The Blue Night Blog

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Part 1. Last Saturday I was fortunate enough to attend another one of the Origins Project presentations at Arizona State University’s Gammage theater. ‘Transcending Our Origins’ was a wonderful group presentation across many scientific fields of expertise, including astrophysics, political science, human evolutionary medicine, criminology, biological anthropology, business, and genomics. The presenters were Lawrence Krauss,…

Read More The Origins Project, and more good news
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*Also known as ‘That Stark Necklace’**, or ‘I Need To Make Something Red This Week’. **This has absolutely nothing to do with that TSTL family in Game of Thrones. When I was about five, I had a clear red plastic pendant that may have come from a quarter vending machine. The pendant was roughly an…

Read More Dragonfire necklace*
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This is a classic piece of advice for new(ish) writers. It’s also one of the most frustrating, for a couple of reasons. Often, we simply don’t know how to do that yet. It takes time and work to gain the skills to ‘show’ instead of merely narrating important details. Even the critical reading skills to…

Read More Show me, don’t tell me
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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
by 1 comment on "Three digital M/M and LGBT romance publishers sound off"

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
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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
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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
by 4 comments on "My self-publishing countdown begins…"

…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…
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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?
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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
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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?
by 2 comments on "‘The beatings will continue until morale improves’"

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’