Inanna Gabriel

So, I’ve been so busy with actual projects that I haven’t had time to write about any of them! So let’s see…

Issue Four of Title Goes Here: is finished and available now! It was a few days late, but well worth the wait–the cover art by Chris Orapello looks just fantastic, as expected. And in order to get the title, author names, etc. to show up right against the image I had to do sort of a relief effect on it, which actually really makes it pop–think I’m gonna keep using that on all the covers! We’re also in the thick of the submissions period for next year’s TGH issues, so we’ve both been reading subs. So far we’re getting a lot more than last year, which is pretty exciting!

Meanwhile, the majority of my writers’ group, Creative Minds Collective, is in a frenzy to get our stories done for this year’s anthology. We do a short story collection every year, and this year our editor, J.M. Vogel, has raised the bar and come up with an incredible idea. We’re doing a shared world, an imaginary town in New England that’s cursed and crawling with monsters after dark. Almost all of our stories are running long, though, largely because we’re both developing our own characters and plots and fleshing out the town itself. I’m down to my final draft, so I’m doing decently, but it’s not been an easy task by any means! Watch here or on CMC’s own website (www.creativemindscollective.org) for more on the book, including when it’s available, which should be in October.

And finally, the thing I’m actually most excited about–we’ve just announced a new Misanthrope Press project. We’ve been planning this for a while, but just recently decided to move up the timeframe and get on with it. It’s our first open-submissions, book-form short story anthology. It’s a pagan-themed collection that will be called Etched Offerings: Voices From the Cauldron of Story. A few of my favorite pagan podcasts are running promos for us to annouce the guidelines call, so we’re getting the word out to the pagan community directly, not just through the usual writer-ly channels like Duotrope. So far “The Infinite and The Beyond,” “The Wigglian Way,” and “Media Astra ac Terra” have all confirmed they’ll give us a mention on their next episodes. I have really high hopes for this project!

Oh, and not really my thing, but still worth mentioning–Chris has a new website! www.cbryanbrown.com. It’s the same URL, but the side’s completely redone, and it looks awesome!

And that’s it for now, I think. Off I go to read more subs, finish my CMC story, help Chris figure out how to get Etched Offerings listed on Duotrope, and… well, and plenty else, I’m sure!  Busy, busy, busy!

Blessings,

~Inanna

Well, it’s official: Title Goes Here: is open for submissions once again!

For those of you who aren’t aware, TGH is a fiction magazine I co-edit with friend, writing companion, and business partner C. Bryan Brown. We do a once-a-year reading period during which we pick the stories for all four issues of the following year. This means we don’t have to work reading and responding to submissions into our schedules year round, but it also makes for a busy few months while we’re open and everybody’s clamoring to get them in in time. It’s a lot of work, but I’m excited it’s upon us once again!

We’ve already received a good handful of stories to read each, so things are moving right along. And speaking of, I’m off to get started on my slush pile now! Toodles!

~Inanna

My story “Services Rendered” is online now at Midnight in Hell! Look for it in the Summer 2010 issue.

So, on the other side of MarCon… First of all, this was my first ever SF convention, and I’ve discovered that I’m not quite as big a geek as I thought. I’m up there, don’t get me wrong, but… wow.

Our panel was rather a big flop, mainly, I think, because we didn’t get a description of our topic into the program book, so it just had the group’s name. We had five people show up, three of whom were together and left about fifteen minutes in, and one who both came late and left early. I think number five looks like a keeper, though, so it certainly wasn’t a waste as I think we may well have a new CMC member! And it’s another guy, so Chris & Matthew are quite happy about it.

We weren’t exactly happy with our book sales, but we’re already looking at ways to better promote and hopefully get that number up next year and/or at any other cons we may do in the future. I did hand out Title Goes Here: cards and fliers to a few writers, though, so that might generate some magazine submissions.

Oh, and on a just-me-not-CMC note, I got to talk to Alayna Williams for the first time since the NaNo WriMo kickoff last October, and she gave me a copy of her new book, Dark Oracle! I love knowing famous people!

So that’s my MarCon report. Short and sweet, I know, but there it is.

I probably should have been talking more about this before now, but oh, well – CMC is going to MarCon this weekend! We’re going to have a booth in the main hall, as well as running a panel. Our panel is 1:00 pm on Saturday, and will be about how our group operates with an emphasis on how to start and run one of your own.

For those of you in and around the Columbus, Ohio area, MarCon is Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of Memorial Day weekend (this weekend) at the Hyatt Regency downtown. The website for the con is www.marcon.org.

Hope to see you there!

Inanna

Oh, and CMC is also planning to do its regular Saturday meeting this weekend, but later than usual, after the panel, and not at our usual spot in Gahanna. We haven’t determined the exact location or time just yet.

My book is on Amazon finally! Hurray! 

OK, admittedly, the cover image isn’t showing yet, but it’s there. As I was typing my name into the search box, I got about to Inanna Gab– and it filled in not only the rest of my name, but “Inanna Gabriel in Books” Woo hoo!

I have my box of copies for MarCon, and a box of copies of Chris’s book, Men of Five, plus all the remaining copies of the first CMC anthology ready to go for MarCon. We’ll be ordering our t-shirts and copies of the 2nd anthology volume today, so looks like we’ll be all set. Sadly, we’ve decided we can’t have copies of Title Goes Here: for sale, but Chris & I are both bringing our own copies of issues 1 through 3, so we’ll have some to demo, and flyers for the website.

So, now that the book’s done, it’s time to focus on my story for the 2010 CMC anthology. The theme isn’t publicly announced yet, so I won’t go into detail here, but I have to say that this is going to be our best anthology to date. Not only that, but I think this will be the first time one of our books promises to have true public appeal–I think this one will actually merit some real promotion to the public, and get us some sales to people who don’t know us for a change

OK, well, the group’s all showing up for the meeting now, so I’m off. Later!

Inanna

At last, my novel is published and available for sale! It’s not up on the Amazon site yet at the time of this writing, but it’s available through Misanthrope Press, here: http://www.createspace.com/3449535

The proof copy wound up getting shipped to Chris instead of me thanks to a glitch on the printer’s website, so I had to wait an extra day ’til our regular Wednesday meeting to see it, but I have it in hand now and just approved it for publication. It’s always pretty exciting to hold a new Misanthrope Press title, to have a real, tangible work in print that I helped to bring into the world. Much more so when it’s my name alone on the cover! (Well, technically, Chris’s name is there, too, but just in the artwork…)

I’ve placed my order for copies to sell at MarCon Memorial Day weekend, where CMC is going to have a booth and will be doing a panel on starting a writers’ group. Should be an exciting weekend… you should come look for us there!

Later,

Inanna

So, I’m almost done with the novel. The interior pages are all done, proof reading formatting and all. The only thing I’m missing is an author photograph that I may or may not include. So, I was all excited about this and updated the tagline on my IM with donedonedonedonedone! then realized…no, I’m not.

The interior pages are not the final step, as I’m my own editor and publisher as well. I knew the front cover wasn’t going to be ready until the weekend, as I’m going out to see Starwind on Saturday for her to take the photo for it. (She might be taking an author photo at the same time, and then we’ll see if I can manage a good enough shot for the book…) Anyway, that still left the back cover and spine for me to do. So, I popped into my graphics program and started on the design I had in mind, when it occurred to me–I still have to write a back-cover blurb for this thing!

I HATE writing blurbs.

But, I managed, and so this thing really is almost ready. Looks like it’ll definitely be ready in time for MarCon, and quite possibly even a bit sooner. Yay!!

That’s it for me–just seemed like something worth posting so I popped on.

Later!

~Inanna

I was gone all day yesterday, and just got up today to discover that the proof copy of Title Goes Here: Issue three has arrived! All looks good, so that issue will be ready and available on time–yay! I it seems that my double-converting theory is correct as our twice-converted .pdf file is displaying all my fancy fonts and formatting. I think it’s time to start considering re-doing the file for Issue One.

Otherwise, I’m still working on finishing up the novel. I started my final proof-read the other day, knowing that I was going to have to go through it carefully because of all the changes I made on my last revision pass. Any time you’re doing a lot of deleting, adding, and moving, you wind up with orphaned words, repeat words, missing words etc., so I knew I’d have a lot of that to get rid of. But it’s proving a lot more involved than that. I didn’t start adding/changing until about chapter six of part three, but I’ve been doing MAJOR line edits and fixes from page one. A big thing is that one of the first steps I took when re-formatting the files as book pages was to change the sentence spacing. I was raised with it heavily enforced by my teachers to put two spaces after the end of a sentence, but that’s fallen out of common usage in the last few years. So, I’ve been removing that from my manuscripts when I format for publication. (Can’t do it in my day-to-day writing–it’s far too ingrained!)

Anyway… I went through the entire manuscript and did a find/replace on period-space-space to period-space. Then I repeated to shorten periods after question mark, exclamation point, and the end-quote mark when combined with a period, question mark, or exclamation point. Not the first time I’ve done this–I do it every issue for TGH (though thinking about that, the two-spaces method is an old typesetting technique, so it would probably make sense to leave it in…). This time, though, something went haywire in my find/replace. It somehow managed to replace period-quote-space-space with just a period-space, for one example, so now anywhere I have a quote ending in the middle of a paragraph, I’m having to add the quote mark back in. It also somehow threw in random question marks throughout the text, so that every now and then a sentence that is in no way a question suddenly ends in a question mark. When I first did the find/replace, I noticed shortly after that it had actually changed my name in the header from Inanna Gabriel to Inanna Gabri???.  So, I’ve had a lot to fix, between that crap and the normal line edit/proof reading stuff. It’s been going quickly, fortunately, but still a good deal more work than I expected of it.

So the proof-reading isn’t done, but well under control. Now I get to worry about the cover. I think I know what I want, but I’m a lousy photographer and don’t even own a camera other than the one in my phone, so it’s not something I can do alone. I believe Starwind is going to do my cover photography for me, but we need to find a time to do it, still. And I also need to convince her or someone to do a photo of me for the bio page. I don’t envy anyone having to take a picture of me while I whine about not being photogenic. But I should shut up if I hope to convince her!

So, that’s it for my overdue update. Issue Three of Title Goes Here: will be available April 13!

’til next time,

~Inanna Gabri???