OryCon 2019

2019 Endeavour Award Finalist badge

OryCon is coming up this weekend in Portland, OR at the Jantzen Beach Red Lion Hotel. I will be there as a panelist as well as an Endeavour Award finalist for Moonshine.

If you want to catch the panel I’m on, it will be Exploring Publishing Options on November 10th at 11:15 AM. The Endeavour Award Ceremony will be on Friday, November 8th at 6:45 PM.

I’m very excited to have Moonshine selected as a finalist for the Endeavour Award. I’ve been attending OryCon for the past two years now, and as one of the smaller conventions I’ve been to, I really enjoy it’s laid-back atmosphere and homey feel. I’m generally a very low-energy person and highly prone to sensory overload, so even though I like conventions, most of them take a lot out of me, but OryCon has proven to be the sort of the convention that’s a comfortable speed for me. Having my work recognized there is a great feeling that really makes me feel a part of the Pacific Northwest SFF community.

Check my events page for all the panel and award ceremony details, or visit the OryCon site for the full convention schedule.

WorldCon 2019 Schedule

Dublin WorldCon just sent along my finalized panel schedule, so if you have a chance to attend WorldCon this year, you can find me at the following panels:

Making the asexual textual

Format: Panel15 Aug 2019, Thursday 21:00 – 21:50, Wicklow Hall-1 (CCD)

In the past, many asexual and/or aromantic characters in science fiction and fantasy stories have not been overtly identified this way. Should writers be more explicit in stating asexual and aromantic characters’ identity? How do asexuality and aromanticness shape and change the way characters and their relationships with others are perceived or written?

Wendy Metcalfe, Darcie Little Badger (M), Dr Edmund Schluessel (International School of Helsinki), Jasmine Gower

Gender and the writer

Format: Panel17 Aug 2019, Saturday 17:00 – 17:50, Wicklow Room-1 (CCD)

Gender defines and redefines how we think about ourselves, each other, and our characters. Our panel delves into the topic of gender, looking past the basics of diversity to examine the issues important to trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming creators and readers.

Dr. J.S. Fields Ph.D., Vanessa Rose Phin (Strange Horizons), Dr Nick Hubble (Brunel University London) (M), Jasmine Gower, BE Allatt

 

You’ll also be able to find me at the Angry Robot table signing books at the following dates/times:

  • Friday, August 16 at 1:00-1:30 PM
  • Sunday, August 18 at 1:00-1:30 PM

I did get bookplates, so if you’ be at WorldCon and already have a copy of Moonshine that you want a signature for but don’t want to bring it to the convention, I’ve got you covered. I’ll also have some bookmarks up for grabs 🙂

Moonshine’s 1st Birthday!

Today, Moonshine celebrates the 1st anniversary of its US release!

One year ago today, my little book about bisexual flapper wizards living in a volcanic hellscape full of gang violence, gentrification, and sexy fae monsters had its Stateside debut.

Haven’t picked it up yet? Let me make it easy, since I’m so very helpful:

Ebook : Angry Robot | Amazon | Kobo | B&N 
Paperback : 
Powell’s | Amazon | B&N
Accessible formats: Large Print, Braille & Synthesized Audio

(You can also try checking your local library! I know quite a few have bought copies or have the ebook available.)

If I can get raw for a second, my debut year was, um, hard. Turns out full-time grad school and part-time day job/full-time day job and part-time grad school really eat up a lot of the hours that a debut author needs to work on editing and book promotion and writing more books. There were also a couple of walls hit that didn’t have anything to do with my non-writing life, and rolling with those punches has been a challenge. (You wouldn’t think that an author would forget what rejection feels like from the querying process, and yet here I am like, “Who could have predicted how disappointing this would be?”) And of course there’s forces outside of my life entirely that have impacted my debut experience for the worse–remember when a violent fascist rally in Seattle took place on the same day and a block away from my first author reading ever? Because I do.

I’ll remember that one into my grave.

But! Overall it’s been a delight to have Moonshine out in the world (and to not have to worry about editing it anymore, whew!), and I’ve been so glad to see people connecting with it, even all across the globe. (There are people buying it in Iceland, what!) People have expressed so much passion for Soot City and Daisy and Vicks and even Andre Swarz, and it’s just been so cool. Maybe that sounds a weak descriptor of how it feels to know that my story is resonating with people, but it’s true. And besides, what do you want from me? Powerful, impactful descriptions? Like I’m some kind of writer or something?

As for what’s next, there’s a lot up in the air right now, so it’s hard to say. My main focus is graduating, which is coming up in June, so hopefully once that gets cleared out of the way I’ll have more concrete writing updates. I can say that at the moment that there is no more Moonshine content on the horizon. If that changes, trust me, I will be shouting about it as soon as I can, but for now, I’m working on a few new projects–my current draft, which is still in its infant stages so much so that I don’t even have a working title yet, and good ol’ Hellslayer (if you’ve been following my writing pre-Moonshine, you might recognize the name), which is still… what it is. I don’t even know what to say about Hellslayer anymore. I’m hoping as I hammer things out with my new book, I’ll have more content-wise to chat about here, but it’ll mostly be word count updates for a while.

But, this post is about Moonshine, and there’s plenty of Moonshine content to keep you, uh… content. Sorry, it just occurred to me that “content” (n.) and “content” (adj.) are spelled the same. Distracting. Anyway, enjoy all these links for Moonshine miscellanea:

Another brief update on the progress of things

I’ve emerged from my Kingdom Hearts III seclusion and all I have to say is: Woody the toy cowboy didn’t have to throw down as hard as he did.

I basically took the week off from writing, too, but my draft is just over 20K right now, which is a solid start. I’m feeling good about how things are going so far, and now that I’m not desperately chasing that bizarre Kingdom Hearts plot revelation bliss, I can focus back on my work. Unfortunately, I’m still trying to figure out how to restore everything from my website breaking, and while all the basics are back online, I’d really rather not lose all of my old blog posts if I can save them, but that will eat up some of my precious spare time if I try to untangle that knot.

So I think instead I’ll make an effort to update here more and rebuild my blog backlog (my backblog, if you will) from scratch. I have a notion for repackaging some of the blog content I wanted to save as part of Moonshine’s 1st birthday celebration.

Oh, and Moonshine’s 1st birthday of the US release is coming up tomorrow! So expect another update here for that.