Iscah's Blog, page 9

New Horse Feathers Chapter and back in Franklin

Chapter 38 of Horse Feathers is up.

I'm participating again tonight in the Franklin Art Crawl. Pray it's warm, so people actually come out. Last time I tried this it was freezing and the crowd was nonexistent.

Books are in the Mail...

Books are now in the mail to winners of the Seventh Night Goodreads Giveaway.

I revamped my "Plot Hole" design on cafepress, and there's a good chance I'll do it again. Some of the items look good, but I'm not completely in love with the T-shirts.

After some disappointing reading selections, I'm taking time to read a Dickens novel. It's slowing down my book-a-week goal, but my writing brain needed to be fed.

Winners, New Chapter, New Design, and Sad News...

First Off... Congrats to the winners of Seventh Night giveaway on Goodreads! (If all goes well, your copies will ship out this weekend.)

Second... Horse Feathers Chapter 37 is now up on Fictionpress. (At this point, it does look like Horse Feathers is going to be longer than Seventh Night...sigh.)

Third... New "Beware of Writers" design for the Pretty Little Liars fanportal on Cafepress. If you've watched recent episodes, you know what this refers to. If not, I won't spoil it.

Lastly the sadness... The literary world lost one of it's treasures today Aaron Allston. Aaron's battled through some health problems over the past few years, but this was really unexpected. Only a few days ago, he had announced new con appearances. I met him through the Star Wars community, and while he excelled at humor, I've been repeatedly impressed by his professionalism.  He was a classy guy in Hawaiian shirts. He will be missed.  Yub, yub, Emperor.

New Design, New Reviews, as for Chapter 37...

So I drew a little one panel comic inspired by the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debate. They both made some good points, but they both also said some really silly things. And that's all I'm going to say on the subject for now, though the debate did get my brain churning in interesting ways.

Got some new reviews... normally I link to those, but the reviewers seem to have trouble keeping the Iscah / Kay Iscah thing straight. Might be my own fault, but I was hoping I could avoid keeping up with more e-mail addresses, etc. Eh, I'll go ahead and link, but for fiction, it's "Iscah" no "Kay".

The Query Faerie reviewed Seventh Night: http://thequeryfaerie.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/seventh-night-by-kay-iscah-review/

Shooonya reviewed The Girl With No Name:
The Tome Tender ebook giveaway is over. I don't know who the winners are yet, but there were 333 entries for 3 copies... numbers amuse me.

Still seven days left to win one of seven hardback copies on the Goodreads giveaway.

And now onto Chapter 37. I did write it. I wrote it two weeks ago, started on chapter 38, but could not make headway on 38. I finally figured out what was wrong with 38. But both my betas seemed to feel chapter 37 just wasn't right, and I had to agree with them. So I've been revising, and it's better now. But it's not finished. The idea behind the free serials is to invite reader input to improve the storytelling and allow for a semi-interactive experience...but still, I don't feel right posting chapters when I know there's something wrong with them. If I manage to fix it before Monday, I'll post it when ready, but if not, I'll probably just skip this week.

Happy V-day! New Horse Feather Chapter!

Happy Valentine's, Chapter 36 of Horse Feathers is now available. Show your love for Phillip and Thunder by leaving a comment here or on Fictionpress.

It's sort of a rainy, mucky gloom V-day in Nashville. But that's okay, I'm spending the afternoon watching Doctor Who with the world's best brother. Creatively, it's been kind of a dry week. I got a bit of writing done, but not so much artistically.

On the upside, the Goodreads Giveaway is getting a half decent response. Nearly a hundred people have added Seventh Night to their "to-read" list, and that'll make an author all warm and fuzzy.

Oh, I have found a 15 year-old-writer who looks a LOT like Phillip, and he's said he'd be up for modeling for me. Hopefully, I can arrange to do a shoot with him on horseback once the weather improves a bit. Current cover is cute, but it's intended as a stand-in rather than the permanent cover art.

Horse Feathers Chapter 35 & new Seventh Night Swag

Horse Feather Chapter 35 is now up for your reading pleasure. You get to meet Thunder in this chapter. :)

And I've reworked the Seventh Night cover art into a T-shirt design. Already have it on several cafepress items. Tried to add it to Zazzle, but that site was not cooperating this morning. Hopefully it will work later this afternoon. I like it best on the hoodie, but that could be because it's cold outside and I'm wishing I had a warm hoodie.

Seventh Night's Goodreads Giveaway

Enter at Goodreads during the month of February to win one of seven hardback copies of Seventh Night. (U.S. only, sorry.) This will probably be the only hardback giveaway of Seventh Night, unless someone else sponsors it.

If you prefer ebooks or live outside the U.S., Tome Tender is giving away three ebook copies until February 20th.

I didn't take many photos once the Local Author's Meet & Greet got going last Friday at the Barnes & Noble in Cool Spring. We didn't have signing tables and were standing for most of the event...which was different. It did get kind of crowded. But being of introverted tendencies, the main excitement for me was having copies of Seventh Night physically available on Barnes & Noble's bookshelves.

Here's a couple photos before and after the crowd...

On the event table:



After the event, Seventh Night takes it place on the Sci-f/Fantasy New Releases shelf.

Signing and Contests, but Sorry No Horse Feathers...

I'll be at the Barnes & Nobles in Cool Springs (just south of Nashville, TN) for the Local Author Meet and Greet from 6:00pm to 8:00pm tonight. Should be not freezing for a change, so I hope those of you in the area will come out and say hi.

Skylar at the Tome Tender blog wrote a rather flattering review of Seventh Night, AND they're giving away 3 ebook copies between now and February 20th. Go here to read and enter. Tome Tender reviews some adult material, so the site may ask if you're over 18, but this specific link is pretty PG and should be work safe.

Or you can check them out on Tumblr. Or here for Google+.

If all goes well, my first Goodreads giveaway should be starting tomorrow for those of you who prefer print copies. I'll update with details when it's up and going.

Sadly, no new Horse Feathers chapter this week. Too much going on, but it should return next week.

Oh, and I already linked this on my budgeting blog, but if you'd like to listen to me "um" through my first blog radio interview, it's now available.

First Bookstore Signing and Horse Feathers Chapter 34

First off, if you're in the Middle Tennessee area, I hope you'll consider coming to Local Author Meet and Greet at the Cool Springs Barnes & Nobles this Friday from 6pm-8pm. I'll be there along with:

Rod Huff, Yolanda Shields, Mitchell Karnes, Houston Gunn, Kelly Lynn, Beverly Fisher, Parnell Donahue and Danna Sims.

Kelly Lynn was one of the authors who participated in my release party, so it'll be fun to see her again.

New Chapter: There was a few days delay due to illness (mine, my nephew's, and my beta's), but Horse Feathers Chapter 34 is now up for your reading pleasure.


New Design: I've had this green sort of abstract design that's been my head for the last couple years, but I haven't had much luck getting it out. The new design Succulent Green is my latest attempt and shown here on a pair of flip-flops from Cafepress. Nothing groundbreaking, but I was proud of myself for doing a design that could tiled.

Horse Feathers Returns

The long wait is over and Horse Feathers has returned. I posted Chapter 33 today.

This story is getting way longer than I thought it would be. At this rate, Horse Feathers is going to be longer than Seventh Night when it's finished. But I think that's mainly a side effect of approach. Seventh Night is rather plot and action centric, where Horse Feathers takes a more meandering path and does a lot of sensory description and world building that really doesn't fit the Seventh Night novel. I mean you don't stop to smell the roses when you're being chased by an evil wizard... I'm just hoping the length isn't me being unnecessarily repetitive.

I finished reading Clan of the Cave Bear, which had it's good points, but you could probably cut 100 pages from that novel if you trimmed out all the redundancy. I'm reading through the Acorna series now, finished the first novel and on to the second.

I've been working on some new Cafepress designs.  This one is for the NCIS fan portal.  Rule #62 as unveiled in this week's episode.

I worked on a couple things for Pretty Little Liars too, but one got abandoned and the other may get revamped.  Follow the links to DeviantArt if you're curious.

I'm a little nervous about my upcoming podcast interview. It's related to the Living Single on Minimum Wage book, which is budgeting. But I get the impression the interviewer might want to get into the politics of minimum wage and my thoughts on that aren't simple and sound bite friendly.