Birthdays!

Today it's Ru Emerson and Susan Froebel's birthdays! Wishing you both an excellent day and a healthy and wonderful year to come!

I talked with Ru EARLY this am and she sounds great -- getting her strength back, full of ideas for stories and home improvement. Considering she is on a massively tight budget, that's very good news. Fortunately she and her husband own their house and land outright, so unemployment and the current economy is not destroying them.

Really hope to see her this year. I trust I'll see Susan at a regional convention! ;^)

Book View Press Goes Punk

Steampunk, that is. THE SHADOW CONSPIRACY: Tales from the Age of Steam is the latest release from the authors of Book View Café (http://www.bookviewcafe.com), the Internet’s largest professional author cooperative.

The stories of THE SHADOW CONSPIRACY revolve around the premise that something…else happened on the stormy summer of 1816 at the gathering of poets, far beyond the creation of Mary Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN. These tales focus on the dreamers, experimenters and engineers of this alternative timeline who work their mechanical and metaphysical magic both for good...and evil. Edited by Phyllis Irene Radford and Laura Anne Gilman, authors include Judith Tarr, Sarah Zettel, Steven Piziks, and Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff. The collection will be available for the Kindle, Sony eReader, B&N Nook and a wide variety of smartphone reader apps.

To celebrate the launch, BVC will be holding a twitter fic contest from the 15th through the 17th. The subject of the contest is machines and monsters. The first place winner will receive an ebook copy of THE SHADOW CONSPIRACY and a hardcover edition of editor Laura Anne Gilman’s Flesh and Fire. Second place winner will receive an ebook copy of THE SHADOW CONSPIRACY and a hardcover edition of P.R. Frost’s Faery Moon. Details can be found at the BVC twitter fic contest page http://bit.ly/92q4OF.

Another snowflake!

lillian13 has sent me a snowflake! Extravagant creature!

{Feeling loved!}

Many thanks, and may your holiday sales be highly satisfactory. (If you haven't checked out Lillian's custom jewelry, get thee to her page and site!)