I got a package in the mail today from Leah Moore, for whom I drew a silly little comic recently (which I’ll be posting soon, in fact!). It contained a watercolor sketchbook and a dip pen and ink and I thought AW YOU DARLING! and said AW YOU DARLING! to her on Twitter. “Have you looked inside the sketchbook yet?” she asked. “NO!” I said, “LET ME GO DO THAT RIGHT NOW!” “I’ll wait,” sez she, and I ran downstairs to open the sketchbook and inside was THIS! OMFG OMG…
I started a novella on January 1. It was gonna be a quick & dirty little retelling of Beauty and the Beast, and it was gonna be 25-30K and written in a week, and I was gonna slap a cheapie cover on it and fling it up onto the interwebs in a Surprise Novella Drop! When, at the end of a week’s writing and 23.5 thousand words, I had only just gotten to the Beast, it was pretty clear that this was not going to be a novella, and that…
2016 in review is a work related round-up, because it’s been an absolutely awful year personally. The other day somebody sent around a “some good things must have happened at least on a personal level in 2016, please post them!” and I honestly couldn’t think of anything actively good enough to stand out. So, this year in publication review: startingly good, actually. I had 5 books come out, including the graphic novel of TAKE A CHANCE, which we’ve all been waiting for forever. :) To wit: MAGIC & MANNERS An…
Once in a while I manage to have my act together enough to present a holiday short story to my readers. This year’s story was inspired by visiting North Carolina for the first time, and driving some of those twisty twisty roads that Joanne is so fond of. Slaying the Dragon is set five years after the end of SHAMAN RISES, and as such, contains, if not outright spoilers, certainly spoilers by association. :) Slaying the Dragon (pdf) (turns out wordpress won’t let me upload epub or mobi files, sorry.…
I *do* have a throw-away comment about the 2016 election in one of my #WalkerPapers short stories. I thought I did. The protagonist is Ashley, the little girl from #ThunderbirdFalls, 20 years later: “I had a grenade launcher. I wasn’t supposed to, of course. Nobody was, especially since the country-wide crackdown after the election riots when I was seventeen.” The story was written in 2012 and was a deliberate (given the Walker Papers timeline) reference to the 2016 elections, and I kept the line even though it made my editor…