Month: March 2019

Dungeons & Dreaming

~ kmcorby ~ Leave a comment

Dreamed I was playing D&D again.  It wants to come back into my life.

My brother’s character, who was a bard of some type, had an actual animated, talking pile of garbage as some sort of familiar.

My character, who was a ranger veteran just back from the wars, said, “What the hell is this?”

Pete sniffed, “It’s a perfectly common magical construct.”

I said, “It’s a talking pile of garbage!”

Mouthy, too. It kept interrupting.

Our dad was playing, too, but he hasn’t played in decades, so he needed a lot of hand-holding.  We had another new player, too, a young lady I knew from work, I think.  She wanted to cosplay as her character, which, fine, but she was also being shy and creating a lot of drama about it. Which was a drag, but I was trying to give her a break because she was new.  Much as in real D&D, we were simultaneously our characters, and our actual selves.

Our milieu was a rambling, seedy subtropical city on the shores of a shallow sea, built on many islands.  Like a sweaty Venice.  (New Orleans in the future?)

Hopefully I can put some of this to use one day.

Probably not the pile of garbage, though.

 

SPFBO Update

~ kmcorby ~ Leave a comment

The Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off has reached its finals: the blogger/reviewers have chosen their 10 finalists, and all will read all to determine the winner.  Read about it here.

My book is not among them.  In fact it was cut during the first round of eliminations.

Ouch. That hurt.  But I have to admit that I seriously overestimated my chances on this thing.  There are many, many authors entered in the Blog-Off that are far more experienced than me.

The mini-reviw of my book on Team Weatherwax is here.  The reviewer (not sure who) said Daughter of Atlas has “pacing issues.”  Ugh.  That’s hard to hear. But no else who’s ever read or reviewed it (that I know of) has ever said that, so I guess it’s a matter of opinion.

My biggest disappointment from being cut so early, though, is that DoA didn’t get a cocktail made to memorialize it by Book Wol of Tome & Tankard.  I was so looking forward to that. There is a general cocktail for all the early losers here.

One thing I have noticed, is that most (I think eight out of ten) of the finalist books have more “painterly” covers than your usual indie-published books, with their Photoshopped covers.  It looks like the authors paid to have artists actually paint cover paintings for their books, or at least composit them in a more illustrative style than the usual photorealistic , CGI’d indie covers we are used to.  It makes the books more “professional” looking, that is, more like commercially published books.  It probably contributes a positive halo effect to the books.  They are appropriate to the genre, fantasy, and are what readers expect to see.

(Not that I am displeased by the cover of my book, or having second thoughts. I love the cover of DoA, and I have always received positive feedback from it. But it is something to keep in mind for future works.)

Author and YouTube book vlogger Quinn Buckland gave DoA a stellar review here.  Check it out. Thanks Quinn!

My interview by Michael Baker of the Thousand Scars Muse blog is here.  I did see a small sales spike from that, thank you Michael.

And I have a new review on GoodReads from XDesoto, here.

Well, there’s always next time.  My forthcoming book is science fiction, so I can’t enter SPFBO with that, but I will return to fantasy and to my series Atlantis Fallen in the future, so hopefully one day I will be able to enter the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off again.

Does anyone know if there is a similar contest for indie sci-fi?

Finally, let me extend my thanks to Mark Lawrence, who founded the Blog-Off, and to all the bloggers and reviewers, who are putting in an incredible amount of work on their own time, for love of reading and the genre, and also to all my fellow authors.  Good luck to all the finalists!