The Return of the Posts! Of Publishing and Society of Creative Anachronism

My life has become… busy. Oddly, delightfully, busy.

With my lady and I returning to the Society of Creative Anachronism (SCA), parts of my life that were ‘shut down’ and no longer used are back in operation – full tilt. There are many skills, and desire to learn more skills, that lay dormant in me when I wasn’t in the SCA. That was because there was no reason, or form, for the skills to be channelled through. That is now flooded forward as the SCA gave me opportunity and reason to reuse them.

Mean while, I also have started the edits for the next White Dragon Black novel, ‘Bindings & Spines’, with my editor, McKenna Gardner, from Xchyler Publishing. They are not going fast right now, due to ‘life’ on both our sides of the process. However, I am in that phase which means, an actual publication is not too distant. We have the cover art all done, and Luke Spooner at Carrion House has once more created the right look, and atmosphere, with his art.

I have recently taught myself how to do repousse and chasing. I’ve in no way mastered it but I’ve had enough success and fun doing it, I will certainly continue to improve and utilize that skill.

I’ve just challenged myself, in court, before Her Majesty, to carve a rosary from bone and tagua nut or ‘vegetable ivory’ in a year (or less). I’ve worked with bone in the past but using a Dremel tool – so doing it by hand will be a big learning curve for me.

I’ve also bought some Amber to play with and find it a very interesting material to work with, much like soapstone but… well, not. It does smell rather nice as you gently file away the unwanted parts, though.

As for writing, there hasn’t been too much of that. However, as I suspected might happen, now that the weather is turning cooler, and I’m immersing myself in the Jonathan Alvey’s world with edits, the snippets and short scenes are returning to my head. I don’t know if it’s my Muse finally being able to to get into my distracted brain, or if it’s that she didn’t decide I should be allowed new words until now. Either way, it will be nice to create things with words again.

I actually have a strong leaning to get back to a zombie novel I started, long ago.

I still like the premiss of it and the world it resides in, so I might just allow a hiatus from the WDG world and see about writing it. Or maybe my Muse will feel I’m not doing enough and get me working on both worlds at the same time.

The style and emotional input would be drastically different than I have written in a while, perhaps that would be a good thing. Changing your thinking every so often, keeps the regular day, in day –  day out, fresher and more interesting.

With my rejoining the SCA, its associated new projects, and ‘jobs’ to do, I fell out of my habit and routine here on social media. I managed to get my Twitter habit back and now I’m attempting to implement my blogging again as well. Maybe I’ll can get back to sharing updates… now in a wide range of interests.

Filed under: Book Release, Publishing, SCA, Writing Tagged: amber, Bindings & Spines, bone, Carrion House, characters, crazy, current work in progress, editor, edits, Jonathan Alvey, Luke Spooner, metal work, muse, novel, paranormal, paranormal private investigator, plot, publish, repousse & chasing, SCA, scene, Society for Creative Anachronism, tagua nut, Urban Fantasy, White Dragon Black Series, wife, winter, world building, writing, Xchyler Publishing, zombie