Many years ago, when I was still part of SFWA, I had a long conversation with the Patreon reps about their platform. I’d been using Patreon for a several years already, and they wanted my take on it. That conversation led me to a video call/interview with the engineers—I think I did two of those? In which they questioned me about use cases and I had a chance to explain what I felt was their greatest challenge. As is typical of me, the tactical stuff had to wait on the philosophical stuff,...
2020-10-15 13:16:43 +0000 UTC
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Poor Worldlord and Simone. So confused. I have no idea what their story is going to look like but I get to write it because the Kickstarter coasted over the $5K line! Today's the last day you can back, unless you wake up early tomorrow (or you're on the eastern seaboard of the US, with me). Here's the URL again, for those of you who wanted to wait to the last minute: https://www.kicksta...
2020-10-13 10:33:16 +0000 UTC
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Happy Monday, Patrons! Have some art! I am trying to get my groove back here with more frequent drawing (and I'll certainly need to start coming up with a cover for the new Kickstarter collection), and I had several good sessions recently. (Thank you, Discord frens, for keeping me company.😊)
I've got lots of stuff bubbling away in the pot, but most of my energy right now is managing that Kickstarter. 2020-10-05 12:34:53 +0000 UTC
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My most successful Kickstarter to date was last year’s Major Pieces project, which gathered some interstitial stories I’d already completed with stories written from your prompts to fill in some of the gaps of the Princes’ Game series. Your participation made for a far more interesting table of contents than I could have come up with on my own... without your suggestions, I would never have thought to write about the restaurant at Starbase Alpha, or how a D-per came to be...
2020-09-30 16:04:28 +0000 UTC
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Cool stuff coming or available now!
- First, I've enabled annual memberships for Patreon! If you are sick of the monthly payment charge, you can now go buy an entire year at once. You even get a 5% discount! Here's a guide to make the switch. (Because some of you will ask, neither is ...
2020-09-22 12:01:15 +0000 UTC
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Today's content will be helpful if you ever want to deal with me! Or if you want to think about social-fu. Otherwise, feel free to skip it! But hey, I haven't done a philosophy-type ramble the way I used to on Livejournal in a while, so here's a thing.
***
I grew up exquisitely aware of boundaries.
I didn’t always understand what I was perceiving when I was younger, but I knew them all the same: I knew that something made my household different from other households. Somet...
2020-09-21 13:09:45 +0000 UTC
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The summer ripened with the grain, and Zafiil strengthened with it, rambling on long walks through the forests or near the lake with Duzai. She climbed trees; she sprinted long stretches with the grasses whipping a steady rhythm against her flashing legs. Her finger joints learned to lock and unlock, the first step, it was said, toward developing the MindFire. She steeped in the scents of Quafiirla until they seemed prosaic, natural: the rushes in her bed, the sodden soil after rainfall, the ...
2020-09-17 10:51:40 +0000 UTC
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Yes, I'm trying to get back on the bandwagon. Today at 1 PM EST (timezone converter: use New York, America), I'll be narrating my way through a partial scan of one of my sketchbooks! Join me then, on Twitch!
2020-09-16 13:59:04 +0000 UTC
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Because nothing survives contact with the enemy (time), these are only *tentative* plans. But here's how I'm thinking the next couple of years will go:
- Pelted Pack (2020-2021): Alysha 7, Zafiil 1 and 2, Dragons' Fealty and Another Collection
- Other Stuff (2021-2022): Kherishdar 5, Coracle 1-4, maybe a Jokka short or novella
- Back to Pelted (2022): Surela's trilogy
I am about halfway through Alysha 7, ab...
2020-09-11 12:29:00 +0000 UTC
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I continue to experiment with water-miscible oils! For this piece I switched to a different brand and I'm really glad I looked on the forums for people's experiences, because otherwise I wouldn't have known this brand existed. Blick doesn't carry it, only Jerry's Artorama. And I LOVE it so much better than the Holbein Duos. If you look at this first picture, at the palette on the right, you can see the paints are sitting in those dark amber puddles? Those are the separated oils. This...
2020-09-08 15:17:57 +0000 UTC
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I am endlessly entertained by the bizarre positions the cat ends up in while using this beanbag.
2020-09-05 14:11:31 +0000 UTC
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The next day Zafiil woke just before sunrise—she thought, from the color of the sky seen through her window. Was it too early to be up? But she was definitely awake! Paden-aul had warned her that she might find it difficult to adjust to a new schedule on a new world; maybe this was what he meant.
Zafiil padded out of her room as quietly as possible, wondering if she’d find Baila in the kitchen, the way she would have Qazen-dii. But Neden was there instead, minding the firepot and pu...
2020-09-03 12:01:01 +0000 UTC
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Things are crazy lately! If you have sent me a message or email, I promise I've read it, I just have a lot going on. I did, however, manage to finish this 7000-ish word vignette in response to several people asking me for Jahir/Lisinthir. When the fourth person made the request, I said, "Well, tell me a point in time I could reasonably fit a new scene into and I'll do it!" And got back a great answer: "the night before Lisinthir, the Queen Ransomed, and their entourage leave, after Sediryl's ...
2020-09-01 12:09:01 +0000 UTC
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We return to the world of the Faulfenza! Chapter 2: In which Zafiil reaches her new home.
***
The sunlight was slanting through the trees when Zafiil woke. She was moving without walking, a fact which caused her some consternation until she realized Jeniiz was carrying her like a baby.
As she opened her mouth to protest, Jeniiz spoke. “We’ll be walking until third-night. Do you really want to get started on that so fast?” Zafiil paused, and the other Fau...
2020-08-27 12:13:04 +0000 UTC
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We begin our religious epic in the world of the Faulfenza! Chapter 1: In which we meet a prickly child...
***
“Give your sister a goodbye nuzzle, Zafiil,” Qazen-dii said.
Zafiil rose on her toes so she could rub cheeks with the baby bundled in her mother’s arms, suppressing her envy. How good it would be to be an infant again! If she hadn’t gone and grown up she wouldn’t be in this position! One of the intraplanet shuttles tore past outs...
2020-08-20 15:34:53 +0000 UTC
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Artist Jaguar continues experimenting with water-miscible oils, and finding them fascinating because they are Not Like Gouache. I have a long, long list of things I need to experiment with in order to feel like I understand these new/old tools, because When Last We Left Our Young Artist Painting With Oils, she was all of twelve, and her brief experiments in college lasted only one semester and that doesn’t feel to me like enough time to master anything… particularly when the teachers in q...
2020-08-17 19:38:41 +0000 UTC
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This is the way of the cat. 😂
2020-08-15 14:20:08 +0000 UTC
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https://mcahogarth.bandcamp.com/album/amulet-rampant
As before, it's free, because you all are paying to crowdfund it. If you'd like to donate, you can do so at bandcamp, or, if it doesn't let you, I've set up a Paypal link here: http://paypal.me/amuletrampant
Tell me how it is, I haven't had a chance to listen to it ye...
2020-08-11 12:01:05 +0000 UTC
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At the time I finished Zafiil, there was no such thing as indie publishing, and wouldn’t be for at least a decade. My goal was to be a Published Author, though, so I embarked on the tradpub process: write short stories to get your name out, while hunting for an agent, who will hopefully shop you to publishers.
I quickly learned, however, that no agent or publisher wants a debut author’s 1000+ page novel, no matter how promising. With regret (and determination), I set Za...
2020-08-10 15:21:19 +0000 UTC
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Supervising from the tarp.
2020-08-08 11:52:41 +0000 UTC
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This is the first in a short series of posts introducing the serialization of Zafiil, Jaguar’s first novel, and a story of the Faulfenza.
It may entertain y’all to learn that once upon a time, I worried that I would never have a novel-length story idea; that I’d never be able to write something that long; that even if I had an idea for a novel, I wouldn’t be able to finish it. My notebooks and hard drive were littered with the beginnings of stories I thought promising, ...
2020-08-03 16:55:23 +0000 UTC
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We return to the saga of the new jaguar studio! Some Big Next Steps were taken, so I am excite.
BOOKENDS
Okay, maybe bookends don’t seem like a very exciting thing to other people, but stick with me here. Those rows of sketchbooks are only as useful as my ability—and desire—to pull them out… and without the bookends, I have two problems: first, that if I’m not careful, I will shove the stack and the books on the end will topple off the edges of the shelves (which do
2020-07-29 14:03:38 +0000 UTC
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Today I'm going to start moving my computers and furniture into the newly painted studio! And I want to show you more in-progress shots but obviously I need to get everything wheeled over and reconnected first. I'm hoping to be back in business by Wednesday, at least for most of my activities... streaming is going to have to wait until I figure out where the art desk's going, and where to run the wires for the camera! I will, as always, keep you posted. In the meantime, here is Determined Jag...
2020-07-27 12:00:05 +0000 UTC
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That's right, I'm finally making headway on editing this one, and I'm going to start serializing it here once I've got a few more chapters in the bag. For those of you unaware, the novel Zafiil, about the character Zafiil, concerns the history of the Faulfenza, and so rightly belongs in the Peltedverse canon! Its age has made it necessary to make lots of adjustments so it'll fit properly, and that's what I'm doing now. It's not a small project, though: at over 250,000 words (about 11...
2020-07-24 19:03:57 +0000 UTC
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We return to the saga of my new studio! Furniture choices are going to have to wait until I decide how to handle the walls (which I think I want to repaint)… but the closet is fine the color it is, so I’ve started filling it.
My first challenge was that the wireframe shelving, while fine for clothes or large flat objects, is pretty awful for books. Husband and I went to the hardware store to see if we could replace them with something better without having to tear down the hanging s...
2020-07-20 15:17:18 +0000 UTC
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THREE HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE
When his favorite student invites him to immigrate to the world of the fabled Eldritch, Armin Palland brings his wife and mother-in-law and all the unresolved issues he’s been avoiding. That he arrives to a planet without a university to employ him leaves him stranded with nothing to do but what he does best: turn his psychology degree and analytical powers on the plight of the natives… and one native in ...
2020-07-17 13:49:46 +0000 UTC
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I hope to have fun news for you on Friday (some of you have already ferreted it out, I see), but in the meantime, here's what I'm up to!
We return to my observations about writers’ bibles and worldbuilding as the wiki develops! In this case… it’s time to tell you that your flaws can be supremely helpful to you.
BAD RECALL IS YOUR FRIEND. For instance! One of my most egregious flaws is a bad memory. It’s so bad that my family and friends tease me about it all the time. (They’ve decided I’m a wormhole alien, from DS9: ‘you exist now, without linear time’. They’re not wrong.) I’ve gotten...
2020-07-09 13:29:10 +0000 UTC
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I have been only intermittently updating and available, but I have good reason! We've been doing a lot of work on the house and we're not done yet... but one of the unmitigated good parts of it is that I'm going to finally have a room of my own! I can't remember the last time I had a room to myself; I've been working out of the dining or living room (and master closet, and linen closet, and laundry room, and a bunch of other scattered places in the house) for at least 12 years, possibly longe...
2020-07-06 12:00:02 +0000 UTC
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A question I’m getting more than once is ‘how do you organize your wiki so that it’s useful for your writing.’ Which… is not a minor question, because my initial response is ‘I’ve organized it? It’s a big enormous tangled mess of stubs and passages from one blank space to another and then boom! Wall of text.’
It is tempting to go at this like a prescriptive text: “The proper way to organize your wiki is to divide it into the following nine sections, under which you s...
2020-06-30 13:25:30 +0000 UTC
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