catherineldf | Entries tagged with updates

I'll be on The Story Hour, along with writer Daria Lavelle, tomorrow night at 7PM PST. This is a fun virtual series that gets recorded live on Zoom, then broadcast on Facebook. It's free, the authors read for about 20-25 minutes, usually from short fiction, and we plug our current favorite nonprofits. In my case, I'm plugging my birthday fundraiser for SAGE, a nonprofit that works with LGBTQ+ elders.

Otherwise, birthday plans for the next week and half are afoot, writing and editing is happening, I just taught 2 workshops and did a booktable at a festival. It's been a LOT, but overall pretty pleasant. More soon and come join us tomorrow!

The weekend brought a lot of ups and downs, on pretty much every level. These included:

My friend Beth’s memorial service. Beth, being Beth, threw the best going away party/funeral I’ve ever attended, complete with loved ones, her artwork and excellent catered food. It was both a sad and festive occasion, just as she would have wanted, I think. I’m going to miss her a lot. :-(((
Michael and I did a reading on Sunday at Cream & Amber, which was both well-attended and delightful.
Alex book, Murder in the Titania, did not win a Colorado Book Award (but is still awesome and you should read it and the sequel).
I had a killer migraine on Sunday.
friends took me to vaguely Regency-themed improv and it was great fun.
I got a lot less work done than I had hoped for. Sigh.
We are officially announcing that Queen of Swords Press will be publishing a collection of stories about Cinrak, dapper lesbian capybara pirate, by NZ author A.J. Fitzwater next year.

So there’s been a LOT. Naturally, that means we must have a big upcoming event!
Off to WisCon on Friday for the following:

Sunday, May 26th - 10-11:15 “So You Want to be a Publisher” Conference Room 3. Presentation and talk.
Also Sunday - 4:1-5:15 “Book Marketing for Writers” Capitol A. Panel discussion with Cecilia from F-BOM.
And Sunday again (it’s s big day) - Queen of Swords Press Party, Room 627, 8-1PM. Tea, guests, fun! Stop by!And now back to work...

Been another full week. I took a couple of days off to try and get caught up on stuff and promptly got a couple of lively migraines. Good times! In between periods of ouch, I stopped by Diversicon and picked up Charlie Jane Anders and Rachel Gold for dinner on Friday night at Pho 79, which was lovely. I've only met Charlie Jane or once or twice before so it was nice to get to spend more time with her.

I've also had a couple of new acceptances, which is lovely. I'll have two short reprints in the Outwrite benefit journal to be given out at the conference next week in D.C. and just had an Emily L. Byrne story accepted for Cwtch Press's latest volume of vampire erotica, Blood in the Rain 4. Otherwise, plugging away on edits for Scourge of the Seas of Time (and Space), writing a space Regency, working on Blood Moon and intermittently working on a game proposal for Choice of Games. Also, planning a ton of future events, applying for stuff and so on.

Outwrite 2018 is coming up this week and I'm off to D.C. to visit with friends, do a reading and moderate a panel on writing queer horror. It's a stellar lineup and if you're in the area, you should definitely try and attend.

Or it would be pictures if Dreamwidth wasn't fighting me every step of the way.

New edition of Silver Moon coming soon!

Watch on YouTube

Patreon posts are done and posted for my current pledges - recommendation lists of bookstores and comics and graphic novels, and for my patrons pledging at the $6 level, an additional bonus article about woman's bookstores and feminist science fiction and fantasy that I wrote for Women In Science Fiction and Fantasy: An Encyclopedia. February's donations are going to NCLR, which provides legal support and representation for LGBTQ folks dealing with a whole range of issues. I'll be donating to a different nonprofit every month and there will be different rewards each month. Sign up and help me do good works!

Apart from that, working on new stories and getting stuff moving along for Queen of Swords Press (Emily L. Byrne's new collection Knife's Edge comes out soon). There'll also be a new print edition of Out of This World: Queer Speculative Fiction Stories coming soon. I also just got interviewed for the Skiffy and Fanty Podcast and that'll get posted soon. And I've added a Tea and Ghost Stories Reading at Bingley's Tea Room in Minneapolis in April. More updates coming soon!

Currently watching When We Rise around getting other things done. On the one hand, there's too much going on. On the other, holee shit, they're doing this on primetime for a mainstream audience with kissing and everything. So, thanks, ABC. This is kind of cool and I'm really glad to see it.

The last few weeks have been an exciting jumble of day jobbery, crud and miscellaneous projects. In the next few weeks, I need to do my first technical conference presentation, plan something for my mother's 80th birthday, teach two classes at the Loft Literary Center (if they carry), get new publicity photos, deal with day job release schedules that are falling badly behind and generally survive. Whee! It promises to be fun! Or at least parts of it will be fun. I hope.

But we're not here to talk about dread and worries today. Today, we are writing and working on stuff and making progress on freelance editing and novel edits and such. Progress, especially finishing any of the above, will be glorious, glorious, I say!

So, writing update is minimal. But Queen of Swords Press update is impressive. In the last few weeks, I've gotten a business bank account, done some excellent networking with another writer about software and social media solutions that I need to check out, worked with my web designer to mock up a website and acquired Quickbooks. I get to meet with my new accountant tomorrow to get the latter set up, and my small biz lawyer to get a few more things finalized in two weeks. I have contract templates to review and very nearly have a new email address for the Press. So things are moving, which hopefully means that writing and editing will be picking up steam too. Progress!

Crossposts: http://catherineldf.livejournal.com/389861.html

So I know a lot of people ask why I don't do more and why I need so much spare time...actually, no one asks that. Instead, let's talk briefly about 2013 and 2014 from a writing perspective, namely mine. The very condensed version is that I parted ways with one of my publishers for a variety of sound reasons, then nearly got picked up by another publisher before I had a nice attorney vet their contract. Nice attorney said bad idea, and I believed her, and thus I dodged becoming part of the Ellora's Cave disaster of 2014. However, that meant that I had spent a lot of time (2013-early 2014) writing book proposals, being depressed about my career, moving my mother across country, finishing a novel, working a day job and having my entire social network implode. Those were good times. But, I digress...

Around this time last year, there came rumblings at the day job which, due to a zillion years in corporate IT, I recognized as likely presaging eventual layoffs (projected timeline announced this week, as a matter of fact, but projected as slow moving). I decided that it was time to get my life back together. I spun off my erotica and erotic romance under Emily L. Byrne, wrote a bunch of stories and essays both as Emily and as myself and got a bunch of stuff either published or in the pipeline and started a whole bunch of financial planning on various fronts. I also took classes, talked to a lot of experts in various areas and bought a domain name. I decided that I would self-publish and see how that went, and maybe think about publishing other authors.

Then a friend of mine's publisher went belly-up and I realized that one of her series was exactly the sort of thing that I wanted to publish and could market (unlike previous publisher). I talked to her and she was amenable, but now I was tackling a bigger project than I had planned on. Fast forward through more elderly parent crises and other stuff and I got referred to a nice small business attorney. And found a web designer and a template and a terrific logo artist (S.L.Johnson). I'm most of the way through my business plan and have a full list of all the other things I need to do next. What I don't have in place yet includes my finalized LLC, my financial structure, books ready to go out the door yet, distribution accounts, submissions guidelines and all that good stuff. So we are still early in the process, but beginning to gain traction. Think of this as Update #1.

Here is a brief description and page proofs of the new logo (bliss!)

About Queen of Swords Press:
Queen of Swords is an independent small press, specializing in swashbuckling tales of derring-do, bold new adventures in time and space, mysterious stories of the occult and arcane and fantastical tales of people and lands far and near. What does that actually mean? It means our publisher likes all of the following: swashbuckling tales with female protagonists, people from wide-ranging cultural and racial backgrounds having adventures in outer space, LGBT and/or Q characters engaged in magic and swordplay and historically-flavored stories that reflect diverse casts of characters doing interesting things.

Crossposts: http://catherineldf.livejournal.com/379304.html

First, author, educator and amazing human being Kate Bornstein has suffered a reoccurance of her lung cancer. She needs help with travel expenses and care. Please donate and spread the word. http://www.gofundme.com/2cxb6w

On a personal note, my trip is going reasonably well. Yesterday's interview was a blast. Today, we checked out a Japanese bookstore, the Broadway show "Kinky Boots" and dinner with the ever-charming D.L. King. There have been some ups and downs, but overall a good trip thus far. Hoping to get in some museuming tomorrow and Friday.