards tonight
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Publishing is a weird business, even to someone on the outside like myself. Over the summer, I’ve watched a newish author run afoul of some alleged very bad behavior by a junior agent who should have known better, apparently abetted or condoned by a senior agent who *certainly* should have known better. In this case,…

Read More Agents’ submission records
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To continue the fiber art theme, I’m discussing ‘constructed fabrics’, of which quilting and applique are subsets. In my version, I work finished layers on top of a support layer of fabric or felted interfacing. I use the end result as either accent pieces (book cover above), or whole backgrounds (award ribbons below.) They are…

Read More Constructed fabrics