on Reading and Writing and All the Speculation In Between
Today we have a treat from another one of my Triberr-mates: Carmen DeSousa is celebrating the release of her latest work with a give-away. Given my own love of magical realism (another variant of the crypto-history I like to write), I couldn’t not spread the love. Without further ado, then: In every myth there is…
Tonight, despite the blizzard outside, the cockles of my heart are blazing: I Haz Cover Art! One thing I love about indie publishing: It allows me control of imagery and branding for my books. And Gayla is awesome to collaborate with in the process of refining graphic ideas and how they might play in our…
This was the first year I had heard about the A to Z blog challenge–and I heard about it serendipitously when I was pondering publicity options for my release of Dust to Blood. So it served a two-fold purpose: To see whether I could blog that frequently, and to gather some of my notes and…
OK. I know I’m cheating a little, taking out the “T” you normally see at the beginning of the Anglicized version of this word, but I really struggled with finding a word related to Dust to Blood that began with Z for this final installment of the A to Z blogging challenge. After all, this…
My penultimate A to Z blog challenge post. What a month! Doing 26 posts in a month seems like a mini NaNoWriMo–but I’m pleased with the background bits I’ve been able to share about Dust to Blood. So today’s post reverts to language study, and another one of the very early phrases any beginning student…
I won’t claim I’m not cheating a little with today’s X entry for the A to Z blog challenge, but the Cyrillic spelling and pronunciation for the word of the day could easily be represented by an X (update: Here it is in Cyrillic, so you know I’m not lying: Хорошо). So I’m running with…
I struggled again, coming up with my 23rd entry in the A to Z blog challenge. There wasn’t anything obvious in Dust to Blood that would work for a W entry–until I took a step back with the help of my husband. He was right to point out that the backdrop for this story is…
I’m grateful to the A to Z blog challenge for showing me the whole daily blogging thing isn’t as big of a grind as I had worried it might be–so long as you have a useful framework and a way to build your posts ahead of time for a more guaranteed timely release. The timing…
I’m getting to the tail-end of the A to Z blogging challenge with this entry for U. This was another easy one: the final third of Dust to Blood takes place in Central Russia up and down the spine of the Ural mountains. When we lived in Moscow, I remember some colleague of my dad’s…
For my twentieth entry in the A to Z blog challenge, I’m returning to a Russian word: tovarishch. The word was appropriated during the Bolshevick uprising in 1917 to designate egalitarian standing within the Communist party. This one should be familiar to anyone with middling knowledge about the Cold War, as there was a great…