Not much time to post today - flying out to Clockwork Alchemy, where I am the Author Guest of Honor. But, it's still Camp Nanowrimo, and I had wordcount to get in on Jeremiah Willstone #2, THE CITADEL OF GLASS. And, yes, I do count it as word count if I'm futzing around in the appendix reviewing the characters and revisiting ideas for the title, but the bulk of today's word count was in the climax, which I had sketched out earlier (almost a decade ago!) and am now adjusting to fit the new ideas in the fleshed out plot ... so I can in turn reverse-engineer how that plot shall proceed to reach that climax. Very ouroboros.
-the Centaur
Pictured: A title brainstorming session for CITADEL OF GLASS.
"Off we go towards Clockwork Alchemy ... there we'll have tea with all of our fans." I'd say "sung to the theme of 'Wild Blue Yonder'" but I actually don't remember the words to that other than the first line - and it's relatively hard to parody something you don't know all that well.
Regardless, we'll have books, and panels, and the debut of Jeremiah Willstone and the Choir of Demons!
-the Centaur
Pictured: an accidentally blurred shot of my book stock, and a fortuitous super closeup of the books that I had taken pictures of at the Kickstarter.
SO! Our Kickstarter for the Neurodiversiverse is live at neurodiversiverse.com (which just links through to the Kickstarter page for the duration of the campaign). And I'm proud to say that we are number one of projects if you search for neurodivergence!
For this project I had to create about fifty images in Photoshop - mostly by remixing other imagery we had, admittedly, but sometimes it took a bit of cleverness to make everything work out, as in this physical picture of most of our books and flash fiction postcards - not all of which I had on hand for the picture, and some of which don't even physically exist yet, like the softback of The Neurodiversiverse:
Liza and I (with the help of Betsy and Keiko) put a lot of time into this and I'm proud of the result:
So, please check it out and back us ... we have reward tiers everything from $1 for token support, to early bird ebooks at a discount, to the book and the ebook themselves, all the way up to getting your name listed in the acknowledgements at the back of the book:
And, while I hope to get in some real drawing today, I am unabashedly using this as my Drawing Every Day post, because I spent hours and hours on art today and that should count, dang it.
More stick figure studies from "Wizard: How to Draw". They look simple, but part of "planning for success" in drawing is creating rough sketches to help find the right composition of the piece - and you can't do that if you have to do a full drawing every time, or if you don't know how to draw a simplified sketch.
Another study from Goldman. It's interesting how different the structures are INSIDE the body from the landmarks they create OUTSIDE the body. So much complexity, in something as simple as a heel and its joint to the rest of the foot - a joint that enables you to waggle your feet independently of the positioning of your ankle and the wriggling your toes (try it). Yet all that complexity must exist inside for us to achieve something as simple on the outside as stretching your feet a little bit.
Drawing (on average) every day, posting every day if I can.
Hey folks! This is a "sticky" post up for the next week or so to remind you that I will be Author Guest of Honor at Clockwork Alchemy - and that we're running a Kickstarter for The Neurodiversiverse! Please check out the Kickstarter - and click to be notified when it goes live, I'm told that helps "the algorithm" when it launches.
I was selected as Clockwork Alchemy GOH not just because of the Jeremiah Willstone steampunk series, comprising one novel and a dozen stories featuring the rayguns-corsets-and-aliens world of Victoriana, but also because I've been involved in Clockwork Alchemy since its inception. Please visit us at the con!
At Clockwork Alchemy, I will be joined by my Neurodiversiverse coeditor and friend Liza Olmsted. Our schedule at the event is the following - including a Tea with the Author on Friday and the debut of the audio drama "Jeremiah Willstone and the Choir of Demons" on the anthology panel on Saturday:
Friday, April 19
Own Voice Stories - 2:30pm / Synergy 5 - Liza Olmsted, M.D. Neu, Sumiko Saulson, Emily Flummox Why promoting and celebrating 'own voices' stories is imperative!
Tea with the Author Guest of Honor - 4pm / Synergy 2-3 - Anthony Francis Come have tea with me! Ask your questions. I don't promise enigmatic answers!
Author Signing with Anthony Francis - 6pm / Convene Lobby Come get your books signed!
Saturday, April 20
Steampunk Vehicles - 1pm / Inspire 1 - Anthony Francis and Michael Tierney We'll talk about airships, land walkers, behemoths, and time machines!
Author Signing with Anthony Francis - 4pm / Convene Lobby Buy more of my books in Author's Alley, and I'll sign them too!
Bringing Anthologies to Life - 5:30pm / Synergy 5 - Anthony Francis, Liza Olmsted and Dover Whitecliff We'll discuss the challenges of bringing anthologies to life, and debut the very first Jeremiah Willstone audio drama, "The Choir of Demons"
Sunday, April 21
Favorite Steampunk Books - 10am / Synergy 5 - Anthony Francis, Madeline Holly-Rosing, Dover Whitecliff What are the greatest steampunk books and series? We have opinions! And will share.
Author Signing with Anthony Francis - noon / Convene Lobby Buy more of my books in Author's Alley, and I'll sign them too!
Author Signing - Last Call with the Author's Alley - 4pm / Convene Lobby Buy more of ANYONE's books in Author's Alley, and we'll all sign them! Or sign our own. Whatevz.
Finally, for the duration of the campaign, neurodiversiverse.com will link through to the Kickstarter! We're campaigning to get enough funds to pay our authors full "pro" SFWA rates, and if we surpass that, the funds will go to the planned second book in the series: The Neurodiversiverse - Binary Stars! Back and share, folks!
Hey folks! I've got just a quick post for you now, because I need to go heads down on Jeremiah Willstone #2, CITADEL OF GLASS, for Camp Nanowrimo. Prepping to be Guest of Honor at Clockwork Alchemy next week - and creating the Kickstarter campaign for The Neurodiversiverse, which we want to go live before CA - has put me behind on my word count for the month ... so I need to make a few changes.
In "normal" circumstances, I have a pretty simple day: take care of food, cats and laundry, work for several hours on the project of the day, and then break - on Mondays and Wednesdays, a late break for dinner where I catch up on reading, on Tuesdays and and some Thursdays, an early dinner break before writing group and the church board meeting, and on Fridays and Saturdays, an early break for coffee and drawing / writing before a late dinner and more reading (with date nites with my wife thrown in). This structure makes sure I'm both making progress on life and work projects during the day, and creative projects at night.
But you can't do that during Camp Nanowrimo or regular National Novel Writing Month - at least, not if you get behind, because if you do, you will fall farther and farther behind. Writing in Nanowrimo actually makes it easier to write more in Nanowrimo - generally, you can raise more questions for yourself than you can answer in a writing session, creating the fuel for future sessions. But once behind, that can jam up - stuck in "writer's block" where you haven't raised enough interesting questions for creative mind to answer, or not thought through the answers enough when you get to the point of writing the outcome of a confrontation.
When I'm behind on Nano, I have to drop my normal "read and eat" strategy in favor of "crack open the laptop at every available opportunity". And I won't limit myself to "write and eat" during meals and "laptop in the coffeehouse" sessions: at the very end of the day I'll set up the laptop in the kitchen , sitting down to bang out the day's wordcount before I let myself crash for the night, where both I and the laptop recharge.
"Autistic inertia" is the way many autistic people describe their inability to start or stop tasks, and some feel it is one of the most disabling aspects of autism. I don't have a formal diagnosis of autism, but informal tests put me on the spectrum - and being aware of your own neurodivergence and the experiences that other people have with the same neurodivergence can help you find strategies that work for you to cope.
For me, I can work on tasks for hours and hours on end - but if I don't have a long enough block to do a task, I tend not to start a task. Now that I understand that I may be struggling with autistic inertia, that helps me understand what may be going on. The feeling that I won't be able to get anything done if I don't have time to get everything done is just that, a feeling. In reality, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step towards it ... and the journey towards 50,000 words in a month begins with one word on the page.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Normally, there should be an open book or sketchbook next to those delicious fish tacos.
Okay, it wasn't a fluke: Loki sought me out, meowed for attention, climbed up into my lap ... then moved to the nearby table and deliberately turned his back to me.
Now, it is true that he wanted more scritches, but just a little, and it was just as clear that he wanted his large primate to be near enough to protect him, but without a lot of interaction.
He is a weird little cat. He often meows that he wants something, but can't seem to walk in the direction of what he wants, and you need to trial-guess it by walking in several different directions until he follows.
He clearly wants something though ... he just can't make it clear.
What, you expected my behavior to make sense?
-the Centaur
Pictured: that guy, yes, that guy, rocking the golden hour.
Alright, one more not-drawing drawing while I am scrambling to get ready for Clockwork Alchemy. If you're not using the Internet in its most basic form, it resembles a countryside where roads to infrequently-visited towns frequently get torn up and you have to either reroute - or build your own.
Case in point, link shorteners. Google used to have one called "goo.gl" - used to have, before Larry Page took over at Google and led it through the Google Plus debacle, where Google really started to get the reputation for killing products that ultimately led to it being called the Google Graveyard.
But, before they killed it, I used it on the book cards that I hand out at conventions! I had been using that shortlink to point to my Amazon "Anthony Francis" author page, but I don't trust link shorteners anymore. So I created a new link, dresan.com/blog/books, which has all my books on it (now in the top menu):
But, that means my book cards needed to be updated. I of course updated the link, but also took the time when I was in there to enhance the contrast on the top title so it was more legible. Hopefully these cards will arrive in time for the Clockwork Alchemy convention next week, where I will be Author Guest of Honor.
Drawing (or graphic design) every day.
-the Centaur
Pictured: the back of the "book cards", and the "book page" which also shows the book card fronts.
So, no drawing-drawing today, as we needed to complete the Kickstarter for The Neurodiversiverse, which goes live early next week - and we (and by we, I mean I) had to ALSO complete the graphics for the book cards we will be handing out at the Clockwork Alchemy and Con Carolinas conventions. Have a look!
While Photoshoppery isn't the artistic skill I wanted to refine when I started Drawing Every Day, it is a skill that also needs to be perfected. I had to generate a LOT of graphics by today so we could submit the Kickstarter, and then these two cards - by TONIGHT, to get the order into Moo in time.
But, we did it! Hopefully the cards will arrive in time. Cross your fingers!
Drawing (or Photoshopping) every day.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Front and back of the Kickstarter cards, based on a draft of our cover, itself based on art from Barbara Candiotti, one of the contributors to The Neurodiversiverse. More information on The Neurodiversiverse Kickstarter will come shortly before it goes live next week.
Zazzle for the win. I think this rendered pretty well (the color difference is in the lighting):
Admittedly, Zazzle were late shipping this to me, but this t-shirt design came out better than the Cafe Press take on the Embodied AI Workshop t-shirt:
Even though both shirts are fairly dark, and both of these images are drawn from the same Adobe Illustrator template, the text on the Cafe Press one came out a bit grey and worn ... and actually a bit small, whereas the Zazzle one looked white and solid and was sized pretty much like the text on the preview image:
I wouldn't close the door on Cafe Press - the t-shirt itself was solid, and I've used them successfully in the past. But I think for this iteration of t-shirts I'm going to go with Zazzle.
What a long fricking day. No real drawing for you ... just sketches of a proposed Jeremiah Willstone logo. I created these as feedback to a fellow artist I'm working with who will design the actual logo in a form suitable for putting on pins and stickers. We started with an old logo idea I had a few years back:
But that's kitbashed together from a number of different public domain images and my own quickly hacked logo designs in Photoshop and Illustrator. However, Kimchi Kreative did such a good job with the Neurodiversiverse logo I asked her to apply some of her magic to Jeremiah. We're iterating on it now, with super rough sketches to bounce ideas back and forth.
You know, it's great to learn to do things on your own - and I focus on doing most of the work that I can myself, especially for my own creative projects. But when you have access to an expert, it's foolish to forego that for things in their area of expertise - and learning how to work with others on creative projects is a skill all its own.
Loki has asked me to pass on this public service announcement for cat partners everywhere: "Please, sit close enough that we may ignore you. We can't very well ignore you if you aren't there, now can we?" I suppose this is a security blanket thing, though later in the day he changed tactics on maintaining proximity of his human and went for "doing cute things, please pay attention to me."
I picked him up recently for one of the back-stretches he enjoys, and I swear he yawned when he did it.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, trying to ignore me, but from a comfortably close distance, then attracting attention.
So I saw two make turkeys posturing outside, and carefully stepped to the French doors to take a picture. But what I assume was the female they had been courting had been on the other side of those doors, and decided to book it. Yet, even though their audience was gone, the two males didn't stop posturing.
I feel this make some subtle point about continuing the fight after the prize is gone, but it eludes me.
Back in the day, I felt embarrassed about practicing with stick figures, always wanting to move on to the actual drawing. But now, I see real value in learning an approximation, so you can test ideas out and get proportions right with rough sketches, rather than ending up with an unbalanced or malformed drawing.
More Goldman studies. Interesting how many fiddly bits there are in something as basic as the heel of the human foot, much less all the bones that make up the rest of it.
How much of this do you really need to know to draw? Conversely, how much does knowing this at a muscle-motion, stone-cold sketching level give you an invisible substructure that helps you get the shape of the outer structures correct?
Still hanging in there apparently - we made it to 100 blogposts this year without incidents. Taking care of some bidness today, please enjoy this preview of the t-shirts for the Embodied Artificial Intelligence Workshop. Still trying out suppliers - the printing on this one came out grey rather than white.
Perhaps we should go whole hog and use the logo for the workshop proper, which came out rather nice.
-the Centaur
Picture: Um, I said it, a prototype t-shirt for EAI#5, and the logo for EAI#5.
When stopping, my buddy commented "it was a gas station as if done by Pixar." After seeing it, I said "It's like Pixar had done a theme park for their movie entitled 'Murica'."
His response? "They already did that movie. It's called WALL-E."
