A Short Excerpt from Chapter One of A Bone to Pick By Jan S. Gephardt “What is that dark thing in Bonita’s quinoa patch?” XK9 Shady Jacob-Belle dialed her vocalizer low, flattened her ears, and growled. Unease slithered in her gut. She drew back from the balcony’s railing. Her mate Rex had been gazing toward the starry nighttime sky-windows with a dreamy look on his furry black face. Now he crouched beside her in the shadows, tense and focused. He…
By Jan S. Gephardt It’s way too late for this to be a “reveal,” but the story of A Bone to Pick’s Cover deserves telling. Because it was not an easy—or short—journey! Late update: I unfortunately timed this post just when Jody had retired her old website and hadn’t quite gotten her new one ready. If you’re reading this in late 2021, her links may not work. The Artistry of Jody A. Lee For most of my adult life it has been…
By Jan S. Gephardt I’ve been making ARCs recently. What does that mean? It means I’ve been assembling an assortment of documents into an early version of my latest book, to create Advance Reader Copies. It’s not exactly parallel to a dress rehearsal for a stage play, but for me it’s a necessary step in the publicity rollout for my science fiction mystery novel A Bone to Pick. I’ve been blogging a lot in this space recently, about A Bone…
By Jan S. Gephardt To quote Red Leader Garven Dreis, we’re almost there! In this case, I mean we’re almost to the point where A Bone to Pick is available and ready to read. Almost. We’re close enough that I can at last announce a presale offer on Amazon, in both the US and the UK. I’m also almost to the point where Advance Reader Copies (ARCs) are ready to go out as review copies. I’ll send them to my…
Since our prehistory, humans have focused on creating a calendar, then using it to keep time. We’ve based calendars on the seasons, the sun, and the moon. We’ve scratched symbols into clay, bone or stone, dug sequences of pits, erected poles, or even dragged enormous stones for fabulous distances, all to get a handle on “WHEN are we? But creating a calendar that’s accurate over a long period of time is a harder thing to do on Earth than one…
To anyone who asks, “Can you tell me about your book?” I can only offer hints and glimpses. Of course, that’s all any of us can offer, short of a full read. But which hints and glimpses? It becomes marketing It becomes marketing, whether we authors and our might-be-readers care to think of it that way or not. We not only want to give the asker a good idea of what our story’s about—we want them to think it’s interesting….
It’s kinda like being pregnant. Except it takes longer. No matter how much people tell you your life will change after the baby is born, you can never really “get it,” until after you’ve become a parent. There’s this divide between “before baby” and “after baby” that can never be crossed in reverse. On the far side of that Rubicon is Terra Incognita (with or without dragons) that you’ll never understand till you get there. If my publishing efforts turn out as well as my kids did, I’m good. However, right at this moment the “contractions”…
Regular readers of this blog (if you are one, THANK YOU!!) may recall that I’ve published at least one guest-post by my sister, Gigi Sherrell Norwood (Orchestra Dreams). What you may not know is that she is herself a talented writer, and she’s also the widow of science fiction writer Warren C. Norwood. Yes, we’re kind of a cottage industry all in the family (and that’s not even counting the emerging editorial expertise of my son and frequent sf convention companion Tyrell Gephardt). It was perhaps inevitable that we’d do the writing/publishing…
The Artdog Quote(s) of the Week In recognition of Women’s History Month, I thought I’d focus on quotes about women in the arts as this month’s theme. Yeah, try Googling that phrase under “images.” The quote that seemed to come back with just incredible frequency was this one: Um, EXCUSE ME, but what does that have to do with Women in the Arts? One image that came up near the top of the search results is a poster visible on the Tate website (but not available for…
Did you ever have one of those projects you thought was just about done . . . except you needed to adjust this one thing. And then that one thing led logically to another. And after that you discovered an excellent new technique and it would apply to this current project, so now if you just revamp these bits . . . . Eventually it HAS to end. In this case I’m talking about the novel I am THIS CLOSE to having completely ready to start production. ON or before September…