Posts Tagged With: blackbird lsd

I won Camp NaNo + first draft of Chasing Nonconformity complete!

Posted on April 19, 2013 by Michelle Proulx

Fellow bloggerites, I have officially won Camp NaNo and completed the first draft of Chasing Nonconformity (the sequel to Imminent Danger). Huzzah and rejoice, my friends!

I would say that today’s a huge day for me, writing-wise, except that would be a blatant lie, as I actually accomplished all the aforementioned accomplishments yesterday. Ah well. Victory tastes just as sweet the next day. But not the day after tomorrow. That’s when the ice storm hits and we all freeze to death in the New York Public Library whilst fending off a starving wolf pack.

Right! So Camp NaNo was a rousing success, possibly because I only attempted to write 20k words instead of the traditional 50k words. Meh. The point of going to camp was, of course, to finish the first draft of Chasing Nonconformity, which I did. So … woo!

Here’s some stats on Chasing Nonconformity for you, because who doesn’t love stats? Crazy people, that’s who.

Total word count: 114,340

Total page count: 308

Total usages of the word “ZWOOSH”: 41

Total references to someone being kidnapped or abducted: 59

Total of alien planets/space stations/colony ships visited: 5

Total level of awesomeness: Over 9,000

To celebrate my success, I acquired a slice of cherry cheesecake, a bacon pizza, and a peanut butter chocolate cupcake. The cheesecake was delicious, the pizza was meh, and the cupcake hurt my stomach because I was full from all the cheesecake and pizza. Intestinal discomfort has never tasted so good.

In other news, tomorrow marks the beginning of the LA Times Festival of Books, where Blackbird LSD will be representing me and my book since I don’t have the moola to jaunt off on a jet plane to California for the weekend. They’ve got 51 copies of my book (I know, weird number, don’t ask), 3,000 bookmarks, 2,000 stickers, and all the enthusiasm they can muster! Three cheers for Blackbird LSD! Hip hip, hooray!

That is all.

Unrelated media of the day: “Scumbag Candyman”

Source: http://www.imglols.com/wp-content/uploads/scumbag-candy-man.jpg

Categories: Writing | Tags: author, blackbird lsd, books, California, Camp Nano, Cheesecake, Huzzah, imminent danger, la times festival of books, National Novel Writing Month, New York Public Library, Word count, writing | 90 Comments

Promo Stickerz for the LA Times Book Festival

Posted on April 12, 2013 by Michelle Proulx

Happy Friday, my friends! Anyone else psyched that this cold, rainy week is finally over? Maybe the cold raininess is just an Ontario thing. Still … looking forward to being able to leave the apartment without needing both my full winter gear and an umbrella. It just seems wrong. Pick cold or rain, Mother Nature, not both. Get your act together. Geez.

Right! Moving on. So, as you may know, the LA Times Book Festival is coming up soon (April 20-21), and I’ve managed to wrangle the publicity company Blackbird LSD to represent me at their festival booth. Not to sound like too much of a fan girl, but they’re awesome!!! Check out the latest web banner they whipped up for Imminent Danger:

Fun, right? And very dangerous, which is always good. I love that the cover is all “romance, love, mushiness”, and the ad is all “danger, death, omglazorspewpewpew”. Fun juxtaposition there.

Anyway, the real purpose of this post is to share some of my sticker “designs”, so-called. The stickers are being shipped to California as we speak, so fingers crossed they turn out the way they look on-screen – preferably better! Feel free to either praise or viciously insult my design skills at your leisure, although do recall that my heart is made of cotton candy and is prone to dissolving if exposed to too many tears.

The stickers themselves will only be 2×2 inches (tiny!), so I had to keep the designs simple. And yes, the top sticker image was drawn by the lovely and talented Celeste DeWolfe. And if anyone’s wondering, the grey text in the background of the second image says “SHWOOP”. That’s the sound spaceships make when they shwoop through space and time.

Other updates … Goodreads Giveaway finally finished!

Total entrants = 945. Not too shabby.

Let’s be honest, I was expecting maybe 300, tops, so I’m beyond thrilled. Of course, whether any of this results in reviews / sales remains to be seen, but I’m cautiously hopeful. And if not, well … still a fun experience!

Unrelated link of the day:

Since I already bombarded you with a bunch of images already, today’s unrelated media will be a link. It is Game of Thrones related, specific to the latest episode that aired this past Sunday, so if you haven’t seen it … well, you won’t get the joke at all.

http://www.happyplace.com/23035/game-of-thrones-facebook-recap-season-3-episode-2

Categories: My Works, Self Publishing | Tags: author, blackbird lsd, books, giveaway, Goodreads, imminent danger, la times book festival, Mother Nature, printrunner, self-publish, stickers, writing | 31 Comments

Bookmarks! Bookmarks! Bookmarks!

Posted on March 20, 2013 by Michelle Proulx

Sorry, I tend to get over-excited by little things. However, yesterday was quite thrilling in that my shipment of 3,000 bookmarks arrived in California in preparation for the LA Times Festival of Books. Here’s a photo of the bookmarks sprawled across a random flat surface, courtesy of Daniel Mariano at Blackbird LSD:

Ain’t they bootiful? I’m still not sure if 3,000 bookmarks is way too much, or way too little. On the one hand, the Festival of Books attracts 200,000 people a year. On the other hand, 3,000 bookmarks is a lot of bookmarks. Let me find the other picture Daniel sent me … hang on …

See??? That’s a stupid amount of bookmarks right there. And yet I have a feeling they will all be snatched up long before the end of the weekend-long festival due to their extreme awesomeness.

Moving on.

I went through several designs before I landed on this one. My initial design was incredibly crowded, as you’ll remember from my previous post about bookmarks. Here’s the new design — you’ll have to decide for yourself if it’s an improvement or not:

Important note re: designing bookmarks — you have to leave a 1/8 inch “bleed” around the edges of the bookmark design, since this will be cut off when the bookmarks are printed.

This design is definitely much simpler, but it’s more in keeping with the simple, black and red theme of Imminent Danger’s cover. Plus, my hope is that when the bookmark is stuck in a book, the Imminent Danger title / “A YA sci-fi novel by Michelle Proulx” part will stick out the top of the book like a mini billboard for my book. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

My bookmarks, for anyone interested in bookmarks and printing and whatnot, was ordered from printrunner.com. The price was reasonable — it came out to $174.96 with tax and shipping — and the quality of the bookmarks looks to be pretty good. So if you’re in the States and looking for bookmark printing, check it out!

As for creating the bookmark itself, I used Inkscape, which is basically the free, glitchy younger cousin of Illustrator. It has lots of neat features and, fingers crossed, I will hopefully be able to design book covers using this program in the future.

This concludes my sales pitch / bookmark how to lesson of the day. Live long and prosper, fellow bloggerites.

Unrelated media of the day:

Fun with a big piano: