Life in a Northern Town

I’ll be at Gulliver’s Books tonight from 7-9 p.m.! I’m giving a short talk at 7 p.m. about the book, and then signing afterwards.

On Saturday from 2-4, I have another signing at Forget-Me-Not books (the bookstore division of the Literacy Council).

And you can still sign up to win a free book until midnight; I will choose a winner tomorrow!

In other news, it’s -20 and doesn’t seem to be warming up today. WOE. I did stop by the optician to get a long-overdue glasses adjustment, so I no longer look like I ran face-first into a telephone pole.

In yet other news, if you enjoy clever takes on fairy tales, I really can’t recommend the show Once Upon a Time highly enough! I just marathoned the first season this past week while I was painting and working on holiday gifts, and it’s wonderful.

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

So how did I spend my Thanksgiving? I’ve been painting handmade cards and bookmarks to sell at the Fox Lions Holiday Bazaar this weekend.

This is a “test the waters” kind of thing, because I haven’t done a craft show before (comic conventions, yes, but this is my first time having a table at an art/craft venue) and I honestly have no idea how well they’ll sell. I’ve actually never tried to sell my art as art before. All the art I’ve done professionally has been for commercial illustration (and occasionally one-shot gifts for people). So this is a new thing for me!

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

Wolfen Moondaughter interviewed me for Sequential Tart this month. Check it out! I talk about Freebird, Kismet, the future of Raven’s Children, and my own background in comics. Basically you can’t shut me up. *g* And Wolfen had some great questions — thank you very much for the interview, Wolfen!

And if you’re coming here from the interview, or have managed to miss my shameless shilling over the last few weeks, the book can be purchased here, and you can read most of it online for free.

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

So, this afternoon, off and on, I’ve been hearing what sounds to me like a dog howling, somewhere in the neighborhood. But I can’t get a good fix on it, because I only ever heard it from inside the house, while I was doing something else. By the time I stopped to listen and open a window to see if I could hear it better, it had already stopped.

I kept trying to figure it out, because it’s really cold today (-20F or so) and I was worried that perhaps a neighbor dog had got caught in a trap or accidentally left outside or something. I couldn’t hear it well enough to tell for sure, though, and I wasn’t even 100% sure it was an animal, because sound carries a long way when it’s this cold, and I often mistake snowmobiles for animal sounds — their rising and falling pitch sounds animate, until I stop and listen and can tell for sure that it’s a snowmobile somewhere far off.

When I walked Lucky in the afternoon, I made a point of roaming around the edges of the property, hoping to hear the howling again (if it was howling) and get an idea of where it was coming from. At the edge of our driveway, I found the kind of tracks that I have, in the past, assumed are wolf tracks: enormous dog tracks (~5″ across) in a straight line, as wild canine tracks tend to be. In winters past, I’ve only ever found a single set, but this time I was pretty sure there were two different ones. But again, two of our neighbors have large dogs, and I wasn’t entirely sure it might not be them.

For some reason I didn’t put 2+2 together until I was out, again, with Lucky at dusk, and heard the howling again, and this time I heard it well enough to tell that it was two different howls responding to each other at different distances, catching and carrying on each other’s signal, as Huskies sometimes do. And then the penny dropped and I went “Oh!”

What I’ve been listening to all afternoon is wolf talk.

Of course, I could have done without having this epiphany at dusk, a quarter mile from the house. XD

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

For those of you in Fairbanks, there are several places around town where I’m going to be signing and selling books in the next few weeks. It’s almost like a book tour! A very small tour. In one town. Yep.

Sat. & Sun, Nov. 24 & 25 – Fox Lions Club Holiday Bazaar – 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
This is a small local bazaar … and I do mean local; it’s at the Fox Lions Community Center, which is only a mile up the highway from me. I’ll have a table on both Saturday and Sunday.

Wed, Nov. 28 – Gulliver’s Books – 7-9 p.m.
In addition to signing books, I will also be giving a short talk, probably something to do with comics. (Yeah, I really need to figure that part out.) The talk will be upstairs in the cafe.

Sat, Dec. 1 – Forget-Me-Not Books – 2-4 p.m.
Forget-Me-Not is the used bookstore attached to the Literacy Council, so a portion of proceeds will be going to support the Literacy Council. There is a really groovy flyer.

There’s also a completely insane part of me that’s thinking about calling the McKinley Holiday Bazaar people tomorrow and seeing if it’s possible to get table space on Saturday. Advantage: I’d probably have a lot of fun. Disadvantage: it’s in Denali Park, which is about a 2 1/2 hour drive from here (each way). And I have no idea if I’d actually manage to sell any books, which would make it a really silly way to spend my Saturday if I don’t sell a thing.

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

It’s getting to the point that I’ve written (and finished) enough different things that I’m starting to have an idea of how my creative process seems to work. This is not how I thought my creative process worked. I’m not necessarily sure this is how I want it to work. Nevertheless, this seems to be the way it’s evolved. Basically, everything (original, i.e. non-fanfic) that I’ve finished in the last couple of years, except for the really short stuff, has gone like this:

( Read the rest of this entry )

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

I am remiss in announcing this, but Sword & Sorceress 27 is available now! This fantasy anthology includes my story “Netcasters”, in which a thief attempts to steal a few small valuables from a village of seemingly simple fisherfolk, and gets a lot more than she bargained for when she stumbles upon their magical secret. Here’s its Goodreads page (no reviews yet). If you read it, let me know what you think!

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

Freebird comic of the day, brought to mind by this week’s cold snap + vividly clear, beautiful stargazing weather. (Obligatory shill: Freebird can be purchased here, and maybe EVENTUALLY it will have the “look inside the book” option — I’ve uploaded the files for that, so … *crosses fingers*)

I had the bright idea today of doing a “winter holiday gift box” option for Freebird, containing the book and some touristy Alaska swag, like keychains and mini Alaska flags … those cheap little things that local gift shops sell. Maybe a little piece of original art in each one. And then wrap it up nicely in holiday paper. Would people buy that? I guess that if I’m going to do it for this Christmas, I had better get right on it.

In other news, apparently an election happened. I suppose that it’s no surprise to anyone who knows me just exactly which way my general thoughts are trending on the way that things went nationally (*thumbs up*) or locally (*oh noes*). I am delighted beyond belief that marriage equality passed by popular vote in three states (and another one voted down a discriminatory amendment). And now I am looking forward to seeing how the next four years goes, and meanwhile, I’m infinitely glad to have the uncertainty behind us — not to mention all the political ads!

I’ve been reading election post-mortem posts and articles with interest, but the only one I’m going to link to (at the moment, anyway) is for reasons having nothing to do with the election: John Scalzi’s post Meanwhile in Darke County is currently hosting an absolutely fascinating discussion in its comments, starting about halfway down, on pre-industrial disease epidemiology, rural-urban migrations and birth control via infanticide. (Uh, well, I’m a total history geek, so it’s interesting to me!)

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

I’m working on edits to my urban fantasy novel this afternoon and thinking about research. I just got back from three and a half weeks in the New York area, partly to visit my sister and partly to research my novel. (And my heart goes out to everyone who’s suffered and is still suffering in Hurricane Sandy; some of the places that flooded are places where I was just standing a week ago. To all of you on the East Coast, I hope that you and yours are safe!)

During my time in Ithaca and environs, I did pick up quite a few details that I’d gotten wrong (hence the revisions!), as well as collecting impressions to (hopefully) convey the sort of local flavor that you can only get from spending a lot of time in a place or talking to people who have.

But eventually I started to hit a point where I was researching things that I suspect 99.9% of locals don’t even know, which made me realize that there’s a certain point beyond which it makes just as much sense, if not more sense, to make things up rather than trying to get them exact in every detail. An example: we drove out to Trumansburg (a small town northwest of Ithaca) to see what grew in the ditches, since I have a scene where the characters scramble through a tangle of blackberry vines in a ditch beside the road near Trumansburg. And then I realized … who actually cares? It’s important to research the sort of details that people would notice if you got wrong (like the kind of doors on a particularly well-known Cornell building; I had gotten it all wrong before actually walking around campus). But then there’s the sort of thing that you can totally make up, provided you have some basic knowledge of the general area. I wouldn’t put blackberry brambles in a ditch if I were writing something set in Alaska, because they don’t grow wild here. That’s exactly the sort of detail that detail-nitpicking locals might notice (I know I would!) and go “Hey, wait a minute.” But blackberries grow wild in New York, and could quite plausibly grow in a roadside ditch, and I’m not convinced that scrutinizing the actual ditches in the actual Trumansburg area to see if any of them have blackberry thickets (and if not, what they do have) is a good use of my time.

And there are even some times when it’s actually better to fake it rather than using a real business or a real neighborhood, especially if you plan to blow it up. *g* Giving yourself permission to make things up also gives you more freedom to, say, give your building exactly as many floors as it needs for your plot, regardless of whether the actual buildings in the area are four stories or five. Aside from perhaps an architecture student, who stands around counting floors on the buildings in their neighborhood? Who’s going to notice if you add or subtract one?

I’ve always disagreed with those who describe fiction as a form of lying, but it is a sort of augmented reality, and as long as you know enough to plausibly fake it, I think you can totally get away with it. If you’ve never even SEEN a farm, then probably you should do a bit of research before writing about one, but I’ve spent enough time on and around farms that I think I can get away with writing plausibly about farm country even if I’m not up on the exact details of what the ditches look like in that particular spot of farm country.

(For the record, in this case, I think the blackberry thicket is plausible based on what I saw on our drive. Most of the area seems to have shallower, less overgrown ditches than I had imagined, but I also saw places that were similar enough to what I’d envisioned that I don’t think it would jump out as wrong to someone who was familiar with the area. And I had fun exploring, so it’s not like it was a waste of time! But even if the scene doesn’t correspond exactly to reality, exploring the ditches to figure out what grew in them was probably a completely pointless level of research, unless it was going to be tremendously important to the plot. Which it isn’t.)

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.

LOOK LOOK LOOK! I have a BOOK!

All the info: The book is 8.25×6″, 152 pages, and retails for $12 US. It collects all of the Freebird strips from 2006-2008, the ones that ran in the now-defunct Fairbanks entertainment paper fbx square plus the online ones that I did after square died. There are also new strips (bringing the story to the conclusion that it was originally supposed to have) and two backup stories, plus extra sketches and previously unseen strips from the development process.

How to sample: You can read nearly all of the story online, starting here — although the book contains about 30 pages of newly drawn strips that aren’t online, plus all the backup stuff.

How to buy:

• You can buy it from Amazon.com. If you’re in Europe, you can get it from your local Amazon in your local currency — I’ve checked Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon.de, and both of them have it! (Since I’ve never done this before, for those of you who are in the UK and continental Europe, could you tell me if the price seems really wrong to you? I just based it on the US price — it’s a more or less straight currency conversion from the US price into UK pounds and euros, so you pay just what you would if you bought it in the US. But I have no idea what “common” book prices are like in those currencies.)
• You can also buy it from my estore on CreateSpace. Amazon still handles payment processing and order fulfillment, but (fair warning) it’ll be more of a hassle for you than buying it from Amazon’s main site, because you’ll have to create a CreateSpace account (if you don’t already have one), can’t get Supersaver shipping, etc. The advantage to me is that I get a significantly higher percentage on sales through the estore than I do through Amazon, but frankly, I am absolutely delighted and flattered if anyone wants to buy my book, and you are definitely encouraged to do it wherever and however is easiest and best for you!

These books will be available locally in Fairbanks at The Comic Shop very soon (possibly even today; I’ve been severely hampered this week by Lack of Functional Automobile or they would be there already!) and subsequently in every other local bookstore that I can convince to carry them. ETA: They are available in The Comic Shop now!

At this point I don’t have anything set up for people to buy the books directly from me, aside from catching me locally at a book signing. (There will be book signings, but I don’t have dates/venues yet — more information forthcoming soon!) I did my own book shipping in my last self-publishing venture, but honestly, living in Alaska, so much of my profit is eaten up by shipping costs that it’s just about as cost-effective for me to sell them through Amazon. On the other hand, I know how some people feel about Amazon (I am entirely sympathetic, believe me!) so I’m hoping to have more non-Amazon options available for you soon.

Questions? Please ask! I will have a reaction/discussion post for the book up soon.

In conclusion: BOOK! \o/

Originally published at Layla's Wordpress blog. You can comment here or there.