One thing I can say at the end of my very sparse “sf convention season” of 2024: Archon persists. We’ve seen a lot of fan-run science fiction conventions bucking strong headwinds since the Pandemic. My “home convention,” ConQuesT, has gone on hiatus. The club isn’t ready to say it’s dead yet, but we didn’t have one this year. Another longtime mainstay, SoonerCon, also went through a bumpy transition this year, as I noted in an earlier blog post. We and…
Is there anything quite as sad as unfinished stories? The bright promise of beginnings, the building strongly up to a climactic . . . nothing there? I’m sure I’m not the only writer with unfinished stories in her file drawer and on her computer. But today I’m not only talking about literary projects. Because all too often, people’s lives can be unfinished stories, too. The Unfinished Stories of Too-Early-Ended Lives My mind leaps to all the young people in the…
The day came! You might remember that last week I wrote a blog post titled “Any Day Now,” about how long it was taking to get my latest book, Bone of Contention, into print. All the unexpected amounts of time things took. All the unintended mixups. Not to mention all the delays beyond my control! The waiting isn’t quite over yet – not all of it. But the day came, at least for one thing! My Amazon pre-sale promotion is…
Any day now, I’ll have a pre-sale to announce! Bone of Contention, the third and final novel in the XK9 “Bones” Trilogy, will be available for pre-sale orders in advance of its September 24, 2024 publication date. My plan (check back in a few weeks to see how well it went 😳) is to offer ebooks through Amazon, paperbacks through the Weird Sisters Publishing website, and both (if possible) through IngramSpark’s new e-commerce portal. Amazon doesn’t allow tiny publishers like…
Back on July 20, 2022, I wrote about a Dallas Winds Fourth of July concert. We played a medley of armed service anthems but stiffed the recently created Space Force. Did the Space Force, created in 2019, even have an anthem? At that time there was only an interim anthem, penned by John Philip Sousa. The Space Force Anthem The Sousa march is called The Invincible Eagle. Sousa wrote it in 1901 for the Pan-American Exposition, held in Buffalo, New…
No two ways about it: change is hard. It’s inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any easier to manage. And when innovation butts heads with tradition, change is really hard. SoonerCon 32 offers a sometimes-painful, sometimes-cautiously hopeful, case in point. I remember decades ago when my husband and I witnessed another painful transition. We were assistant directors of a summer camp unit that had seen a complete change of staff from one summer to the next. The camp organization was…
Here at Weird Sisters Publishing, new visions keep popping up. Sometimes They are literal visions, AKA illustrations, of the sort I shared a few weeks ago in the post about a new way of approaching Warren C. Norwood’s adventure-filled Windhover Tetralogy. One of the new visions I’ll share for the first time in this post has been seven months in the making. Another came into being quite suddenly. And at the end of the post I’ll talk about a convention…
Please note: this post is now several years old. For a look at publishing in 2025-26, take a look at my post “Time for the Annual Marketing Review.” Of course I have thoughts on publishing trends. I have to take trends into consideration with every decision we at Weird Sisters Publishing make. Especially right now, while G. is finishing out her time with The Dallas Winds, and I’m the one holding down the fort full-time. In my last post I…
How do readers find books? Wow. I wish I could offer a quick, easy answer to that, but there isn’t one, as far as I can tell – at least, there is no single, cheap-or-free avenue that an author or publisher can always rely on. Used to be, there were only really two places to find books: a bookstore or a library. Publicity for a book was through print media, word of mouth, and placement in displays. A few favored…
Time, for creatives, is an eternal challenge. There are so many things to do – and all of them take time! No matter what our art, it takes time to make/perform/produce. By now everyone’s probably heard about the apocryphal “10,000 hours to mastery.”The way that’s normally understood may not be exactly what Malcolm Gladwell meant, but it’s close enough for truthiness. He also said “practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes…