Categories
Writing process

A new year, a new look … and a newsletter

Site redesign

We’ve updated our website. The old site had been around a while, and didn’t scale super well on mobiles and tablets. So we’ve gone for a new look.

Over the next few weeks we’ll fine-tune it, but the basic design is there.

It has changed the way some images are presented.  We have gone back and updated the last few weeks’ posts, but we won’t do them all. As a result, you will see that a lot of the old blogs don’t appear to have images associated with them.  They do, but they’re not displayed until you actually view the post itself.

 

Newsletter

We have also introduced a newsletter.  If you want to receive a quarterly newsletter from us, why don’t you subscribe?

It’s hard to test newsletters.  Once you subscribe, that’s it. You can’t resend it to yourself, and short of signing up to multiple dummy emails (not something we want to do), we have to believe it’s okay.

If you do sign up, you should receive your first newsletter straight away. If you don’t get that newsletter, please let us know and we’ll see if we can find what the problem is.  This is new technology for us, and until we’ve used it a while we’re nervous about it.

 

Outside of that

We’re still working on the drafts of the book to be delivered after Stars Uncharted. We are both adding lots of words, and taking out just as much. Sherylyn’s really on a roll writing this week, which is good.

The story is starting to settle, and feel like a story we want to read/write.

Categories
Fun stuff

The Last Jedi

Star Wars Kirigami, from the Star Wars site, http://www.starwars.com/news/star-wars-kirigami-author-marc-hagan-guirey-on-papercrafting-a-galaxy
This amazing kirigami (paper craft) spaceship created by Marc Hagan Guirey, from his latest book Star Wars Kirigami. Image from starwars.com

We saw The Last Jedi the other day.

Too many movies have given away the whole story in the trailers, so before we went, I tried very hard to avoid reading or seeing anything about The Last Jedi.

Over Christmas-new year break the internet was full of opinions about the latest Star Wars movie.  I tried to avoid them, but I could still see that there was controversy about the movie.  Some people liked it; some people appeared to hate it.

I was strong. I didn’t read any reviews or spoiler-nominated articles. I stuck to the entertainment news, like the red carpet, with Kelly Marie Tran becoming excited when she saw someone cosplaying her character.

The theatre was nearly full.  Not bad for the first session of the day for a movie that had been out three weeks.

The Last Jedi was wonderful.  I enjoyed it. And Rose, you are as great as the actress playing you. Can’t wait to see you in the next movie.

Categories
Book news

Cover art for Stars Uncharted

Having a book published takes time, but there are landmarks along the way.

Selling the book. That’s a given.

Signing the contract, which can often happen later than you expect it to.

Delivery and acceptance, which is when your editor finally says, “Yes, I’m happy with the edits you have made to this book.”

Copy edits, when you start to see what the finished book looks like.

The first time you see the cover.

Advanced reader copies, when you get physical books to hand out to people.

Publication.

The first time you see the cover

The first time you see your cover, however, isn’t necessarily the first time you can share it.  We first saw a cover for Stars Uncharted in early November.  It went through another iteration after that, and we saw the nearly-final one in early December.  Even then, you can’t show anyone until the publishing team sign it off.  So you end up sitting on this awesome cover, bursting to show someone, and you can’t.

So here we present, at long last, the cover for Stars Uncharted.

We think it’s awesome. Don’t you.