Posts published in “Urban Fantasy”

The Dakota Frost, Skindancer series … and all of Dakota Frost’s friends!

And we’re off!

Published November 1, 2014 by centaur

National Novel Writing Month is here again. For those who are just joining the party, it's a challenge to write 50,000 words of a new novel in the month of November - and it's also the event which finally broke through my creative barriers, helping me at last produce a complete publishable novel. I've done it eight times in the past:

2002: DELIVERANCE (Frontiersmanship series #1, as yet unpublished)
2007: FROST MOON (Dakota Frost series #1, published by Bell Bridge Books 2010)
2008: BLOOD ROCK (Dakota Frost series #2, published by Bell Bridge Books 2011)
2009: LIQUID FIRE (Dakota Frost series #3, forthcoming from Bell Bridge, 2014)
2010: JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE (Jeremiah Willstone series #1, forthcoming from Bell Bridge est. 2014)
2011: HEX CODE (Cinnamon Frost series #1, manuscript in progress)
2012: MAROONED (Serendipity series #1, manuscript in progress)
2013: SPECTRAL IRON (Dakota Frost series #4 manuscript in progress, estimated submission 2014)

and now 2015: PHANTOM SILVER, which will be Dakota Frost #5. I'm planning on focusing on Dakota for a while now, trying to get books 4-6 to Debra (and my fans) so that they have six books in their hands, hopefully enough to tide them over while I get Cinnamon Frost, Jeremiah Willstone and Serendipity out the door.

I could say more about Nano, or do link salsa to the text above to provide references. But I'm not. I'm going to get back to writing; it's already 10pm on Saturday November 1, and I'm only about 500 words in, when I need almost 1700. Arr, back to work, ye scurvy writer dawgs! It's Nano time!

-the Centaur

Pictured: a creepy Halloween cat at a nearby hardware store, thematic because I'm shooting for a slightly creepier Dakota Frost tale this time around, focusing mostly on ghosts.

Resurrecting Fanu Fiku

Published August 1, 2014 by centaur

SO, I have this webcomic some of you may know about, f@nu fiku (that's Fanu Fiku, stylized with an @ sign, because aren't I oh so clever :-P). f@nu fiku is about Xiao Dreamweaver, a fifteen year old girl who can travel between all possible combinations of all possible realities … only she doesn't know it yet. What you may or may not know is that this webcomic is cursed.

Early on working on f@nu fiku, I broke my arm in a karate match, forcing me to use guest artists and rough notebook scans for several months. I blogged that extensively, but what I did NOT blog - because it was too disruptive - was the failure of the computer and theft of the notebooks on which I did f@nu fiku.

Back then, I produced f@nu fiku on this great Windows laptop, but eventually its cooling fan gave up the ghost, and I decided - purely as an experiment - to try out an old Macintosh laptop that I had gotten in a clearance sale, since I already used a Mac at work. Four days in to this new laptop, I attended an art show in San Francisco - and my car was broken into.

Many books were stolen. My personal laptop was stolen. One of my writing notebooks was stolen, including the one with the original outline of the Dakota Frost series. My f@nu fiku sketchbook - in which I created the pages - was stolen. None of this was ever returned, of course, but I retained all the data, I had all the scans, and in theory I could easily have resumed the comic.

Only one problem: the laptop was stolen before I realized I couldn't produce f@nu fiku on the Mac.

I edited f@nu fiku in Corel Painter (a creditable replacement for Adobe Photoshop) and lettered it in Xara (a powerful, but much easier to use version of Adobe Illustrator). Corel Painter exists for the Mac … but Xara does not. At the time, I was completely inexperienced at Adobe Illustrator, and found working on the comic extremely difficult.

What's worse, at the time the Mac's support for Python wasn't so hot. I wrote the f@nu fiku webcomic software myself, but found that it adapted poorly to the Macintosh, requiring a partial rewrite of the image processing layer. I eventually got the software running, but by this point FROST MOON was taking off, and without meaning to, I let f@nu fiku drop.

Fast forward more than half a decade. I'm more committed than ever to Dakota Frost, but I'm also more involved than ever with the comic community - with Blitz Comics on the 24 Hour Comic Day Survival Guide, and with our umbrella organization, Thinking Ink Press. At Comic-Con, I got energized, and decided that I should resurrect f@nu fiku, perhaps even in print form.

At first it seemed impossible. Many originals were gone. Some of the completed art was corrupted. And all of the art was way, way too low resolution to be printed. It was depressing. And in truth, this is the real state I've been for the past few years on f@nu fiku: too depressed about it to come back to it, regardless of how much time I had. And I started to give up hope.

But it is a half a decade later, and I've learned to never give up hope. This was a hard won lesson: when I left the PhD program, I despaired of ever using my degree. Well, it took ten years, but eventually I returned to that work … and now, I'm using those skills more than ever. Over time, I've learned that the more patient and perseverant I become, the more I am rewarded.

So, when I started to lose hope … I really had just forgotten how paranoid I am about backups, and soon found the original scans AND backup copies of the completed art. And I had just forgotten how perseverant I have become, and how much I have changed my thinking about solving problems just like this one. And soon, after a little thought, I found a way to get high resolution images.

As before, I had a spare laptop lying around - this time a Windows 8 machine, that I'd tried as a replacement for the Mac (and quickly discarded for that purpose, though it isn't really bad). And IT will run Xara, and IT could load all my old f@nu fiku files. I don't know whether I'll try to save these as Illustrator files, now that I'm comfortable with it, but regardless, I now have a way.

I almost always find that if you think something's impossible, you're thinking about it the wrong way … and a solution awaits you nearby. I don't have to solve the nearly impossible problem of getting Xara to run on the Mac (I have tried virtual machines, but they were virtually impossible to use) but just the far simpler problem of using Xara on a PC to dump high-res images.

Now, I have almost 60 issues of f@nu fiku backlogged … more than a year's worth, almost ready to go. It will take me some time to get all of them beaten into shape, to rework the fanufiku.com site, to get set up on tapastic and get a posting schedule going. But it will be worth it: it will not only break this creative logjam, it will help me prepare for new comic projects, like Quarry.

So don't give up hope. It's just an excuse - just a way to give yourself license to wallow in self pity and to fall into inaction. Often enough, the files are saved on backup, the original scans are on disk, and there's a laptop laying around somewhere, waiting for the software to be installed on it that will give you the power to resurrect something you thought long dead.

You just have to have a little faith, and work a little harder.

-the Centaur

Pictured: the Windows laptop, with Page 1 of f@nu fiku successfully loaded in Xara.

My Presence at San Diego Comic-Con 2014

Published July 24, 2014 by centaur

The submarine surfaces, oh so briefly. So, between work, writing and life, things have been stacked up on me so much that not only do I have several half-finished blog posts begging me to finish them and put them up, but also I now find myself already a day into San Diego Comic-Con - and just now blogging about my presence at San Diego Comic-Con.

This year is the tenth anniversary of 24-Hour Comics Day, a challenge to create a 24 page comic in 24 hours, a challenge which me and my buddy Nathan Vargas have tackled a dozen times between the two of us (him seven, me five). It's a difficult challenge, and we failed the first few times, so we collected our advice on how to succeed in the 24 Hour Comic Day Survival Guide.

Nathan worked with ComicsPRO to create a panel celebrating the 10th anniversary of the event, and will be on the panel along with the creator of the annual event Nat Gertler and several other creators. But what's special is that we were already planning to update our Survival Guide for this year's 24HCD in October - and were able to put together a Preview Edition of the Guide.

Thanks to our friends at Thinking Ink Press, we have expanded our original 8-page guide into a 76 page booklet, with over a dozen chapters of tips and advice and interactive exercises. We'll be giving away signed copies of the Preview Edition of the Guide at the panel celebrating 24-Hour Comics Day, and also giving them away at various events or on the show floor.

The panel is at 5:15 on Friday at Room 18 at San Diego Comic-Con, and Nathan will be appearing with Nate Gertler, Chris Brady, Jimmy Purcell, and Marco Devanzo (with me in the audience). While Nat Gertler created the annual event, the actual 24-Hour Comic challenge was created by Scott McCloud, who will be appearing himself at Comic-Con, and whom I hope to meet.

Regardless, the official 24-Hour Comics Day is held the first week in October every year - this year, October 4. Nathan and I will be appearing at the Alternative Press Expo (APE) on the same weekend, hopefully with some 24HCD themed events, but will take the challenge at Mission Comics and Art in San Francisco which this year is holding 24HCD one week early.

So: that's what's going on. As many of you know, I have two novels sitting at the publisher - LIQUID FIRE and JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE - but Debra Dixon is still reviewing them, so I'm hacking away at Dakota Frost Book 4, SPECTRAL IRON, and blissing out on comics while I wait for the edits to land.

-the Centaur

The Weird Experience of Marketing Yourself

Published May 21, 2014 by centaur

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This Memorial Day weekend, I will be at the Clockwork Alchemy conference, appearing on three panels (Real Women in Victorian Times Saturday at noon, Avoiding Historical Mistakes Sunday at noon, and Victorian Technology, Sunday at 1) and giving one talk (my old standby, The Science of Airships, Sunday at 4).

Since I won't be at my table the whole time, I decided to print up a series of postcards for all of my books using the service at Moo.com, which I and my wife have found to be great for printing customized business cards with a variety of artwork on the cover. I decided to do one for each book, showing the cover on one side and a blurb on the back.

But then I discovered that, just like for the business cards themselves, while you can have many different covers on the front, you get only one choice for the back. So what should go on that single back cover? What should it market? Then I realized: I don't have a book coming out right away. These cards actually have to market … me.

Ulp.

More precisely, the cards have to market my work. But I'm not a single-series author; I can't (yet) pull a George R. R. Martin and just say "author of Game of Thrones," especially not at a steampunk convention when my most prominent series, Dakota Frost, is actually urban fantasy. "Anthony Francis, author of Dakota Frost - who? Author of what? Ok, fine … but why is he here?"

So I have to list not just one series, but all of them, and not just list them, but say what they're about.

After some thought, I decided to use some of my own comic art that I'd previously used on my business cards as a backdrop, but to focus the content of the cards on my writing, not my comics (sorry, f@nu fiku and Blitz Comics … there just wasn't enough room on the cards or poster), unifying all of my books under a theme of "The Worlds of Anthony Francis". I feel like breaking out in hives when I write that. It sounds so damn aggrandized and pompous. But strictly speaking … it's accurate.

One of my worlds is the fantastic space of the Allied universe, where genetically engineered centaurs hop from world to world like skipping stones in the river (collected in the anthology STRANDED). Another is the hyper-feminist alternate history steampunk adventures of Jeremiah Willstone (collected in the anthologies UnCONventional and DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME). And yet another is the world of Dakota Frost, Skindancer, and the magic tattoos she can bring to life (FROST MOON, BLOOD ROCK, and the forthcoming LIQUID FIRE). And I hope you choose to read all of them! Enter the worlds, indeed.

But if I want people to read them, I need to tell people about them, in terms that make people, I dunno, actually want to read the books. Normally it's a publisher who writes that copy, but they're generally marketing a book, not me. I don't yet have a publicist, and even if I did, the entire point of me is to do as many of the tasks of creative production myself as is practical, so I can speak at least quasi-intelligently about the process - case in point, the graphic design of the postcard above, which will be a blog post in its own right. But this isn't about that part of the process; it's about the feeling.

One thing I've learned is that no-one knows that you write unless you actually tell them about it, and no-one buys what you write unless they know it can be bought. SO I have to do at least the first stab at this all by myself (not counting help from cats). I have to try to summarize my work, to bite the bullet and actually sell it, and to package that sales language up in ways that get it out to people - starting with a series of postcards to put on my table. And oh, yes, to blog it: to finally lift my head far enough above the waters to shout, yes, world, I am here, and no, I don't need a life preserver: I need you to buy some of my books.

It still feels weird saying that.

I guess I'll have to get over it.

-the Centaur

Pictured: the back of the postcards I printed for my table, featuring my own art; me, in a potential author publicity picture; and Gabby, helping me organize my book files and promotional materials.

Victory again, my friends

Published May 2, 2014 by centaur

SO yet again I've completed a challenge to finish 50,000 words in a month … this time the April Camp Nanowrimo challenge. My goal was to write 50,000 new words in the 4th Dakota Frost book, SPECTRAL IRON … and as of April 30th, I did it:

Camp Nanowrimo 2014-04-30a-lit.png

Normally I write a lot about how this happened, bla bla bla. But the big thing that happened with this month is that it has gotten me ahead of the game for a change. I've had breaks, of course, in the past year and a half, but no matter how easily I breathed, I always had two almost-finished novels hanging over me (LIQUID FIRE and CLOCKWORK), and chunks of several more half-finished novels waiting in the wings (HEX CODE, SPECTRAL IRON, and MAROONED).

Now both of those books are at the publisher, my editor and I aren't going to talk until after Memorial Day … and I, for once, feel like I'm starting to get caught up.

If you see me wielding a stick, it's to beat off new projects with.

Camp Nanowrimo 2014-04-30b.png

The last thing I learned is that I can basically write 50,000 words of rough draft material in approximately 20 days, and that's with having serious work responsibilities and personal responsibilities I have to put first. It's a push, but it isn't an impossible push, and that means I can seriously start looking at other projects and start figuring out where to wield that hammer.

First up, the frontispiece for LIQUID FIRE. Then, my upcoming talks at Clockwork Alchemy. Oh, and the next version of Blitz Comic's Survival Guide. Lots of projects … but all were on the plate before. Now I just no longer have a giant sword of Damocles hanging over them; I instead have Thor's hammer, ready to strike.

-the Centaur

UPDATE: actually, first up, was an image for Blitz Comic's Free Comic Book Day Creator's Kit. But that's still Blitz. So it's OK.

A 2 meter exhaust port just beneath the main port

Published April 27, 2014 by centaur

Camp Nanowrimo 2014-04-26a.png

I had decided to take out Aprils to do do Camp Nanowrimo, but as you can see, this was thwarted by my work to finish LIQUID FIRE, which spilled over into the beginning of the month. So since then, I've been racing uphill to try to get back on track … and as of a few days ago, I think I can at last say I'm almost there.

Camp Nanowrimo 2014-04-26b.png

What's even more amazing is that I was able to keep up this pace even when I was out for Easter … and THEN after I caught the cruds on the flight home and ended up spending two days out sick. And it wasn't even crashed out sick, either; we had some internal deadlines at work that I needed to keep moving forward, so I spent most of my sick days working from home, sitting on the front porch bundled up in a blanket with my work laptop on my lap, trying to massage a tricky chunk of data through our pipelines while I watched surreal scenes unfold around me, like one of our elderly neighbors getting taken to the hospital.

But I've grown good writing in the margins, over lunch and at dinner, whenever I can, in the corners. (I'm writing this blogpost at dinner at a nice Irish pub right now, itself squeezed in between afternoon writing group meetings and Sunday evening prep for work). So I was able to, somehow, put in my time each day massaging that data, then still spit out the chunk of words I needed, and not kill myself, or at least not make myself any sicker than I was. And by the end of the week, we had the candidate chunk of data we wanted, I had the words I wanted, and I was out a lot of cold medicine and cough drops.

The weekend was even better for me, with a great swathes of time spent Friday late night, Saturday afternoon and Sunday lunch and early evening chasing that 2 meter exhaust port just below the main port. Allmost there … now I'm just 300 words away from begin caught up. Hopefully, I'll close that final gap late tonight. Wish me luck!

Oh yes, an excerpt:

“Dakota,” Terrance said, not turning his head towards me, eyes guiding the pointer on the screen. “When you guys go back to see this,” he said, reaching his head aside to puff at his air tube to rewind the footage, “I so want to be there.”

My heart fell. I didn’t think it was safe to take a quadriplegic into a war zone. But perhaps that was just me trying to shield him; we could work the security arrangements out. I opened my mouth to warn him of the risks, but just then, he puffed, and the video played.

“There,” Terrance said, the red crosshair of his eye tracker active again. “Watch for it!” At first I saw nothing, and grimaced as my yapping mug nattered on. I was rapidly growing tired of seeing this. Then the black form moved behind me—and in the red circle Terrance had laid out with his eye tracker … I saw the tail of my Mohawk brushed aside.

“Jesus!” I said, fear clutching my heart. “It touched me!”

Oooh … buggedy.

Now let's blow this thing and go home!

-Anthony

Getting Some Traction on SPECTRAL IRON

Published April 21, 2014 by centaur

Camp Nanowrimo 2014-04-19.png

It's been hard getting back into SPECTRAL IRON - the beginning of the story is a smoothly progressing freight train, but about a third of the way through, the story went off the tracks --- not because there was anything wrong with the ideas, but because they lacked the right organization. I had to move many, many chapters around before I got the overall structure right.

Then, I found that I'd done "tricks" to speed up the narrative---scene changes, description, shifts of scale---which work great when a story is complete, but in early drafts just distract from creating what John Gardner called "the vivid continuous dream" of fiction. National Novel Writing Month material, for me, must be like that dream, continuously moving forward from point to point.

Often, if I was willing to just "dethrone my darlings" I could make progress. The old writer's advice to "kill your darlings" is something I have a love-hate relationship with, but in this case, I interpret "darlings" as a great turn of phrase that started a scene or chapter in the early draft---but which I found were getting in the way.

Usually, when I couldn't go forward from the next unwritten part of the scene, it was because the darling, while it sounded cool, glossed over too much. To fix the problem, I generally didn't have to delete the darling; I just instead demoted it from its privileged status of starting a scene, rolled my mind back to the point just before the scene break, and asked: no, seriously: what would really happen next?

Thinking very closely about how characters would react to a life-changing event, in the next hours or minutes or even seconds after it happened, is something that produced (for me) more real, honest, and compelling reactions---and, usually, created a far more solid framework for all the scenes that followed, enabling me to think about them clearly and write more quickly.

This strategy has been working well for me, and today it really has started to pay off. I'm getting back on track at last.

Oh, yes, an excerpt:

“No,” Nyissa said, delicately picking up one of the gumdrops with her chopsticks. She gingerly put it in her mouth, sliding it past her fangs with the white ivory prongs, closing her mouth—then her eyes closed in bliss. “Ahhh. You’ve cultivated a different set of skills.”

“Beauty is a skill?” I asked.

“Dakota,” Nyissa said, smiling at me mirthfully. “You are beautiful, but you’re not trying to be beautiful: you’re trying to be a butch badass biker. You wear leather, and a Mohawk, and actually ride a bike, even a fuel efficient one. Your whole outfit says: don’t mess.”

“It’s supposed to say, check out my tattoos,” I said.

“It does say that,” she said, though today my arms were covered with the sleeves of a turtleneck. “But hairstyles and transport are more serious choices than a coat. You’ve cultivated a whole set of lifestyle skills to project a butch image, down to your manly handshake.”

Now I covered my face with my hand. “Ah, I’ll never live that down.”

“I, on the other hand, am a vampire dominatrix,” Nyissa said. “I lure men and women to my bed with my beauty and the promise of a mixture of pleasure and pain. That, too, is a set of lifestyle choices—down to my quite extensive wardrobe, and the shopping that goes with it.”

"Your success at that,” I said, “has a lot to do with your physical beauty.”

“Yes, but, you don’t need a great body to look hot,” Nyissa insisted. “It’s all about your sense of style. You need to project the aura that you’re fuckable. Not dressing in a way that asks or offers sex—but how you show off your body shows you know what sex is, and how to do it.”

I was staring at her. My jaw was dropped. Nyissa slowly raised her chopsticks, taking them in her mouth with a sly smile. She cleaned them between her fangs with a lick of her tongue. Then she leaned forward and touched them beneath my chin, closing my mouth.

It occurs to me that the art of finding an excerpt which is interesting, yet reveals no plot points, is itself a skill. Hopefully I'm doing it well.

-the Centaur

From my labors, I rested

Published April 6, 2014 by centaur

So, at long last … I have sent LIQUID FIRE to Bell Bridge books.

Phew.

This has been a long time in coming; the book that became LIQUID FIRE started with some florid philosophizing about the nature of fire and life by my protagonist Dakota Frost - 270 words written way back in 2008:

Liquid Fire

A Dakota Frost, Skindancer Novel

by
Dr. Anthony G. Francis, Jr.

Started: 2008-04-19
Rough Draft: 2012-09-26
First Draft: 2012-10-23
Completed Draft: 2013-10-19
Beta Draft: 2013-11-01
Gamma Draft: 2014-04-05

Along the way, the story became something very different, an exploration of Atlanta and San Francisco and Hawaii, of learning and science and magic and mysticism. My obsessive attention to realism led to endless explorations and quite a few set pieces.

Now it's in the hands of Debra Dixon, who's already started to send me feedback. Feedback I'm going to do my best to shelve until May 1st, so I can focus the rest of April on SPECTRAL IRON, which is due early next year. Aaa!

But for now, my labors, I rest. If only for a little while.

-the Centaur

P.S. This is is my fifth completed novel, and the third Dakota Frost. Only 18 more Dakota Frosts to go in the main arc!

National Novel Writing Month 2013: MAROONED

Published November 2, 2013 by centaur

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Well, it's that time again: National Novel Writing Month! This year, I'm working on MAROONED, the continuation of my short story "Stranded" from the anthology of the same name. A brief excerpt from Part 2, "Conflicted":

Serendipity stirred. She was cramped and folded. Her hooves caught on rough ballistic tarp. Her back hurt, her rump hurt … then she heard sparks and smelled smoke. She unfolded with a start—and klonked her head on a support beam, tumbling off the cot onto the grille.

Disoriented, she stared up at a dim line of light. The tilted walkway she lay in was barely wide enough for her; the cot she’d fallen off of had definitely not been long enough for a centaur. Beside her was a half-locker with her satchel; above, the wall of a bunk jutted in.

This was insane. They had the entire run of Independence’s cargo bay. She’d sleep on the floor if she had to. She winced at a spark of pain at the join of her backs—then heard real sparks and smelled fresh smoke, and sprawled and stumbled, trying to get up before she died.

Her hand hit the hatch in panic and found it firm, and she beat at it with her palm in the dark, fumbling for the latch as she brought her nightvision and filaments online. There was another spark, and Serendipity pounded the door again. “Dashpat!”

“Sorry!” cried a voice beyond the door—one Serendipity recognized as Andromeda, Independence’s chief engineer. “Leonid’s prepping breakfast, I came to wake you, but you were snoring, and the lights, they’re out, so I … I started to work with this panel, but then I—”

Andromeda sounded completely rattled. From the other spacers, Serendipity gathered that Andromeda had been de facto master of the ship … until a couple of days ago, when the boy Sirius pulled the fuse on the life support system and forced an emergency crash landing.

The voice on the other side of the door didn’t sound like someone who’d been a captain for three years. She sounded like a little girl, a scared little girl who’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar … or maybe a refugee who’d had her whole world pulled out from under her.

Serendipity knew that feeling.

A hundred white computer filaments slid out of the shock of hair on Serendipity’s right forearm, probing the air, lighting the doorframe with a fiber optic glow, revealing the handle. Microscopic cameras fed images to her eyes: T7 LOCK HDL / FLM INDEPENDENCE.

Almost instantaneously, recognition rattled through weave of computers built into her: a Type 7 Lock Handle, from the Faster-than-Light Module Independence. Yes, that was right: the NCE class “ships” were originally modules, built to fly the arkships away from “dying” Earth—

Serendipity seized the handle, hiding the image beneath her hand. She drew a breath. As cramped as this space was, it was just a bunk. As long as she didn’t open the door, she could imagine she was at summer space camp, and not on a seven hundred fifty year old starship.

Not stranded halfway across the galaxy, utterly cut off from her people.

Serendipity opened the door.

People who read this blog may have noticed an extended hiatus. There's been a good reason for that: I had too many writing projects stacked up, and couldn't tackle them all at once. I had to start putting things on hold.

So I had to buckle down, focusing first on editing DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME (now out to the world) and finishing a draft of LIQUID FIRE (now out to betas). One of the first things to go was this blog. Another was social media: the Serendipity pages on Facebook and Google+ got short shrift; only what I had to for 24 Hour Comics Day and Dakota Frost got any attention.

I'm working to change that, but I'm going to continue to follow the same procedure. National Novel Writing Month comes first, and the first book I'm working on for Nano, MAROONED, comes first. Then life. Then blogging and social media, just enough to keep it going. After that, I'll be writing notes for a story called QUARRY, just so I don't lose them - it's a brand new idea.

The consequence is, there won't be that much blogging this month, unless Nano and life are both taken care of. But hopefully more than there has been over the past few months while DOORWAYS and LIQUID FIRE were the primary focus of my attention. Now that those are out of the way, I feel like I can breathe easier.

At least, as long as Serendipity and Leonid can keep the oxygen farm running…

Onward, to MAROONED!

-the Centaur

P.S. Yes, I did make sure I did my daily quota before blogging this:

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I can’t afford to be embarrassed

Published July 1, 2013 by centaur

I'm a published urban fantasy author with two novels on the shelves, one of which, FROST MOON, won an award. I have two more novels in the can and I've just finished coediting an anthology with twenty stories based on an idea I proposed. I've read extensively on writing theory and even have written a few articles on the subject.

So what am I doing with a copy of WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES?

Doing whatever I can to get better at what I do, that's what.

Once a friend saw the huge stack of theory-of-fiction books in my Library, one of which is "Novel Writing for Complete Morons" or some title a lot like that, and he remarked "wow, it's probably been a long time since you had to look at that one." Well, that happened to be true, but not because I read the book, then wrote some novels, and then grew beyond it.

The truth is, I'd already written one novel - and chunks of six or seven others - when I got "Novel Writing for Complete Morons." Heck, I may have already written FROST MOON at that point. But I'm a book hound, and I look at everything. I came across the book, probably at a bargain bin. And I saw a chapter I can use. So I bought it.

I actually love reading overviews. I can dive deep into a technical book, but sometimes it's only stepping back and summarizing the text - either by reading a summary, or writing one yourself - that enables you to hang the details upon a coherent whole. Even when the overview isn't interesting, sometimes the book itself has details you simply can't find elsewhere.

In the case of WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, I saw it in a bargain bin, flipped through it - and found a section in a chapter on editing scenes, a task I'd just been struggling with on my third Dakota Frost novel, LIQUID FIRE. So I bought it, and tonight read a few chunks, some of which are good for structuring scenes, others of which were helpful in overall novel structure.

Some of that information is review; other parts are completely new. It doesn't matter. It helped me move forward.

Creative expression is driven by ego, but it's stifled by snobbery. Don't get embarrassed by what you need to do to improve. If you were trying to climb out of a pit, would you hold your hand back from a rung that was candy colored and clearly intended for children? No. As long as the rung is solid, you grab it and pull yourself up.

Anything else is just hurting yourself in an effort to look good.

-the Centaur

Pictured: WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, atop THE POETICS OF THE MIND'S EYE by Christopher Collins, a study of visual imagination in literature and cognitive science. See how hard it is to be honest with yourself and do what needs doing? Here I had to bring along a technical book I'm reading and use it to prop up the For Dummies book in an absurd attempt at credentialing.

No, I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen: I may have happened to have picked up THE POETICS OF THE MIND'S EYE at about the same time as WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, and I may have had it in my reading pile because I was evaluating whether to recommend it to a friend who works in the field of visual imagination, but the one has little to do with the other.

I, a published author, picked up WRITING FICTION FOR DUMMIES, and it had useful information for a problem I was trying to solve. Don't be embarrassed about things like that: do whatever you have to to help yourself get better. End of list.

My Labors Are Not Ended

Published June 26, 2013 by centaur

lenora at rest in the library

But I am going to take a rest for a bit.

Above you see a shot of my cat Lenora resting in front of the "To Read Science Fiction" section of my Library, the enormous book collection I've been accumulating over the last quarter century. I have books older than that, of course, but they're stored in my mother's house in my hometown. It's only over the last 25 years or so have I been accumulating my own personal library.

But why am I, if not resting, at least thinking about it? I finished organizing the books in my Library.

lenora at rest in the library 2

I have an enormous amount of papers, bills, bric a brac and other memorabilia still to organize, file, trash or donate, but the Library itself is organized, at last. It's even possible to use it.

How organized? Well...

Religion, politics, economics, the environment, women's studies, Ayn Rand, read books, Lovecraft, centaur books, read urban fantasy, read science fiction, Atlanta, read comics, to-read comics, to-read science fiction magazines, comic reference books, drawing reference books, steampunk, urban fantasy, miscellaneous writing projects, Dakota Frost, books to donate, science fiction to-reads: Asimov, Clarke, Banks, Cherryh, miscellaneous, other fiction to-reads, non-fiction to-reads, general art books, genre art books, BDSM and fetish magazines and art books, fetish and sexuality theory and culture, military, war, law, space travel, astronomy, popular science, physics of time travel, Einstein, quantum mechanics, Feynman, more physics, mathematics, philosophy, martial arts, health, nutrition, home care, ancient computer manuals, more recent computer manuals, popular computer books, the practice of computer programming, programming language theory, ancient computer languages, Web languages, Perl, Java, C and C++, Lisp, APL, the Art of Computer Programming, popular cognitive science, Schankian cognitive science, animal cognition, animal biology, consciousness, dreaming, sleep, emotion, personality, cognitive science theory, brain theory, brain philosophy, evolution, human evolution, cognitive evolution, brain cognition, memory, "Readings in …" various AI and cogsci disciplines, oversized AI and science books, conference proceedings, technical reports, game AI, game development, robotics, imagery, vision, information retrieval, natural language processing, linguistics, popular AI, theory of AI, programming AI, AI textbooks, AI notes from recent projects, notes from college from undergraduate through my thesis, more Dakota Frost, GURPS, other roleplaying games, Magic the Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, more Dakota Frost, recent projects, literary theory of Asimov and Clarke, literary theory of science fiction, science fiction shows and TV, writing science fiction, mythology, travel, writing science, writing reference, writers on writing, writing markets, poetry, improv, voice acting, film, writing film, history of literature, representative examples, oversized reference, history, anthropology, dictionaries, thesauri, topical dictionaries, language dictionaries, language learning, Japanese, culture of Japan, recent project papers, comic archives, older project papers, tubs containing things to file … and the single volume version of the Oxford English Dictionary, complete with magnifying glass.

lenora at rest in the library 2

I deliberately left out the details of many categories and outright omitted a few others not stored in the library proper, like my cookbooks, my display shelves of Arkham House editions, Harry Potter and other hardbacks, my "favorite" nonfiction books, some spot reading materials, a stash of transhumanist science fiction, all the technical books I keep in the shelf next to me at work … and, of course, my wife and I's enormous collection of audiobooks.

What's really interesting about all that to me is there are far more categories out there in the world not in my Library than there are in my Library. Try it sometime - go into a bookstore or library, or peruse the list of categories in the Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal System Classifications. There's far more things to think about than even I, a borderline hoarder with a generous income and enormous knowledge of bookstores, have been able to accumulate in a quarter century.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

-the Centaur

The Science of Airships, Redux

Published May 24, 2013 by centaur

Once again, I will be giving a talk on The Science of Airships at Clockwork Alchemy this year, this time at 11AM on Monday. I had to suffer doing all the airship research for THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, so you should too! Seriously, I hope the panel is fun and informative and it was received well at previous presentations. From the online description:

Steampunk isn't just brown, boots and buttons: our adventurers need glorious flying machines! This panel will unpack the science of lift, the innovations of Count Zeppelin, how airships went down in flames, and how we might still have cruise liners of the air if things had gone a bit differently. Anthony Francis is a science fiction author best known for his Dakota Frost urban fantasy series, beginning with the award winning FROST MOON. His forays into Steampunk include two stories and the forthcoming novel THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE.

Yes, yes, I know THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE is long in forthcoming, but at least it's closer now. I'll also be appearing on two panels, "Facts with Your Fiction" moderated by Sharon Cathcartat 5pm on Saturday and "Multi-cultural Influences in Steampunk" moderated by Madeline Holly at 5pm on Sunday. With that, BayCon and Fanime, looks to be a busy weekend.

-the Centaur

Blogging is like a job. One I’m bad at.

Published February 17, 2013 by centaur

One of the things I've always felt about myself is that I'm slow. I have ideas for fiction, but before I ever develop them, I see them brought to completion by someone else. When I was a child, I had a wonderful story involving spacecraft made to look like sailing ships, only to turn on my television to find that it had been done in Doctor Who.

Next I read Drexler's Engines of Creation shortly after it came out and planned a series of nanotech stories, before I'd ever read another science fiction author dealing with the theme. I was in college, still trying to finish my first novel, which I'd updated to include nanotechnology, when Michael Flynn published The Nanotech Chronicles.

Now in the blogoverse, things have gotten worse.

It's bad enough that my evil twin Warren Ellis, a man only one year older than me, has propelled himself to the pinnacle of the writing profession using only whisky and a cane while still blogging more than anyone could believe. Warren Ellis has his own ideas and I don't feel like we're competing in the same headspace.

No, my it's my nemesis John Scalzi, who has not only beaten me to the punch on the serialized novel The Human Division - I'm pretty sure my own designed-for-serialization novel THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE predates it, but my novel is still in beta draft while his is like, you know, released to accolades and stuff - but also somehow seems to have plugged into my brain by beating my blog to the punch on his Hobbit at 48 Frames Per Second impressions and his attempts to tame a feral cat - I mean, come on! Everyone saw The Hobbit but even if Scalzi has a direct pipeline to my brain, how does one arrange to have a feral cat fortuitously run by one's door so one can tame it right when someone else does? Is there a service for such things? Synchronicity Unlimited?

Now dark mental wizard Caitlin Kiernan has beaten me to the punch by blogging about the correct pronunciation of kudzu.

Sigh.

Alright, thanks, Caitlin, for breaking the ice on one of my pet peeves. For the record: if you are recording an audiobook and have a Southern character speaking or thinking, they will pronounce the Borg-like pest vine kudzu "CUD-zoo." A character who lives in another part of the country can call it "kood-zoo" all they want, but in my 38 years in The South I never heard it pronounced that, nor, after nine months of research, have I been able to find anyone from The South who calls it anything other than "CUD-zoo," nor have any of those people ever heard anyone from anywhere call it anything other than "CUD-zoo". (And Wikipedia backs me - it claims the pronunciation is /ˈkʊdzuː/, with the first u pronounced as the u in full and the second pronounced as the oo in food).

It wasn't so hard to say that, was it? Why didn't I say that earlier, nine months ago, when I first heard it in an audiobook (I think in The Magnolia League, but it might have been Fallen)? I know I've been busy, but how hard was it? But, according to the timestamp on the image I downloaded of Loki at the start of this blogpost, I've been at this "little" blogpost for about an hour.

What I'm saying is, blogging is like a job. You find things, reflect on them, and post about them; it takes time to do it right. But I already work two jobs: I've got a slightly-more-than-full-time job at The Search Engine That Starts With A G, and I'm also a slightly-less-than-full-time writer. So this, my third job, has to come behind hanging out with my wife, friends and cats. I'm taking time out from editing an anthology to write this, and that's taking out time from Dakota Frost #3 and THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE.

So: yes, I know. Lots to say, lots to do. Gun control. The Hobbit. Meteors falling from the sky and a drill making its way to a creepy buried lake in Antarctica. I'm working on it, I'm working on it - but two editors have claim on my writing first, and the provider of the paycheck that pays for this laptop has first claim on my time before that.

So if the freshness date on these blogposts is not always the greatest, well, sorry, but I'm typing as fast as I can.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Loki, our non-feral outdoor cat, who has grown very fat and but not very sassy given lots of love and can food.

Viiiictory Seven Times

Published November 29, 2012 by centaur

For the seventh time, I've won the National Novel Writing Month "contest", completing 50,000 words of a new novel in just 30 days. Actually, it took me just 29 days. Woohoo!

This year's entry, SPECTRAL IRON, is the fourth book in the Dakota Frost series, my urban fantasy series featuring the best magical tattooist in the Southeast (and she's not afraid to tell you that herself). SPECTRAL IRON was a bit of a detour from the work I was doing to edit LIQUID FIRE, the third entry in the series, but I'm glad I did: SPECTRAL IRON taught me a lot about what makes a book coherent and I can use that to edit LIQUID FIRE.

So what is SPECTRAL IRON about? Originally, I was thinking the story was about a villain that murders ghosts, but now it's looking like the villain is a ghost who's a murderer. Maybe. There are some very interesting plot complications developing. Let me see if I can pull out an excerpt that doesn't give much away. Well, maybe it spoils a minor surprise, but it doesn't give away the plot. This is the kind of thing they'd put in a movie trailer. Regardless ... SPOILERS:

Now, all that was left was to walk down a hundred more yards of train tracks in the dark.

The dolly had left us, but the spotlight had not. The mobile klieg operator wheeled it forward, slowly, tracking me, Ron and Sunny as we walked down the pathetic, waterlogged track. The further we went, the more layers of mystery were stripped off, one by one, by the light.

By the end, we no longer stood in a chasm of night. We merely stood in a dilapidated warehouse loading bay, a long, low brick-walled chamber, weathered with graffiti, with chained-up wooden doors atop its loading dock and beer bottles in the puddles between its train tracks.

“Nothing here,” the Lady Nyissa said. “Nothing obvious, at any rate.”

I stopped before the back wall of the loading dock. It stretched up before us, a mottled wall of brick thirty feet wide and fifty feet high, with a notch cut out of its bottom right by the platform and another cut out the top by a door. Rusted zig-zag metal stairs led up to it.

“Well,” I said, putting my foot on the train-brake at the end of the tracks, staring down at the pathetic mud puddle rippling before us between the end of the tracks and the wall. “It looks like The Exposers have found another Al Capone’s vault.”

Oh, me and my dumb mouth.

From the water erupted a foul spray of black—topped by a bone white mask.

So, there's a few thousand more words of brain dump to go, and then it's back to editing LIQUID FIRE, revising THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, and working on the DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME anthology, oh, and revising my own story for the anthology, "The Doorway to Extra Time" ... aaaa! But at least I have this year's Nano victory to console me:

Regardless, now that Nanowrimo and 24 Hour Comics Day and the Google Holiday Toy Collection are all behind me, I'm looking forward to getting back to my other projects, including all my writing, the Dakota Frost blog, and, heck, I dunno, my wife, friends and cats. Onward and upwards!

-the Centaur

Me and my dumb mouth

Published November 24, 2012 by centaur

Axually, it's Dakota's dumb mouth at issue here, and while I'd love to include an extract ... ssh, SPOLIERS! But the point being, the day after Thanksgiving, I'm back on track for National Novel Writing Month. And this includes an evening hanging out with my friends at the wonderful Nola restaurant I'm so fond of. No pictures of that (phone battery gave out) but I do have a followup picture from my solo excursion to Cocola Cafe in Santana Row, where I finished out today's Nano:

I've done Nano enough times that I probably could have skipped today and even tomorrow if I wanted, just to hang out with my friends who are in town (staying at another friend's house). But this "vacation" isn't really a vacation for me: it's a writecation. Writing really is like a second job now: if I want to be a writer, certain things have to get done. In this case, it's Nano, and sending off acceptances and rejections for DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME:

You'll note a little asymmetry there: my coeditor, who's done this before, is way ahead of me contacting people about their stories. And those are just the acceptances. Argh. And then I've got to respond to Trish's comments on my own story, which, while I was proud of it before, now looks like it will need a lot of work. Sigh. This is why I like working with editors, I tell myself, they make my stories better. Sob. At least Nano is on track:

Of course, the second half of the story is a complete salsa, and I don't know where it's going, but there's a building, and it's on fire, and it's a spectral fire, that only starts once a year, and there's William Blake's spirit guide riding a tiger, and oh yeah Cinnamon wears a Santa hat, then threatens to punch him in the gut if she meets him in a dark alley. So yeah, I'm having fun, even if I briefly hit a little plateau there while recuperating from all that turkey.

Now, more mountain to climb! Onward!

-the Centaur

God’s Marines Wield Strange Weapons

Published November 18, 2012 by centaur

At last, back on track for National Novel Writer's Month. I like the graph: I like seeing how the week of a software release has taken a neat chunk out of my progress, and how a few days on vacation gets things back on track again. This reminds me to continue taking of the week of Thanksgiving every year if I want to get new novels done.

The title comes from a scene I've just written, in which Dakota Frost is baited into a battle with a wand-wielding priest. Soon Dakota realizes they were set up --- and figures out how to de-escalate:

The priest cried out, striking me with the back of his free hand.

I winced … then turned the other cheek.

The priest stared, drawing back his hand again. I reached up and put my thumbs through the straps of my backpack. Then I turned my head even further, exposing the cheek, eyes glaring at him sidelong in silent accusation. The priest frowned, then lowered his hand.

“Dakota Frost,” I said, extending mine. “Best magical tattooist in the Southeast.”

The priest stared at my hand dumbly, then realized he had a free one.

“Father Aidan Cosgrave, SJ.”

“A Jesuit,” I said. “Interesting to find a Jesuit wielding a wand.”

“God’s Marines,” Cosgrave said, “often find themselves wielding strange weapons.”

I'm over the halfway point of Nano now, with 6 or so free days on vacation to try to really get a head. Onward!

-the Centaur

National Novel Writing Month – Spectral Iron

Published November 3, 2012 by centaur

"Everyone's favorite skeptical witch is back for her fourth foray in SPECTRAL IRON!"

Sheesh. I do find it hard to write marketing copy. I just had to stop, right there.

SO ANYWAY, National Novel Writing Month, 2012. My one, two, three, four, five, six ... seventh, SEVENTH time writing 50,000 words of a new novel in the month of November. It's quite the challenge, but it's the second best thing I've ever done for my writing other than join the Write to the End group - more writing comes out of Nano than (almost) anything else.

How much writing, you ask? (Or maybe you don't, but hey, it's my blog post). Nano itself six times would be only three hundred thousand words, but it was the seed for seven hundred thousand words of text and four completed novels. The Nano's I've done so far were:

DELIVERANCE - 2002 - 150K words - IN PROGRESS
Seven hundred years after the Fall of Humanity, a rag-tag crew of a human spacecraft at the Frontier of space encounters a distress call from a ship owned by the aliens that took the Earth - and encounters one of the humans they left behind, who doesn't seem to think Humanity fell after all ... even though she barely looks human.
Didn't finish this one, even though I eventually got 150,000 words into it. Hope to get back to it someday. My story "Stranded" in the anthology of the same name is set in the same universe, with a YA version of the same setup - the protagonist of "Stranded" is actually the granddaughter of one of the protagonists of DELIVERANCE.
FROST MOON - 2007 - 100K words - DONE
Dakota Frost, a magical tattoo artist who can bring her tattoos to life, is asked by the police to track a serial killer preying on the magically tattooed around the time of the full moon - and then she encounters a werewolf who wants a tattoo done before the full moon to control his impulses. Has she found the killer ... or the next victim?
Finished this one in 2009, published in 2010.
BLOOD ROCK - 2008 - 150K words - DONE
Magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost returns, now fighting a plague of killer graffiti that is attacking vampires, werewolves and humans alike. As Dakota struggles with this new plague, she finds that fighting it threatens her relationship with her friends, custody over her new daughter---and ultimately, her life.
Finished this one in 2010, published in 2011.
LIQUID FIRE - 2009 - 120K words - DONE
Magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost returns, now struggling to keep her head above water in a magical world which threatens to consume her. A chance meeting on a plane leads her to befriend the beautiful fireweaver Jewel Graceling - but as Jewel increasingly comes under attack, can even Dakota save her?
Finished this one in 2012, hope it to come out in 2013.
JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE - 2010 - 100K words - DONE
There's no better defender of the Liberated Territories of Victoriana than Jeremiah Willstone, and she'll tell you that herself! But when her rich and powerful uncle calls down a monster from another world and escapes with it in a time machine, is even the stoutest defender of Liberation up to the challenge?
Finished this one in 2012, hope it to come out in 2013.
HEX CODE - 2011 - 55K words - IN PROGRESS
Cinnamon Frost is a street cat turned domestic - where by cat, we mean weretiger, and by domestic, we mean adopted. But can someone who grew up running the streets really learn to settle down in class? Even if they have her favorite thing in the world, math, there's always English class - and if that's not enough, someone may be trying to kill her.
Still working on this one. Hope to finish it in 2013, have it come out in 2014.

Now it's on to SPECTRAL IRON, book 4 in the Dakota Frost series. Pictured above are some of the books I'm reading to "feed my head" for the plot of the book, which involves magical tattoos, piercing, the fae, ghosts, three kinds of zombies, television, and the appropriate relationship of science to skepticism. From the site, here's my blurb:

Dakota Frost is the best magical tattooist in the Southeast - but she's not in the South anymore. Her new role on the Magical Security Council has taken her to the underbelly of San Francisco, and she's got a camera crew dogging her every step as she's trying to map the magical Edgeworld. But when she runs foul of the fae, and is forced to do them a favor, even one of the world's most skilled skindancer may be in trouble.

Because if you don't know how to kill a ghost, how can you track down his murderer?

You need to write 1666 words a day to succeed at Nano, and so far, so good. Halfway through my day, and more than halfway through today's progress. I should easily catch up to where I should be (missed ~300 words yesterday because me and my wife decided to take a long walk and then crash after that, rather than me getting my late night writing run in).

But most of the day is ahead of me. Alright, enough procrastinating. Back to work!

-the Centaur

Marketing yourself

Published August 11, 2012 by centaur

Recently a colleague asked me how I marketed my books since I "seem to be quite fabulous at it!" Well, *cough* I don't know about "fabulous," especially compared to authors like Diane Duane, Warren Ellis, Scott Westerfeld, and especially John Scalzi, all of whom kick my ass in that department. But I do have some ideas, and they do seem to work. So here we go.

First off, I'd love to say that promoting yourself all comes down to being authentic, but that's not true. We all probably know people who are really authentic who aren't popular - either because their true love is obscure, or because they're abrasive, or because, in the end, they're not really interested in being popular.

So what I really mean by being authentic is not promoting yourself for the point of promoting yourself. Little is more irritating than someone producing an enormous amount of hot air trying to market nothing more than thin air. Ideally, you should do good work, produce it regularly, and then, and only then, try to help people find it.

But even helping people find it can backfire. Most forums, whether online or in person, aren't meant for selling products or services - so marketing language is simply unwanted. So my philosophy for promoting myself is to honestly contribute to the conversation - to do good work online, to produce it regularly, and then, and only then, to help people find my work.

So how do you do that? Well, by blogging and tweeting and Facebooking and plussing, of course. My hope is that I contribute enough to the conversation to make people intrinsically interested in what I say. Once that happens, the work I'm trying to sell to people are my books. Here are the things I do to promote them, as told to my colleague, with light editing:

Have a website and keep it updated - My colleague did this already, so good for her! From a book marketing perspective, my own websites are nowhere near as updated as they should be (as of early August 2012) because I have too much writing to do and I'm using Facebook more, but you can't use Facebook for everything.
Have an individual page for each book - The page for each book should link to everyplace your book is available (again, I've let myself down here, that's out of date on my own Dakota Frost site! Argh!). This is important not just so people can find out what you're doing, but because it also enables ...
Take out a Google ad for each book - The Google ad needs to point to something and you can't point to Amazon or Audible because you don't own those sites. So you have to have a landing page for each book. This has a cost - depending on how much you want to do over the course of the year you could spend a thousand dollars plus on advertising. But it lands people on pages about your book, and then from there to buying it.
Consider blogging - Not just a web site, but an active blog listing the things that you're doing and involved in. More permanent than the other social media that I list below, and something that can refer to as a "master" page for media. My Library of Dresan site is my master site, where hopefully anyone who really wants to know more about what I'm doing can find anything they need to know.
Have a Facebook page for yourself - I actually have one for each series, http://facebook.com/dakotafrost, http://facebook.com/jeremiahwillstone, http://facebook.com/serendipitythecentaur - and update this as often as you can stand without becoming repetitive. Consider setting up your blog so it crossposts to Facebook, but be willing to engage Facebook conversations too.
Take out a Facebook ad for your page - Not as effective as a Google ad, but it slow and steady builds your fanbase. I've found that this builds your fanbase more than anything else you can do, and that Facebook fans are more engaged than anyone else I find in any other medium.
Treat your fans right - Don't just post what opportunities your fans have to buy your stuff, but engage them in the conversation and care about what they say. Your fan count can go down, not just up. People will desert you if you are an irritating toad or only talk to market or even if you just don't ever respond (or produce).
Get on other social networking services - as many as you can stand and still do each one justice. Twitter is a service that doesn't completely overlap Facebook and you can plug it into Facebook or WordPress on your blog. Google+ is another service that seems to have less traction but I've seen a LOT of content on there so it's coming. Consider Pinterest as it seems to have a lot of clickthrough to web sites.
Do everything your publisher asks you to do - My publisher and her team work hard to get my name out there and I accept as many of these appearances as I can. This may not apply to you and what you want to market, but if you have something to market, getting a publicist of your own might not be a bad idea (if you haven't already).
Participate in online and offline communities - science fiction conventions, radio shows, writer's conferences, be a guest at a con, go on a blogtour, give a talk, etc., etc. ... it all adds up. I got published because I took my laptop into the corner of Dragon*Con writer's track year after year, writing away ... and got noticed.

The big thing that you should be trying to do with all the above is:

Create an online presence which is genuine and has enough content for someone who's interested in you to find out more about you, within safety and reason in this crazy Internet stalker age
Use this platform to show people what you have to offer - sending them, via ads and posts and links to pages you control describing the books you've written or the comics you've done or ...
Make it easy for people to then buy what you have to offer - routing people from the pages you control to the places where people can actually buy the books, like Amazon or Etsy or Ebay or Audible or ...
Then produce more great stuff on a regular basis so people are always interested! This is actually more important than the first three. If you really do produce great work all the time, it will serve as its own publicity.

Basically, that's it. I'd love to do more than that (I axually NEED to do more than that because actually part of my writer/developer schtick is that I'm the writer-designer-coder-maintainer of my own websites) but I work for a living and write in all the rest of my free time and still have a wife, friends and cats, so I can only do what I have time to do, and that's it.
Then I go collapse into blissful unconsciousness.

There are some blogs out there which talk about marketing. Bob Mayer talks about it from an indie publishing perspective. My buddy Andy Fossett has written some articles on it from time to time and apparently had some success. Seth Godin has some interesting stuff to say about it. But in the end I just feed my head with those articles. I don't really have a marketing plan.

I do know I need to market myself, and I do by creating a number of sites online where people can read what I write, by working hard to create interesting content on those, and then by hoping people get lost in the content I've produced. That's why I wrote this article - because my colleague found the email that spawned it interesting, so I hope you will too.

That's not enough, of course. There are billions of pages on the web. I make mine visible by advertising them. I'm fortunate that I can afford to do that, but I'm also taking a very long view towards my career - I advertised FROST MOON a year or so before it came out, and it paid off. But beyond a bare minimum of advertising, I don't push it. I sit back and hope people like what I have.

Really, I don't have time to do more - I have to write, so I've produced something people have a chance to like.

Hope this helps!

-the Centaur

STRANDED is on Amazon!

Published July 26, 2012 by centaur

STRANDED, the new science fiction anthology featuring stories by Anne Bishop, James Alan Gardner, and myself, is now available for preorder on Amazon! From the back cover:

Three Great Authors - Three Great Science Fiction Stories

A Strand In The Web

New York Times Bestselling Fantasy Author Anne Bishop makes her U.S. debut in Science Fiction with this engaging futuristic novella. The Restorers travel the universe fulfilling a purpose handed down through the generations. They live and die aboard city-ships, never knowing the worlds they create and save. What begins as a disastrous training exercise in creating and balancing ecosystems becomes an unexpected fight for survival. The only hope may be the secret project of an untried creation team.

A Host Of Leeches

Award winning author James Alan Gardner pens a wonderfully imaginative tale, in which a young woman wakes to find herself the sole human on an orbiting, mechanical moon. To find a way home, she must navigate the dangerous politics of war between opposing robot leaders.

Stranded

Popular urban fantasy writer Anthony Francis (Dakota Frost, Skindancer series) explores the clash of ethics and survival when a young, genetically engineered centauress from the super-advanced Alliance lays claim to a rare, strategic garden planet, only to find herself captured by a band of rag-tag Frontier refugees who’ve crashed their vintage ship on her unexpectedly hostile world.

An excerpt of the story:

Serendipity crested a ridge overlooking the wreck—and froze, bewitched.

Climbing from the ship were the most beautiful people she’d ever seen.

They wore armored spacesuits, patched in a thousand places, and painted to look like animals. Helmets folded back revealed inner pressure suits decorated too: one girl in a leopard outersuit had a snakeskin helm, adorned with feathers, over skin painted a pale blue.

Serendipity gasped. These were adventurers. The gravity was clearly punishing their slender frames, but they kept going, crawling out of the smoking ship from every hatch, rappelling down on spacelines, tools jangling on their belts when their boots touched the broken earth. Not one of them looked a day over sixteen.

That should have meant nothing—her grandmother didn’t look a day over sixteen—but as fractured shale dislodged by her slogs crackled down the slope, they turned and stared at her with youthful shock. They had none of the smug poise of ancient souls newly young.

What Serendipity saw instead, and felt keenly, was fear. Her gut churned.

The boys were armed with projectile automatics.

Serendipity now has her own Facebook page over at http://www.facebook.com/serendipitythecentaur . Please check it out!

Prevail, Victoriana!

Published April 29, 2012 by centaur

Today I finished the first hundred pages to the screenplay to JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, officially winning Script Frenzy 2012! Prevail, Victoriana!

I'm super happy about this, of course, but this has been a very interesting experience. Even though I've left out much of the story and many of the nuances, the script is coming in massively long - 100 pages translating to about 150 of a 450 page book, probably resulting in a 300 page script with a four-hour running time.

I'm learning new techniques to cut things out - breaking things into self-contained scenes which could be deleted wholesale, streamlining conversations, recasting thought as action that illustrates the same point. I probably could easily cut this script down from 100 pages to 70 or even 50 ... but then I wouldn't have succeeded at Script Frenzy.

I believe that you can't really tell what to cut out until you FINISH YOUR WORK (a philosophy shared by many in my writing group). Writing is not editing, and often you can't tell what a story really needs until you finish it. (If you're an expert author and have passed this stage in your development, bully for you; above, I'm talking to the not-finishers). For example, can this scene be cut? It might disappear, it might become one offhand line ... or it could be expanded to a fullblown argument, if we need to highlight the tension between our heroes:

Jeremiah leans back, her eyes narrowing at her companions.

JEREMIAH

Let me guess. He lied.

GEORGIANA

(nods)

I do love dear Albert, Jeremiah, but the reason I stole your mark was to make a personal appeal.

PATRICK

Einstein was about to rediscover the weapon that ended the Civil War. In the Victoriana, the Peerage suppressed that knowledge.

GEORGIANA

The point of the mission was not to steal Austrian secrets, but to convince him to keep them secret.

Jeremiah scowls, looking at the both of them.

JEREMIAH

And you kept this from me.

GEORGIANA

The mission was ... Need to know.

JEREMIAH

What kind of mad dictator came up with that rule?

(points at Patrick)

And why did he get---

PATRICK

To confirm what he was up to. The Lady Georgiana had to train me to operate the Crookes counter.

Jeremiah is glaring daggers at the two of them...

At my stage in scriptwriting, it's going to be far easier to tell what to leave out after I've put it all in. So, even though I'm going to shift gears back to Dakota Frost #3, LIQUID FIRE and the Science of Airships panel at Clockwork Alchemy, my plan is to finish THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE script in its entirety. Then I'm going to cut it mercilessly until it hits a 2 hour (ish) running time. Then I'm going to hold a reading where a group of friends will read the script aloud so I can see how it sounds (a trick I learned from my friend the playwright Jim Davies). And then I'm going to cut it again.

And then Script Frenzy will probably roll around again, as I'll have to squeeze all the above in around regular work and writing. But if I keep at it, after a few years of writing scripts I'll probably have something pretty tight, something that might actually be salable. Not that I won't try to sell THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, but I won't let failure to sell the first script I've written in twenty years stop me.

I'm in this for the duration.

Prevail, Victoriana!

-the Centaur

UPDATE: I forgot to mention SCRIVENER. Scrivener, Scrivener, Scrivener: without you I wouldn't have finished THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE on time. I don't know if you'll replace Microsoft Word -- I've been using THAT for almost a quarter century --- but you made the process of producing a script effortless. Thank you.