secure this beckoning sunshine

Who are you?
That answer tells me
what face to show to you.
Who are you?
I need to know
what name to answer to.
The name my mother gave me
is not my own
but yes it is.
The name I chose myself
is one I rarely hear
but often see.
Different faces, different places.
Different names for different spaces.
Who are you?
Can I be honest with you?
Who am I?



Janus by Alex Conall is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Taken from someone else on another network, deemed too good not to use.

Ask me a question about one of my fics or series. It can be absolutely anything in any project and I will tell you the honest-to-goodness answer (even on the progress/plans for next chapters of current series).

Don't hold back. Whatever you ask, I’ll answer as truthfully and as completely as possible. You can also ask about my writing as a whole, if you like.

I'm modifying this meme a tad: I want you to click to my original fic works-in-planning list and pick a thing, any thing of any size, and ask me a thing about it.

I am obsessing over the Perfect First Paragraph.

<ackbar>It's a TRAAAAAP</ackbar>

So I am not pantsing Viva La Vida after all. I sat down to write an email to a family friend who volunteered editorial assistance on my next novel, and I started to summarize the plot, and a thousand words later I apparently have an outline. I think that makes me officially a planner.

So here goes on the public accountability portion of Camp NaNoWriMo. July is a 31-day month and my word count goal for the month is 50K, so my daily goal could be 1613 but I think I'm going to keep it at 1667 with plans of celebrating victory a day early.

I'm really excited about this novel. I can't tell you much about it until jukebox_fest reveals, part because it's an expansion of my story for that challenge and part because I'm pantsing it and don't know much myself, but I hope y'all will enjoy it.

Home Is Where The Heart Is is an installment in Nine for the Nebula's Heart, meditating on the nature of quests.

Nine for the Nebula's Heart is a collaborative-canon project. Come play!

So Amazon's being a bully. Again. This time it's the publisher Hachette that they're trying to strongarm. And frankly I am sick to death of Amazon's bull.

I think tomorrow I'm going down to the local indie bookstore with a list of the books I have on preorder at Amazon and going "hey do you do preorders". And assuming they can preorder them all for me, I am then cancelling my Amazon preorders saying "found cheaper somewhere else", comment to the tune of "I find that supporting bullying of publishers and the authors who depend on those publishers is a price I am unwilling to pay", on every single preorder. I have seven, counting only the hardcopy books, and I can maybe find the DVDs and the CD for preorder on BN.com. And then cancel my Amazon Prime membership into the bargain.

My problem is (as it has been since the Kindle Worlds nonsense started) that I'm a self-published author, and I like print books, and used books are a marvelous thing and they don't exist in electronic format. Neither do ebooks that can be read without an expensive piece of electronics, which provides a barrier to entry to reading for the sufficiently poor; used print books have a much lower price tag. Who the hell goes to lulu.com to browse for books? As far as I know, Lulu doesn't distribute to other booksellers, either. And as far as I know, my choices for self-publication in print are Lulu and Amazon CreateSpace. Also, if I don't have copies of my books available for sale on Amazon, I'm shooting myself in the foot sales-wise. (And I can't pull A Dinner of Herbs off Amazon without the consent of my co-conspirator, anyway.)

How do I resolve this? How do I as a self-pub author stop supporting Amazon without hurting myself a lot worse than I hurt them?

crossposted from conallpublications.com

Presenting nineforthenebulasheart, an intersectionally feminist collaborative-canon mythpunk quest story, about nine diverse people with the common goal of finding the Nebula's Heart. Come play!

( serenity / courage / wisdom )



Serenity Prayer by Alex Conall is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

The prompt call is CLOSED for prompts.

Your dear authorbear is reliably informed that the only dependable way to get words on the page is to plant self in chair with hands on writing implement and write. To that end, I am holding a prompt call.

The theme of this month's prompt call is earth, wind, fire, water. Please leave prompts about characters, settings, plot elements, and such related to that theme. From earthquakes, tornados, infernos, and tsunamis to rock gardens, wind chimes, candle arrays, and water features, from the four personality types to the four Watchtowers, anything that fits the theme goes.

This is an exercise in crowdfunded creativity. An excellent way to inspire me to do a thing is to pay me to do it; if you like what you see and you want to see more, feed the bear.

There are several options for feeding the bear:

1) Sponsor the prompt call. I have a Paypal button for donations. The recommended minimum donation is $1, because Paypal takes a fee from every transaction. Any Dreamwidth user who donates (make sure you mention your username) will be added to my access list (where I try to post at-least-weekly excerpts from my works in progress). Anonymous donations are of course welcome, but cannot get that bonus.

If donations reach $25—I'd say keep an eye on the ticker, but apparently tickerfactory.com's images are all broken—I will post a sixty-six-line narrative poem; this month it will be "The Selkie Sisters and the Dryad".

2) Sponsor a story. Each story will have a price tag, using a semi-pro per-word rate, rounded down to the nearest dollar. A two-hundred-word prose story will cost $5, a two-thousand-word story $50, comparable to what Duotrope Digest assures me I would make by selling the story to a semiprofessional market. Similarly, a poem of up to ten lines will cost $5, of up to twenty-five lines $10, of up to forty lines $15, of up to sixty lines $20, and a longer poem, we'll talk. When you sponsor a story (prose or poetry), tell me which story you want to sponsor—every time I complete a story for the prompt call, I will comment to the prompter with the title, the medium, a brief summary, and the price—and I will immediately post it publicly to this journal, with your username listed as sponsor.

3) Spread the word. Link to this post from any social media, suggest that people come and leave prompts, and leave a comment saying you did so. If you link back and you leave prompts, your prompts go to the top of my to-write list. If I see a new prompter or donor (anonymous people, sadly, do not count), I will post a free story; this month it will be the poem "Serenity Prayer". "Serenity Prayer is up! Thanks, corvi!

Whenever I write a story to one of your prompts, I will send you a private copy of the story, via Dreamwidth PM to logged-in prompters or email to anonymous prompters who give their email (anonymous prompters who do not leave contact information cannot get private copies of stories). Please do not share it with anyone.

At least one of the stories resulting from the prompt call will be posted for free, so y'all have a better idea of what you're getting into.

At the end of the prompt call, I will post a list of all the unsold stories, to simplify life for anyone looking to see if you might want to sponsor something.

This prompt call will last until the evening of Sunday, May 11 is CLOSED. Fills will appear as soon as I can manage.

Leave your prompts here! This month's theme is earth, wind, fire, water.