Posts Tagged With: California

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

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:

Categories: My Works | Tags: big piano, blackbird lsd, Bookmark, books, California, imminent danger, Inkscape, Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, marketing, phantom of the opera, printrunner | 39 Comments

Writing Apocalypse Book of the Month!!! + Minor iUniverse Silliness

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Michelle Proulx

We’ll start with the exciting bit first. The lovely Ms. Tania L Ramos and the folks at Blackbird LSD run a website, which celebrates well-written books and the people who write them. Naturally, my book is nowhere to be found. Ha! Kidding, kidding. They were kind enough to slap Imminent Danger up on their site a few weeks ago, and to my delight, they’ve actually named it the Book of the Month for March 2013! Wooooo!

Another item of note, for anyone who lives in the vicinity of California: Blackbird LSD will be representing my book at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. I will not be there in person, due to my living in the frozen wasteland that is southern Ontario, but they’ll have lots of Imminent Danger swag (bookmarks, stickers, books, etc.).

So if you’re in the LA area April 20-21, stop by booth 214 and claim your swag! Or, if you have a moral objection to the term ‘swag’, you can claim whatever you want — booty, plunder, spoils, etc. *insert pirate joke here*

In other news … some minor iUniverse silliness

I say “minor” because it isn’t a huge deal — more of a “Really, guys? Really?”

You all know about my struggles to get my book listed under the correct genre, right? I would have thought that, at some point, a proactive iUniverse employee might have put a note on my file mentioning that the book is actually “Young Adult”, and not “Children’s Lit”, despite what the unfortunate book category might say otherwise.

This is apparently not the case. I’ve recently been corresponding with the iUniverse Publishing Programs Department, who are going to get my book into Chapters for 8 weeks as per the publishing package I purchased. So the lady I was talking to whipped up a “sell sheet”, which basically has all the relevant information about Imminent Danger that she’ll send out to the local Chapters store in my area. Here’s a screencap of the top of the sheet she sent me for approval:

Time to play Spot the errors!

1. “Children’s” should be Young Adult or Teen.

2. “Juvenile” should be Young Adult or Teen.

3. Romance is fine, but Sci-Fi should really be first. Also, who ever heard of a romance book for children? Is that a thing?

4. Fantasy is just wrong — maybe stick Romance here instead?

On the plus side, they definitely got “Fiction” right. Three cheers for iUniverse! I shall inform them today of their amusingly incorrect first attempt, and advise them on how to actually make it accurate on their second go.

Update: The iUniverse lady was very prompt and professional, and said there was no problem changing the genre to Fiction / Teen / Sci-fi / Romance. So points to iUniverse for fixing this problem ASAP!

Unrelated media of the day:

I want to live here …