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Posts published in “Appearances”

Silicon Valley Open Studios is Here!

Published May 18, 2024 by centaur
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Cue "It's Happening" meme: Silicon Valley Open Studios is this weekend, May 18th and 19th, where my wife Sandi Billingsley will be showing off both her paintings and mixed media including furniture!

Our friend Diane, a glass artist, dropped in to help us manage the day, bringing snacks and champagne!

Sandi has a lot of artwork and furniture on display today, including some very nice large-format art. Above you can see "Kirsten Piig" and "Jim Dairy" from Sandi's "Animals are People Too" series, and one of the geode tables (along with Diane on the left, Sandi on the right, and my toe at the bottom); on the other side is "Missy Elephant" and several of Sandi's other pieces with custom art boards made to look like stone:

Another room has more pieces and some works in progress:

Below you can see "Collie Parton", "Yeti White" and another striking geode table:

This is an open studio, so several of Sandi's in-process pieces are prominently on display, like this bar and chairs set (and also the finished art "Moo Paul" and "Mllama"):

In the back room, this enormous piece is going to be a conch-shaped day bed:

It is so big that Sandi's actually going to partially take it apart and make the top into a removable cabinet:

Not because it can't fit through the door or anything. Not at all. Sandi also let me have a space to display my books, since we needed to find a place to put that bookcase (which I designed and built, I'm proud to say). The giant egg creature is actually one of Sandi's furniture pieces - a hat cabinet!

At the back there is the final geode table, which I think I showed yesterday ... oh, no I didn't, here you go:

We will be here working on art today and tomorrow from 11-5, so please come on by!

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day one three eight]: one day to go for realz yo

Published May 17, 2024 by centaur
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Contrary to yesterday's post, which was done after midnight so it fooled me about what day it was, TODAY is one day left to Silicon Valley Open Studios, where my wife Sandi Billingsley will be showing off both her paintings and mixed media including furniture, like the geode table above.

Below is one of my wife's pieces, Marylin Thumbtoe, from a series combining animals and celebrities into surreal combinations, like ... Marilyn Thumbtoe.

Perhaps the work should speak for itself.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Yes, I know, after midnight is the next day according to the calendar, but I count days as over when I go to bed, unless for some reason I pull an all nighter, so a 1am post is technically the previous day. I don't always hold to that, but for the purposes of the blog series, that makes the most sense.

[twenty twenty-four day one three seven]: two days to go

Published May 17, 2024 by centaur
centaur 1

Just two more days to Silicon Valley Open Studios where my wife Sandi Billingsley will be showing off both her paintings and mixed media including furniture. Can't photo yet, we are currently scrambling to get the place fixed up, so let me present representative samples from South Carolina (not on display here).

These three, however, will definitely be on display!

Most of this art, even the large furniture pieces, are made from recycled materials such as paper and reclaimed wood, which I think is very cool.

Please come check it out!

-the Centaur

Pictured: One of the frames I helped assemble today, and some of Sandi's furniture.

[twenty twenty-four day one three six]: zoom zoom

Published May 15, 2024 by taidoka
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One Flew South sushi and cocktail

On my way to Silicon Valley Open Studios to help my wife with her art show this weekend - both paintings and mixed media, including furniture:

Geode-like furniture by Sandi Billingsley

Short layover, hit publish, please attend!

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day one three four]: victory condition

Published May 13, 2024 by centaur
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Wow, the Neurodiversiverse Kickstarter not only got funded, we reached our first stretch goal - bookmarks!

We had hoped to reach postcards or even the audiobook, but this was a great achievement, and I'll take it. Not only did we take in almost $9K to help pay our authors and defray other costs in the book, but also a hundred and eighty people backed and another hundred bookmarked the campaign. Which means that over two hundred fifty people liked it ... and probably ten times as many looked at it. Mission accomplished!

Next up, finishing the ARC (the preliminary version of the book for industry and sensitivity reader review).

Onward!

Pictured: Graphics from the Kickstarter, which were not only fun to do but taught me a lot, and an Old Fashioned from Select restaurant in Greer.

[twenty twenty-four day one three one]: celebration!

Published May 10, 2024 by centaur
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Yay! The Neurodiversiverse Kickstarter funded, with two and a half days to go! And it has been amazing, after a month of slow but steady growth, that the Kickstarter continues to now rapidly fund even as we're trying to publicize it! A shoutout to Cat Rambo, who graciously let us do that guest blogpost! Let me shout back, with the story card we came up with for Cat's story, "Scary Monsters, Super Creeps"!

Now that we've met our funding goal, we've announced our stretch goals, which include cool things like bookmarks and postcards and, if we really stretch, an audiobook of the anthology.

But we've also been posting about our process, talking about how we selected our stories for the anthology and how we organized them into our current table of contents - which required setting up a Kanban board in Airtable to help us organize it quickly, efficiently, and, most of all, understandably.

Airtable is a system that looks a lot like a spreadsheet, except it's actually a database under the hood, enabling you to build different views of the same data; a Kanban board is one such view, with rows turned into "cards" organized into "stacks" by a given field - and as you move cards about in the stacks, the field changes with it. This helps visualize the flow of, well, many things - including stories in the editing pipeline, or stories in the table of contents; I'm even using it for tracking the writing of new stories. But for now, the most important thing is that it enabled us to put together this:

We're proud of the table of contents - but also, pleased with the process that got us there, and hope other people find it as useful as we did.

So please, go check those posts out, and maybe even help spread the word so we reach our stretch goals!

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day one three zero]: and then he rested

Published May 9, 2024 by centaur
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It's been a long day dealing with a whole sequence of guff, so here I present to you Loki, taking a nap after his hard work on reconciling large language models with classical symbolic artificial intelligence.

-the Centaur

P.S. The Kickstarter is almost there! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thinkinginkpress/the-neurodiversiverse-alien-encounters-a-sci-fi-anthology ... 94%, with ~3 days to go! Like, back and share!

Guest Post on The Neurodiversiverse at Cat Rambo’s Blog

Published May 9, 2024 by centaur
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Hey folks! I have a guest post on The Neurodiversiverse up at Cat Rambo's blog! Check it out:

In it, I talk about the aliens in science fiction, the origin of The Neurodiversiverse, about neurodiversity and representation, and about some of the cool stories that we are featuring in the anthology!

Cat is not just an author in The Neurodiversiverse, she's also the author of the space opera You Sexy Thing and lots of other cool stories and novels. Thanks to Cat for the opportunity!

The Kickstarter runs for just 3 more days, so please read, like, back and share!

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day one two seven]: so what if we did a hardcover?

Published May 6, 2024 by centaur
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So Liza and I have been working on the upper reward tiers for The Neurodiversiverse Kickstarter (we're so close! almost 85% of the way there!) and we think we have a solution for producing the limited hardcover edition. Unfortunately, the bindery that produced Thinking Ink's limited edition of The Hereafter Bytes has gone out of business, but we found a few similar options (and may even be able to reduce the price). Above is a mockup of what it might look like, and below was the actual original for The Hereafter Bytes:

Hopefully some people will buy this reward tier - it is pricey on purpose, in the hopes that backers will back this because they want to support the project (and just in case something goes wrong with the printing costs). Just a few of these will take us over the top, so please pledge ten of them! :-D

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day one two six]: working on the neurodiversiverse kickstarter

Published May 5, 2024 by centaur
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Hacking away at publicity for the Kickstarter for the Neurodiversiverse, which is at +80%! But that means we have almost a thousand dollars to go, and we're really far from our stretch goals. So I'm working to publicize it further with guest blog posts and such, as well as pushing further on social media.

You can support it as simply as pledging for a book or an ebook (or a sticker or pin or even $1 for no reward). But you can also get reward bundles that have lots and lots of Thinking Ink Press books in them:

Or an awesome tote bag and pins and stickers and such!

And if you REALLY want to help us out ... you can get your name in the book. Just sayin'.

Onward!

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day one one four]: zoom zoom

Published April 24, 2024 by centaur
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Mostly flying back from Clockwork Alchemy today (and catching up on wordcount on CITADEL OF GLASS, which I am now thinking is going to be titled THE WATCHTOWER OF DESTINY).

A long day. Regular posts resume tomorrow.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Artwork in the Greenville airport, and a glass of iced tea from One Flew South.

[twenty twenty-four day one one three]: a special place

Published April 22, 2024 by centaur
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Likely out all day today hiking with my wife, so just a quick post for you.

I missed the big dance show at Clockwork Alchemy because I was, frankly, exhausted after the Author Guest of Honor events (and the de-briefing that my co-editor and I had after the con where we tried to figure out what went wrong, what went right, and what to do next). But even then, late late late Saturday night, there were still music acts going - I believe this was Unwoman, who has definitely still got it.

-the Centaur

Pictured: um, I said it, the dance floor at Clockwork Alchemy Saturday night at something like 11:45 pm. In previous years it's been more hopping super late, but now the concerts start earlier at 6:30.

[twenty twenty-four day one one two]: adios clockwork

Published April 22, 2024 by centaur
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Crashed out after finishing my Camp Nano wordcount for today; full debrief on Clockwork tomorrow. Zzz....

-the Centaur

Pictured: A crow, or perhaps raven, or just a sculptural cartoon average of the two, which is supposed to be a lampholder, instead serving as a book card holder, because his little light was too darn bright.

[twenty twenty-four day one one one]: cheers from clockwork

Published April 20, 2024 by centaur
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Friday was slow, but Saturday was a pretty damn good day at Clockwork Alchemy. I have wordcount on Camp Nano and a late night event to attend, so I'll give a fuller update tomorrow.

-the Centaur

Pictured: the "Louie", a very nice variant of an Old Fashioned unique to the San Mateo Marriott "Craft / Code" bar, which is going out of business next week as the hotel is closing.

[twenty twenty-four day one ten]: at clockwork alchemy 2024

Published April 20, 2024 by centaur
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So we had a great first day at Clockwork Alchemy! I got a great Guest of Honor banner for my table, and we had a delightful Tea with the Author Guest of Honor in the con's amazing Tea Room!

My co-editor for The Neurodiversiverse, Liza Olmsted (far left on the picture below), was on an #ownvoices panel, which was very informative! I particularly liked her quote:

The world is so much more beautiful with intersectionality ... everything is so much more nuanced."

Liza Olmsted

"Intersectionality" is a funky word for the simple concept that people aren't a single attribute, like "black" or "women" or "gay" but that each person is a combination of all these things - and discrimination isn't just additive, but can compound in interesting ways. In one famous court case, for example, a court ruled that a group of black women weren't discriminated against because the company had hired a lot of black men (in a factory setting) and a lot of white women (in an office setting) thus improving the percentage of blacks in the factory and women in the office - but the point was, the women were being discriminated against for being black and women at the same time, and the court was essentially arguing you couldn't be one or the other. But, if you acknowledge that people can be more than one thing, you can take their distinctive appearances into account into how you treat them, rather than sweeping it under the rug.

Neurodiversiverse author Clara Ward dropped by and left us a few of her new book, "Be the Sea", which is (as I gathered from discussions) a climatepunk story featuring neurodiverse and nonbinary characters. I worked with Clara before on Doorways to Extra Time and we're excited to have her back for this one!

We hope to see you tomorrow at the con! Next up, Steampunk Vehicles, Bringing Anthologies to Life, and the world premiere reading of "Jeremiah Willstone and the Choir of Demons"!

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day one oh seven]: departure angle on viewer

Published April 17, 2024 by centaur
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"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.

[drawing every day 2024 post one oh seven]: more kickstarters

Published April 16, 2024 by centaur
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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.

Drawing every day.

-the Centaur