I went to COSine and then I forgot to blog about it.

This last weekend I went to COSine in Colorado Springs and had a lovely time. There were a couple of let downs, the print house had failed to get my books to the publisher in time and so we had no copies of Diary in The Dark to sell, but that wasn't the reason I went anyway.

I did meet the fine folk at Strigidae in person for the first time and they were all marvelous and supportive. I had excellent conversations with a handful of other authors including Amity Green and Shelly Wright, both of whom were perfect pictures of advice and encouragement.

Unfortunately and in truest Aki fashion I got distracted from one of the panels I had wanted to attend because I got immersed in a game of Sentinels of The Multiverse with my boyfriend, but these things happen.

All in all it was an excellent weekend and I returned home enthused to work on my own projects.

Holding My First Published Work

On a far more sentimental note than most of this blog will be, my boyfriend's copy of Diary In The Dark came in today and it's been  . . . something of an experience. Even with the contract signed and the manuscript edited, even once I had cover art it always felt a little bit like everything could stop. Probably that was the anxiety, but a piece of my brain kept muttering that at any minute Diary could not happen.

Then it went up on Amazon, and that was excellent, but also intangible. It was no more real in that moment than it was on my google drive. (Totally not knocking e-books, e-books are excellent.)

But here it is. Solid and soft and smelling like new book. This was my first chance to see the font Strigidae used for the titles (I love it) and, if I'm being entirely honest, I'm a little overwhelmed. As in, my hands are shaking and I keep sneaking glances over at it like it's going to move or stop existing any minute now.

Any way, I sent Neil Gaiman an ask on tumblr because he's made himself magically approachable (also he's one of two authors I'm following on tumblr and I'm a little afraid of Gemma Files, she's just so . . . neat) and asked if it gets less awe-inspiring to hold your own book for the first time or if his hands still shake. I'm guessing it gets less, but who knows.

Not me, that's who.

COSine Science Fiction Convention

So, this weekend (The 22nd-24th) I'll be at the COSine Science Fiction Convention in Colorado Springs. I'm not attending as a guest or anything, but it will still be my first convention as a published author and so that's terribly exciting.

Also nerve-wracking. Dreadfully nerve-wracking.

But the excited outweighs the nerve-wracking by rather a lot, so there's that. My publisher, Strigidae Publishing, is having their official launch and announcing their first six titles and so that's why I'm going. Meeting my editor in person and talking with the other authors should be a fun and enlightening experience.

Also Jim Butcher is going to be there and The Dresden Files was hugely inspirational to the neo-noir I've been working on.

I am a responsible adult writer building a media kit

The post title is fairly self-explanatory I suppose, but I'll go into detail here in case anyone is curious about what a media-kit involves. If you have wonderful (if meddling) friends who want you to succeed, or theoretically an agent, you will probably be required to make a media kit. This consists of things like business cards and head-shots and other promotional materials. It's been suggested by other websites that you have all this ready before you get published, but I'm going to come right out and tell you that in a lot of cases I think it's better and easier to wait.

Get your work accepted by a publisher first. By working with the publisher you'll know what sort of theme they're going with for your novel and you can branch out from there with your media kit. Don't, however, do what I did and wait until you're supposed to go to a convention in a week to do literally anything about it because you didn't think it was important.

Start with business cards, these should have your contact information and the contact info of your publisher/agent/whatever along with a short blurb about yourself or your newest work, whichever you feel is most applicable. Business cards are surprisingly cheap and actually good for everything.

Business? Give them a card.
Meet someone socially and want them to have your number? Business Card.

It's the classy way of giving people a way to talk to you and an idea of what you do.

Now Available For Purchase: Diary In The Dark

Exciting news! My debut novel, Diary In The Dark has been published by Strigidae Publishing and is available for purchase (both kindle and paper back) on Amazon.com. Available Here. While not a long work, Diary details the apocalypse in three segments: catalyst, climax and conclusion and follows six diverse characters through the hellscape that unfolds in front of them. 

From the back of the jacket: 

There are things we’re not meant to understand. 

It is the bread and butter of daily life that we turn a blind eye to incongruent truths because they push out against our frame of reference, bending it out of shape and threatening to twist it into knots. 

We comfort ourselves with the faint hope that it’s just a dream, just a story, just speckles of dust in the sun. We sometimes believe in God. We believe in nature, in the rotation of the Earth and the constant pulse of the tides. In biology, anatomy and prayer.  But there are cracks in the wood grain, and a gap beneath reality’s front door. Mash’rg, the Maw, whispers just outside the window, promising knowledge, passion and above all else, an end. 

Jeremy thought the book was just a book. Beautiful, lonely, finding him even as it was found. 

Lizzie was confident in three things, death, gravity and her younger brother. These three things couldn’t, wouldn’t fail. 

Andrew only knew that the sun would rise in the morning, every morning, no matter how bleak and black the night had been. 

They were wrong. 

We were all wrong.