Have you ever looked at the picture in an advertisement and had utterly no idea what it was?
This has happened a couple of times lately to me.
Amazon has been presenting ads in my Facebook feed. Mostly these are comprehensible, if uninteresting. However, lately there have been a few that are just… I don’t know what.
Continue readingThe story is a prequel to The Rabbit Hole. As such, it has to end with Dimples working in the troll farm under the supervision of the rabbits.
It starts out with the events in several story segments that I wrote ages ago, which I posted to Usenet.
Continue readingI am working through a series of exercises with Jackie on planning Red Rabbit! Red Rabbit!. Step 4 involves writing ‘jacket text’ for the story. This is the text that might appear on the back of the book, or on the front flap of a dust jacket. It’s a kind of marketing text intended to draw the readers interest.
So for, I’ve come up with this:
A hidden society of supremacists is trying to take over the world. They are outnumbered by the rest of us, yet they believe that their strength, intelligence, weaponry, and general cuteness give them the right to rule us all. Yes, cuteness… for these supremacists are rabbits.
Years ago, Tom Johnson and his parents had fled the rabbits’ captivity to build a new life on the outside. Tom’s father had gone back in later to rescue other humans from the rabbits’ totalitarian nightmare… and never returned.Now, Tom was in high school. But his earliest memories were of the safe predictable environment that the rabbits provided for their human guests. He remembered the rabbits’ soft fur and cute little voices, and their warmth and love… and he looked around at the harsh world of high school, the bullying and endless struggle, and he knew he had to leave.
The original alt.devilbunnies story postings that provided the characters I reference in The Rabbit Hole mentioned Kingston, Ontario, Canada. When I was writing the story, I needed to firm up my knowledge of the locations. So here are some of the locations:
When publishing a book in Canada, it is an actual legal requirement to send a copy or two to the national library for their collection.
This applies to printed books, ebooks, serial publications, video and audio recordings, maps, microforms, even sheet music.
The materials go into the national library, and one copy is made available for the public, while the other goes into The Archives.
The Lonely Little Fridge is going to be a hardcover and a fixed-format ebook.
Amazon print-on-demand does not print hardcovers, so I set up an account at IngramSpark (https://www.ingramspark.com/), the publishing platform, who does print hardcovers. They also handle distribution worldwide; bookstores order from them.
In order to print with them, we have to provides all sorts of information, in addition to the actual book files.
Continue readingLast week I handed off a draft of The Lonely Little Fridge to Jackie for her to look over while I plunge into the artwork…
I just backed this art book printing and reprinting project!
I kept seeing bits of the artwork copied into places like Instagram, and I didn’t know where it came from. But then I stumbled across the book reprint project on Kickstarter. And that led me to the source, the Etherington Brothers out of England:
https://theetheringtonbrothers.blogspot.com/
The website has hundreds of little segments giving tips and tricks on drawing and writing topics.
However, I got a great message back from them with some useful advice:
For those who are interested in applying for TCAF in the future, we want to take a moment to provide some context for what our committee considers when selecting applicants for TCAF:
TCAF exhibitors should have a substantial body of comics in print. We are a comics focused show, which means that we try to prioritize exhibitors who have lots of comics for sale.
TCAF exhibitors are encouraged to debut new work at the festival. New comics and new books help make TCAF exciting for patrons, and tend to ensure more successful and profitable shows for exhibitors. It’s great to see applicants who have a solid idea of a new comics project, especially one that has a clear and confident plan for completion.
It’s important to note that these aren’t “the rules” for applying to TCAF, and many other factors are taken into consideration, but we hope this helps with your future TCAF applications.
TCAF
So I’m going to finish “Little Lost Part” as if I were exhibiting it at TCAF, and keep going from there!
Here’s Version 5 of the cover for “Parts: An Industrial Fantasy”. I’m getting closer. And I realized that Gordin and Laisa may have red circuit boards for greater visibility.
I’m still learning more about these watercolours. I am going to layer them more; I’ve been treating them like Photoshop paint-bucket fills or comic-strip colours…