Raven Oak's Blog, page 75

Scrivener Saturday #4

This week’s Scrivener Saturday is on Backups.

If I had a dollar for every time an author lost their project/novel, I’d be rich. We’ve all lost something due to hard drive crashes or corrupt USB drives. One of the things I love most about Scrivener, is the ability to use it with Dropbox to ensure you never lose your writing again.

Scrivener can be set up to do automatic backups:

Choose Scrivener –> Preferences (Tools—>Options in Windows)
When the Preferences window appears, click on the Backup tab...

Flashforward Friday: Comets!

This week’s Flashforward Friday: Comets!

If you’ve been living in a cave, you might have missed the wonderful news that we landed on a freaking comet. Imagine throwing a dart and hitting a bulls-eye over a million miles away. Yeah. That’s freaking awesome!

XKCD has an awesome series of comics they did live during the landing, which you can check out here: http://xkcd1446.org/#7

Even cooler is the sound the Rosetta Comet was/is making–some folks say it sounds a lot like Predator.

This week alone,...

Book Cover Throwback: A Door into Ocean

This week’s Book Cover Throwback: A Door into Ocean.

A Door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski is one of my favorite books in feminist literature, and I love the reprint cover from 2000.

Here’s a nice close up of the image by Alan Pollack.

The post Book Cover Throwback: A Door into Ocean appeared first on Raven Oak.

Novella Done!

YAY!!

Members of the mailing list will rejoice (as well as others) that I just finished the promised story, Class-M Exile. It morphed from a short story to an 18,000 word novella.

I still have some editing yet to do on it before I release it to my wonderful list, but the draft is at least done from start to finish.

Woot!

Now on to writing Book II, Amaskan’s Honor.

The post Novella Done! appeared first on Raven Oak.

Monday Night Gaming: All Things Munchkin

Ah Munchkin!

One of my favorite cards.

That glorious game. The ultimate PvP (player vs. player) game that encourages bad behavior and foul language. What’s not to love?

This week’s Monday Night Gaming is on All Things Munchkin. My husband and I are huge fans of this game series. In fact, we have a wooden briefcase that holds all of our collection. I’ll have to post pictures later when I’ve actually painted the damn thing.

Our collection currently consists of:

Munchkin Base Game (1-4)
Star Munchkin
M...

Pre-Orders & Contests

Amaskan’s Blood is up for eBook pre-order over on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Apple (iBooks). I’ll post when print pre-orders go up.

Also, you can win an autographed copy of Amaskan’s Blood before release, along with some swag, over on Goodreads. See the giveaway details here.

Important!

Hurry though, the contest ends on 11/17/14.

I was also interviewed by the awesome Stuart Thaman. Check it out at: http://www.stuartthamanbooks.com

Have a great rest of your weekend and happy reading!

The post Pre...

Dealing with Negativity

I’m a huge fan of confronting negativity with humor, especially smarmy sarcastic humor because that’s just my style. But writers often face a deluge of negativity by way of rejection letters, negative book reviews, hate-mail, etc.

In the past week alone I’ve seen over a dozen articles talking about the dangers of writers responding to negative reviews.

I’m of the camp that writers should remember:

a) to never respond and

b) that there is no such thing as negative publicity so let it go

That being...

Flashback Friday: John Bellairs

For this week’s Flashback Friday post, I’m honored to have Maia Chance, author of the Fairy Tale Fatal series, here to do a guest post on what speculative fiction novel influenced her as a writer.

If you haven’t checked out her new book, Snow White Red-Handed yet, you should. Think Brother Grimm + Mystery + 1800’s = WIN. So we know that the Grimm fairy tales impacted her as a writer, but what else? Here is Maia to answer just that!

When I was a kid, John Bellairs was my crack. I read and reread...

Book Cover Throwback: The Last Unicorn

This week’s Book Cover Throwback is The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. This is the cover on my copy of the book, and I absolutely love it. It reminds me of the art styles from particular artists during medieval times, particularly The Unicorn in Captivity (and the other 6 tapestries featuring the unicorn) from the late 15th century.

I also did a Flashback Friday on this book. Click here to read it.

The post Book Cover Throwback: The Last Unicorn appeared first on Raven Oak.

Monday Night Gaming: Blue Sun

Last week’s Monday Night Gaming covered the Firefly Board Game and most of the expansions. We finally had a chance to sit down and play the Blue Sun expansion.

If you thought this game took up precious real estate before, try adding in this latest expansion, which includes an addition to the board itself called Rim Space. The main board + add on now takes about 3 feet of space. Add in 18 or so card decks and their discard piles, plus your ship, crew, ship upgrades, gear, etc., and you need a v...