Arts & Crafts. Plus: sundry unrelated but interesting items
Doing a bit of catch-up here — two weekends in a row chock-full of running around apparently requires at least one full weekend of Not Much of Anything Except Naps and Leisurely Walks.
The usual Post-Readercon get-together took place, with fellow authors Ann Zeddies and Geary Gravel. We hung out, talked a lot, did not stint on the wine and other imbibables, ate excellent dinners, enjoyed selected audiovisual entertainments, and shared some work in progress. Also: executed our now-traditional collage art works. The last few years we’ve been covering book-shaped boxes with collages, which has the advantage of resulting in an item that can be put on a shelf, as opposed to yet another thing to hang on one’s wall, when all the wall space has already been used up, so that the new artwork ends up admired for a day and then consigned to the basement for eternity.
Mine, Geary’s, Ann’s
(Because many images follow, I’ll put a page break here, so your browser won’t load them all unless you’re actually interested in seeing them. Alas, this doesn’t work if you come here via facebook or through a feed; you just get all the pictures and it will take FOR. EV. ER.)
As ever, click to embiggen. Also, to view clearly, as WordPress makes the smaller versions of these images sort of blurry, but they burst into claritiy on the large versions!
Here’s Ann’s book:
The seas above, and the seas below, Ann said
Han Shan’s “Cold Mountain” and Le Guin’s “The Shobies’ Story” have much in common, Ann says.
Mountains and islands and sacred canoes, says Ann.
All about humanity, says Ann.
Faces and figures of Earth, says Ann.
And Geary’s:
The lotus and the tiny rock-climber.
When everything moves…
The real?
The ideal?
It’s a moving target.
And here’s my contribution:
Nothing wrong with the dark…
Some of my favorite things live in the dark..
Keep looking, and keep moving.
Because even the random can acquire a purpose.
And time is largely irrelevant…
And that was the arts & crafts portion of the program…
As for the audiovisual offerings: Wesaw Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Which was excellent. And Snowpiercer, which: what the hell? I want those two hours back!
We also listened to an audio version of Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Shobies Story”, which I don’t believe I’ve ever read before.  It was lovely, mind-bending stuff.
Oh, and I absolutely failed to install the Welcome to Night Vale podcast fan virus in Ann and Geary’s brains.  I gave it my best, but it just didn’t take.  Three whole episodes, and they laughed, I think, a total of twice. (Now, now: it doesn’t mean they’re not nice people..)
Other news: The sales of my ebooks have been going well. Extremely well. Seriously. It’s now starting to slack off a bit, but it’s still quite good.  I’m… surprised and pleased.   Actually, amazed and ecstatic.
And the ebooks have finally showed up on Kobo! I don’t know what caused the delay, but I emailed Smashwords, and they immediately looked into it and sorted it out.
And finally, from the department of When the Hell Did This Happen?: Geary’s son, Gabe Gill, is now seventeen, several inches taller than his father, and has apparently acquired a considerable degree of musical skill.   He and his musical collaborator Tieren (collectively known as DRMRL) have put out a single on the SoundCloud site, called “Soldier.”   I like it a lot. You should click the link and check it out. And I hear that a music video is soon to follow… I’m completely taken aback. Hadn’t a clue.  I shall follow their careers with great interest.  And will click “like” whenever a Like button presents itself.
July 31st, 2014 at 1:23 am
Yay! This pleases me :).
August 4th, 2014 at 11:12 pm
Me, too, needless to say (she says, saying it).
I can see the trend going down now, but it remains good enough that my fellow writers are quite jealous when I tell them about it.
July 31st, 2014 at 7:46 am
And the ebooks have finally showed up on Kobo!
*leaps for the Kobo desktop app*
*discovers once again that the Kobo desktop app is rubbish when it comes to actually buying anything, which you’d think would be counterproductive*
*leaps for the Kobo website*
August 4th, 2014 at 12:32 am
I’m thrilled to hear your ebooks are doing so well! I think word of mouth as to how wonderful they are is finally spreading.
This is sort of a random question, because I had no idea where to ask it, but…if the Steerswoman series were ever made into a movie, who would you want playing the characters?
August 4th, 2014 at 11:10 pm
I think that’s an excellent question, and deserves its own blog post! Give me a day or so (I’m currently in a sort of down-cycle with my energy levels, what with radiation therapy), and I’ll see if we get get people interested in discussing this.
August 6th, 2014 at 5:18 pm
Hi Rosemary, I’ve just read your Steerswoman series (thanks to Kindle for suggesting to me). They are absolutely fantastic. Thank you for having such talent and for sharing it. I wept when I read of Tan’s death. Real sobbing, snotty nosed headings; I had to invent a fictional hay fever attack to account for my swollen, reddened eyes when I went to the village shop – hilarious. And what a joy to read something with the power to affect such an emotional response. I can’t wait for the next book. 🙂
August 6th, 2014 at 5:33 pm
Thanks! You know you’re doing it right when you’ve got your readers sobbing.
It’s interesting that Amazon Kindle is suggesting me to people — you’re not the first person to mention that. Most of my ebook sales have been through Kindle. I guess their algorithm likes me!
August 7th, 2014 at 4:48 pm
It’s always been my fantasy that Spielberg would notice your books, turn them into movies, and make you a millionaire so that you could spend all your time writing. Well, that never happened (so far), but if you can’t get one billionaire sponsor, maybe another will do.
Jeff Bezos is a big science fiction fan. In an interview he says:
“I was always a big fan of science fiction, even from when I was, you know, in elementary school reading various things and loved, of course, The Hobbit and Tolkien’s trilogy that follows on from that.”
The interview is at: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/bez0int-1
Bezos may not be sponsoring you directly, but his algorithms are. Maybe your sales won’t taper as much as you think. Wouldn’t that be cool?
August 8th, 2014 at 12:25 pm
Spielberg? Hm.. I’d rather have Peter Jackson, thanks! Or those guys doing Game of Thrones! Yeah, but they’re going to be busy for a long time…
Algorithms: One thing that Amazon did that was really smart was immediately recognize that the Steerswoman ebooks and the Sterswoman paperbacks are the same books, and link all the previous info and custmomer reviews directly to the new ebook editions! So I have tons of 4 and 5 star reviews sitting as data point on these newly-available ebooks. And all the other data, such as who bought a paperback version and then bought a book by some other author, thus creating an association for reference in the future. So that when someone buys an Elaine Isaaks book, the algorithm says, “Hey, you know who else you might like? Rosemary Kirstein!”