Links

A treasure trove of art tutorials!

Art

Looking for a tutorial on how to digitally paint trees for my book cover, I stumbled upon a collection of excellent digital painting tutorials that cover things a little off the beaten path–like painting over photos to make backgrounds and color grading. They’re by Mclelun and you can see some of them here:

http://www.mclelun.com/p/tutorial.html

Click on the “Tutorial” tag link on that page to see all the helpful tuts!

 

Writing Bundles Kickstarter – enriching and (possibly) career-changing writing book bundles!

Indie Publishing Friends, Recommended Reading, Writing

Please check out:

Writing Bundles

A Kickstarter Campaign Creating Five Writing and Publishing Bundles that Include 17 Writing Books.

Normally I’m not one to signal boost Kickstarters, but this one’s well worth a look. Veteran writers Dean Wesley Smith and his wife Kris Rusch have a Kickstarter going now where if you pledge $10, you can pick from one of five bundles of books on different writing topics. Pay a little more, you can get them in paper…get lectures…etc.

Here’s why this is exciting to me: Smith’s Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing blog posts (two sets of which are compiled in two of the books in the “Industry” bundle) literally changed the course of my writing career. At the end of 2016, I’d just finished the manuscript for Steel City, Veiled Kingdom (SCVK) and was feeling pretty down. It was a ginormous novel and I knew novels that big rarely do well with literary agents. It’d take years to shop around, and after that, they’d probably want me to change it, if anybody accepted it at all (which was a long shot).

Then I stumbled upon those posts and realized…yeah, I had ALL the skills to self-publish it. And no need for an agent at all. Three-ish years later, SCVK is out in ebook, soon to be in paperback, and in the meantime, I’ve got, like, a dozen shorts and a few other novels available on Amazon, BN, and libraries (among other digital storefronts) and more fiction on the way.

NONE of that would have happened without Killing the Sacred Cows of Publishing–and in this Kickstarter, you can get it plus three other ebooks in the “Industry” bundle for just $10. And there’s, like I said, five total bundles on different topics.

It’s good stuff, folks.

If they make it to $9,000 before April 30th, 2020, everyone who pledged $5 or more will get access to SIX workshops on topics like Writing Sci/Fi, Writing Thrillers, Writing Time Travel, etc. I’ve done some of their free courses and have LOVED them so this is a great goal to aim for. Even if that doesn’t come true, the info in these bundles is invaluable–it was career-changing for me!

So please, check out this Writing Bundles Kickstarter. They’re covering topics I bet you never even thought about. 🙂

Famous Artist Cartoon Course available as free PDF

Art

“So what is the Famous Artists Cartoon Course? Imagine Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, but written by a dozen of the most successful commercial artists of the 1950s about the skills you need to cut it as a professional cartoonist. It is 18 chapters, 390 pages, on 8.5×11″ paper. There is approximately a 70:30 ratio of space taken up by text versus pictures (it’s a legit textbook).”

Artists, y’all need to buzz on over to this post on Random Nerds and get this marvelous textbook FOR FUH-REE-HEE.

 

 

 

 

Lady Fiction

Indie Publishing Friends

One of my besties just published her first full-length novel. I’m so proud!!!

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About the book:

This is a story about America.

Also about Lady Fiction, a robot of GRACE and POISE who solves CRIMES. Robots do not dream of destiny, and yet she dreams. She dreams of finding American Hero, of bringing her back to save an America on the ragged edge of being eaten up by God’s own chaos.

She dreams of a series of Pintos, left wrecked, mangled, and exploded across amber waves of grain and majestic purple mountains.

She dreams of befriending serial killers and quieting ghosts, and eating trash from a thousand dumpsters to fuel her stomach furnace. She dreams of waking gods and putting others down. She dreams of facing off the Devil and forcing her to change her crooked ways.

But all dreams lie. So does Lady Fiction.

Entropy wins. All you can do is steal a few moments from it.  

I  got to read the first part of it years ago.  I’ve been thinking about it ever since. If you’re looking for a DIFFERENT yet funny yet thoughtful-deep read, you should  grab it.