JAMBARK 2025 is an online summit of writers presenting topics to help writers. It is organized by the fine folks at What’s Your Story Author Services.
We will be presenting about things like worldbuilding, how to write a book if you have no time to write a book, social media for authors, and much much more!
My topic is: “Turning Personal Experiences into Fiction”. I’ll be presenting on Sunday the 26th of January 2025.
Our participants:
The Eventbrite link to sign up:
So now the Write Now Club is starting another challenge! This time, it’s Sixty Thousand Words* in Sixty Days!
But I put an asterisk beside the word “word”… because it’s not just words this time. There are many tasks involved in creating a book beyond just putting words down. What about doing research? Marketing? Illustration? One of our members is an incredibly-talented cartoonist. His stuff just doesn’t have many words. Should he be penalized even though he is doing as much work?
So another member came up with a list of tasks and word equivalents. You can get points for how much time you spend on a task, instead of for how many words you create during that time. Of course, if you’re mostly creating words, that is fine too.
This is great, because I’m doing a lot of illustration and drawing research in support of my story. It helps me figure things out.
Continue readingGlossy on the front, matte on the back. They look good!
I ordered from Vistaprint to see what their quality was like, and requested expedited shipping, so that I can have them when I go to the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair on Sunday!
So there I was. I had just wandered into a convenience store while wearing my new shirt that I had made with the logo of The Rabbit Trap. The cashier was asking me about it, what did it mean, and I was describing the book. He asked, did I have any info on it that he could give out, and I had to admit I did not yet. Creating something to give away was literally the next major thing I was doing.
To that end, I have now created and ordered bookmarks for The Rabbit Trap. Hopefully they will be here this week.
The book trailer for The Rabbit Trap went through a lot of evolution.
It’s technically an ‘animatic’, a kind of draft animation that can be quickly produced and adjusted as ideas change. A fully-animated work would follow on from it.
I started out by drawing a few rough sketches on paper and putting them in order.
Then I decided to try Boords, the online storyboarding service.
Continue readingWith the help of friends, I finished it! I am very thankful for Akosua Brown, who provided inspiration and support, and to Dave Ranson and Sandy Kay, who provided voices (even if just one word!).
It turns out that Facebook does not allow external plugins to display posts from a personal Facebook tiimeline. Only posts from a Facebook page or group can be selected and displayed remotely. This is apparently for privacy reasons.
I picked up a Custom Facebopok Feed plugin from Smashballoon to display selected Facebook posts on my WordPress blog. Its FAQ mentions this restriction.
So I may have to make a proper SRD Books Facebook page, and post art things to that. Since many of these would be various stages of artwork and book preparation, that makes sense. But general sketchbook posts like I’ve been doing lately? I’ll have to think about it. Maybe I can sort and redisplay them on my personal page and then link to that.
A proper FB, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, etc page for SRD Books is something that Orzala would probably recommend anyways…
I just wrote letters and packed up the books I am sending to various friends and family. I also threw in more of the postcards. I have no idea how much postage is going to be…
In the Devilbunnies universe, writers used the names of existing concepts, characters, products and companies. Some of them were associated with the Bunnies or their enemies:
In some cases the group authors took the name and ran with it.
Continue readingAnd here they are! Twenty-five copies of Nineteen Tales, picked up from Jackie in Bowmanville today. We had a great meeting with all kinds of ideas and I have a lot to think about.
