Life in a Northern Town

I started doing these in 2006, and I think this is going to be my last one … at least the last one I do here, in the format I've used for a decade. I started doing these for writing accountability, but my needs have changed. It's really the best of all possible reasons: I don't need to do these anymore because I succeeded. I'm writing for a living now (mainly paranormal romance, as Lauren Esker); there's also a top-secret pen name for even more commercial stuff - send me a PM if you want to know what it is). The kinds of goals I used to set for myself, things like "finish a novel" or "establish a regular writing schedule" don't really apply anymore, because this is my day job now, so for a certain number of hours per day, I apply butt to chair and write. My goals are now more like "write X and Y novel and Z short story in $ESTABLISHED_SERIES", which are excellent goals to have, but they aren't the kind of goals that translate well to public accountability posts.

So basically, my year-end roundup and accountability posts worked! They worked so well I don't have to do them anymore! I am now moving on to a new way of doing my upcoming years' goals that suits my needs better.

To my vast and everlasting relief, however, for my final "how I did in the previous year" post, I can say that I managed to move the Hunter's Moon graphic novel from the "to do" to the "done" list. It has appeared on every year-end to-do list since the very first one, and this summer I did a Kickstarter and I slammed that sucker out.

So I'm ending on a high note.

I don't plan to delete this journal, and I'll still post here occasionally (at least as long as I can remember my passwords and the site remains up). I still check the notification email, so you can still contact me here. Right now, I don't have a blog to replace it; I never have managed to get a regular Wordpress blog up and running. I do have a pseudonymous fandom journal on LJ/DW that's still active (most of you know it; send me a PM if you don't and you are interested). I'm also on most of the Usual Places such as Twitter and Facebook, at least a little bit. If I manage to start journaling regularly again - and I do intend to! - I'll link to the new place here. But other than that, I probably won't post here much anymore. Maybe once or twice a year, much as I've been doing.

A happy, safe, and successful 2017 to all of you!

I’ll be at Pioneer Park in the Bear Gallery (3rd floor, Alaska Centennial Center for the Arts) from noon-8 today for the First Friday opening of Cartoon North II. There’s sequential art on the walls from dozens of artists, some of whom will also have tables at the opening selling books, prints, cards, and so forth. I’ll be there with Freebird and Kismet!

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Crossposted from Wordpress.  

I did the first of these year-end roundups in 2006, so this is the 10th year I've done it and probably the strangest one I've written so far.

The thing is, I hardly did anything at all on my 2015 list! So technically this year should be a dismal failure ... except this year was actually amazing because (thanks to a friend) I discovered a new "door" into writing and self-publishing, and I basically took off like a rocket. I wrote 456,000 words this year (by comparison, my previous best year was 2013, when I wrote 270,900 words. And this year's words were almost entirely useful words, as opposed to most years, when my technical annual word count doesn't take into account all of the aborted projects and false starts. This year, nearly everything I wrote through the whole year was either a completed project I self-published on Amazon, or something I submitted somewhere. And I made decent money off my writing for the first time ever.

But the awkward thing is, I can't talk about a lot of it, because a lot of what I'm writing is paranormal erom (erotic romance) under pseudonyms and I'm not ready to disclose them publicly yet. I did launch the Lauren Esker pen name for slightly plottier paranormal/shifter romance, and Lauren now has a website and a mailing list and is generally doing pretty well.

Looking back at last New Year's goals:

- I DID NOT: edit any damn thing, publish the Hunter's Moon book (which has been on every single one of the last 10 years' lists; it's the world's most amazing procrastination success story), or finish the year with a decent page buffer for Kismet (though I do have next week's page done!)
- I DID: write two novels (actually considerably more than two), keep up with Kismet updates (with one or two skip weeks, but mostly I did pretty well), and I have done amazing at keeping up with a writing schedule and marketing (of my erom/paranormal romance) this year if I do say so myself, though I really need to do better on marketing Kismet and maintaining my blog. I also attended an anime convention and two local shows, got a print version of the first Sun-Cutter chapter together, and started selling more craft/art stuff.

Back shortly with 2016 goals!

I have a new book out as Lauren Esker, Handcuffed to the Bear. It’s been added to my books page. (Hopefully Amazon will have the “Look Inside!” working soon. At least it’s not just me; it looks like things are laggier than usual right now.) It’s tropey F/M romance, this time on the general theme of “handcuffed together and hunted in the wilderness”. With extra bonus ensemble action.

I’m planning to put together a print version of the first 68 pages of Sun-Cutter for Senshi-Con in September. I worked on the cover today – process photos are posted at the Kismetcity tumblr and also on my Patreon.

SOMEONE WHO SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS challenged me to write a submission for this anthology (the werefolk one, not the alien artifacts one, though both sound fascinating). SOMEONE ELSE WHO SHALL ALSO REMAIN NAMELESS pointed me toward this one.  (I have the worst friends. And by worst I mean best.) I’m somewhat snowed under, but hoping to manage a submission to at least one of these!

And speaking of things I don’t have time to write, I think this week’s flashfic challenge at Chuck Wendig’s blog sounds marvelous — this week, create a character and sketch them out in 250 words or less. Next week, all these characters will be up for grabs for people to write about. This kind of collaborative fiction-writing totally sounds like my jam. In fact, I might work on something for that tonight …

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Crossposted from Wordpress.  

This evening we hiked up our hill in a direction we’d never been before to investigate a large and suspiciously square clearing that Orion found on Google Earth (we’ve lived here 11 years and we’re still finding new things!). We did eventually find it, though it’s so overgrown that it was very difficult to determine its age or, most of all, WHY someone cleared a bunch of trees in a large square block in the middle of nowhere, with no apparent roads going to it. Thwarted homesteader perhaps? Lost pioneers? We found some stumps that we were pretty sure were cut with an axe; if so, this area was cleared a century ago! Fairbanks’s dry climate and slow-growing trees are excellent at preserving old wood. There is, however, no sign of occupation: collapsing cabins, old vehicles, etc.

We decided, eventually, that this was probably a woodcutting area for the early-1900s gold-mining operation in the valley. In an area that’s mostly scraggly swamp spruce, this particular small ridge seems to support large birch trees, many of which are now growing in clusters as if growing up from old birch stumps. Our theory is that the turn-of-the-century miners would climb the hill to cut wood (with hand tools!) and then skid the logs down the hill to the valley where they used them for firewood or construction.

Most of the walk up to the clearing is through black spruce forest with a dense carpet of moss underneath. We came upon this fungus-encrusted fallen spruce log and I thought it was neat enough to take a picture of it.

As we wandered around the clearing, we found ourselves conducting tree-stump CSI. This looks like old axe marks to us.

More photos under the cut.

( Read the rest of this entry )

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Crossposted from Wordpress.  

Kismet has a new home for updates:

http://suncutter.tumblr.com/

The old site will remain up, but the comic will no longer update weekly there. (Though I'll still be updating it as a perma-archive in batches of pages every few months.)

The reason for the move is because I needed somewhere I could schedule automated updates rather than having to update the comic manually each week. This means fewer missed updates for you, and easier updating for me!

The new site uses Disqus comments, like the old one, and the overall look is similar. You shouldn't notice too many differences. The only major difference is that I'm now including text transcripts below each comic, for anyone who has trouble reading the words on the image.

And this week's page IS up, fyi!

I'm slipping farther and farther behind on my Kismet page buffer, so this week is gonna be a Kismet Page-A-Thon. One of my goals for May is to get pages done through the end of summer (since June and July, at the very least, are usually too busy to get anything done Kismet-wise), so I'm gonna put that up as my week's goal and see how much of it I can get done. I know I won't manage it all - I'll be over the moon if I can just get the penciling/inking part done - but let's see how it goes, shall we? I got two pages penciled and inked today, so that's excellent progess!

Penciled:

2 pages of 12.

Inked:

2 pages of 12.

Scanned/Cleaned up/Lettered:

0 pages of 12.

Colored:

0 pages of 12.

I also posted an old Telulah Hawkins text snippet on Tumblr (something I came across while going through old AppleWorks files). I'm going to be putting more Kismet stuff up on the Tumblr this month, but I'll always link from here (possibly in batches, if I end up posting a LOT).

The May rewards package for the $5+ backers has been uploaded. This month is material from the sketchbook: character designs and so forth.

I've also gone back and made the first couple of rewards packages for last year free to everybody, so you can see what kind of stuff I put in these - here are October and November of last year. I'm not going to be doing this every time, but I figured free samples are nice, so you can see what you're getting, right?

Also, if you are a Patreon backer and you haven't already, stop by my activity feed - there is a question for you there! allanh had the AMAZING idea of sneakily working Patreon backers' names into the business names in the upcoming Galleria crowd scene. And so I shall. :D So you need to tell me if you have a preference - if you'd rather have your name on a flower shop or a gun store, for example! (Or if you'd rather be included as, say, a busker in the background, or a guy riding a unicycle - I can do that too.)

If you read Kismet and the idea of being immortalized in the comic sounds like fun, but you aren't a Patreon backer ... well, there is an easy fix for that! It's $1/month minimum, and you can cancel at any time. I'm doing this for all the backers, not the ones at certain levels, though you do get extra stuff at the higher levels.

Obligatory mention that the comic is free, will always be free, and I don't care at all if people read it without paying - please do! :) The Patreon is just if you want extra stuff and feel like kicking some dollars to me.

After more than a decade of comic, you finally get to see Linton's meet-cute with Janna.

http://www.kismetcity.com/suncutter/sc71.shtml

We went for a walk in the sunshine today, and the cat tagged along.

Well, at least he seems to be enjoying himself.

 

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Crossposted from Wordpress.