Iscah's Blog, page 8

Flower for you...

Pinnacle Castle

I spent several hours trying to draw Pinnacle Castle from Seventh Night this past week.  Not quite a definitive sketch, but I think the basic look and idea are there. The mountain directly behind the castle should be a bit bigger, and the castle itself closer to the wall.  If you click on the picture, you can see a larger version on DeviantArt.

I've spent a lot of time on the Amoeba Ink Cafepress and Zazzle shops adding current designs to more items. It's kind of boring work, but since it's mainly a lot of clicking, I was able to watch the entire Veronica Mars series, which I checked out from the library. Cafepress has a Veronica Mars fanportal, so I'm pondering series inspired designs.

Horse Feathers Ends...

I always get a little twitchy at "Authors are ______" memes because truly authors have many personality types and struggle in different areas. However many authors are introverts, which is good for long lonely hours with your laptop but bad for marketing.

Finishing a book often feels like finishing a thought and trying to pack thousands of words of content into a single summary sentence is rather daunting. Even the accompanying comic feels like a major truncation of what's normally running through my head when people ask what my novel is about.

I have posted Chapter 43, the last chapter of the Horse Feathers serial. The current plan is to leave it up until November, at which point I'll kick off another serial set in the same world. The next one follows a prince, and the fourth will follow a princess.  But that's all you get for now.

Most of my attention for the months in between will be focused on the 2nd Edition of my budgeting book, though I'll continue to promote Seventh Night and make new art for Cafepress and Zazzle.

I'm continue my on going quest to not be featured on an episode of Clean House or Hoarders by having a yardsale this weekend...

...which is another part of my motivation for posting Horse Feathers now instead of waiting for Friday. But frankly the posting schedule for Horse Feathers has been out the window for a while anyway, so enjoy...

When Horses Fly...

Horse Feathers Chapter 42 is now finished and available to be read. There's only one chapter left after this one.

What color were Dorothy's Slippers?

It's been a busy month and tiring weekend. I wrote chapter 42 and didn't have the energy to post it. And now, I'm glad I didn't. The first half of the chapter was a bit flat...serviceable but not sparkly. Today while going over it for editing purposes, I figured out how to add a little spark to it. I think the rewrite will be worth the delay, but I do apologize for the additional delay.

I didn't want to let the month lapse without a new T-shirt design. Ozians probably know that Dorothy's ruby slippers were silver in the books, so I wanted to do a design that played with that idea. I'm happy with the shoes, but not completely in love with my typography. So think of this as a sort of version 1. I did play with removing the words and trying to let the shoes speak for themselves, which looked nice floating on my screen, but it looked really bad on the shirt thumbnails. I shall be working on better ways to tie the two together.

I got the entire Farscape series for my birthday, which is wonderful, but it has really slowed down my reading.

A step back in time...

Saturday I made my first appearance as an author/vendor at an SCA event. I tend to burn rather than tan, so I invested in a popup shade and had two days to try to dress it up Medieval style. Don't think it turned out too bad for a first timer. Fun event, my friends watched the booth so I could do some archery, but I didn't get to check out all the classes and activities. Luckily we had a decent view of the heavy weapons fighters.

Did a lot of boring clicking on the Cafepress shop this week, but I finally got all the sections grouped into semi-logical and consistent order. The Printfection shop was never high traffic, but it's officially shut down now. Printfection is focusing on bulk orders rather than facilitating individual orders.

Horse Feathers will be wrapping up soon. I'm not certain if there's one or two chapters yet, but definitely into the last few scenes.

Horse Feathers Chapter 41

This has not been a good week for sleeping, but I managed to finish and post Chapter 41.

Look Butterflies!

First off: I'm officially on the guest list for Hypericon June 13th-15th 2014, Nashville. My bio is rather pitiful, so I'll work on that. I've done plenty of others things, just not many things that are relevant to speculative fiction.

I'll also be doing a book signing along with Mandi Lynch at Eastside Story on April 26 from noon to 2pm.

Second: Taking a spring break from posting a new chapter of Horse Feathers this week. Should be back next Friday.

Third: I did finally produce some decent art this week. It's hard to track time with my nephew interrupting every 30 minutes, but I'd say I spent 6 to 7 hours on the original image and several additional hours tweaking it to different products on Cafepress and Zazzle. Cafepress has been suffering from a glitch the last few weeks, making images on some new items look larger than the actual print area... I think I've fixed all the affected items in my shop, but please let me know if something looks wrong.

There are two basic variations on the Butterfly image. The original was a dark pink/purple image, but there's some fun ways to play with colors in Photoshop which resulted in the blue variation. I liked both and may play with additional color variations later.




Some products are so long, they needed two or more butterflies to fill up the print space, so a few items, particularly on Zazzle are sporting both butterflies.

Chapter 40

It's been one of those weeks.  My nephew has been sick, and yesterday, I got a letter telling me my insurance premiums were doubling... if you follow my budgeting blog, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the 5 mil person gap in the AFA. U.S. readers you probably ought to head over to www.healthcare.gov and see what you qualify for; the March 31st deadline draws near. My space bar is sticking on my keyboard, which is more than mildly annoying. Nothing truly devastating to report, just a pile of things that are a tad hair pulling, yet some wonderful things too.

I was pleased with this week's chapter in the story that never ends Horse Feathers.   It got posted a bit late in the day due to the above panic and the need to watch G1 episodes of MLP with the nephew on YouTube. Apparently My Little Pony makes you smart, since he managed to master the concept of negative numbers over dinner. (He's 5, so that seems brag worthy.)

For my own reading, I'm well into Dombey and Son which thus far I'd only recommend for hardcore Dickens fans.

Horse Feathers Chapter 39

New chapter: https://www.fictionpress.com/s/3110866/1/Horse-Feathers

I put a new design up this week too, but Cafepress is experiencing some technical glitches, so I'll wait to link to it. I need to draw more...