Whew! I’ll be making my Guest of Honor run at Readercon this coming weekend in Burlington, MA! It’s me and P. Djeli Clark in the GoH seats, with legions of super-smart sf/f writers and editors on the program, including Max Gladstone, Rob Cameron, Catherine Lundoff, John Chu, Laura Antoniou, Erin Roberts, Sarah Pinsker, Shariann Lewitt and many many more.

As expected, my schedule will be PACKED. Of note: I added a second autographing slot because of concerns that the first one happens soooo early. I will not have a table selling books: you can get them in the bookshop from Sally at Larry Smith Booksellers and some will also be on the Broad Universe table.

And yes, there will be some copies of the new shiny beautiful Magic University Collectors Edition hardcover. (And if you ordered a copy via Kickstarter, check your email for an update about picking up the book in person if you want to! Or just come to a party!)

FRIDAY
2:00 PM Bisexuals in Science Fiction: Still Hip After All These Years?
3:00 PM Autograph Session #1
4:00 PM Cecilia Tan GOH Reading
7:00 PM Moving from Traditional Publishing to Self-Publishing
9:00 PM Levels of Interiority (in Narrative)

SATURDAY
12:00 Noon The Works of Cecilia Tan (I’m not on this, I’ll just be listening!)
1:00 PM Divination in the Writing Process
4:00 PM Guest of Honor Interview: Cecilia Tan by Charlie Jane Anders
6:00 PM Erotica, Horror, and the Fear of Visceral Fiction
9:00 PM Patrons & Kickstarter Supporters Get-Together

SUNDAY
12:00 PM Noon Beyond the Bio: Weird Jobs & the Worlds They Inspired
1:00 PM Harry Potter and the Undeath of the Author
2:00 PM Autographing Session #2

Mirrored from Cecilia Tan.

Hello and welcome to another ctan monthly updatet! It’s Pride Month, so today let’s talk about queer science fiction and fantasy.

First some housekeeping: Mailchimp has been driving me nuts, with the newsletter sometimes displaying so tiny on mobile devices it was illegible. I’m trying on a new template today, with new fonts. Please let me know if this one looks better to you (or worse!) than before so I can keep improving it.

Second, my apology this is a bit later than I intended, but I had knee surgery on Wednesday and as you can imagine it’s put a bit of a cramp into my schedule. I’ve discovered I would rather have my knee hurt and my brain work than be “pain free” but feel seasick from narcotics. Apparently opioids are not my friends! Bleah.

And now to my slightly linkbait-y topic: are we in a “Golden Age” of queer and trans SF/F? Yes, yes we are, end of essay.

Just kidding, of course I’m going to explain WHY my answer is yes.

Mirrored from cecilia tan.

From Closet to Classic: Ann Bannon and Cecilia Tan Discuss 20th Century Lesbian Pulp & Erotica

I’m very excited and honored to be doing this online talk with Ann Bannon, the legendary author of the Beebo Brinker books, the foundational novels of the lesbian pulp genre in the 20th century. (I’m still getting a kick out of talking about the 20th century like it was a long time ago! If only!) The Rare Book library at the University of Illinois is hosting us on Zoom, so you don’t have to be at UofI to attend!

To get the Zoom link invite, sign up here: https://go.illinois.edu/closet

The official description: 

Please join the Rare Book & Manuscript Library via Zoom for a conversation between two of the most influential writers in lesbian pulp and erotic fiction of the 20th century.

Ann Weldy, better known by her pen name Ann Bannon, is the author of a series of five lesbian pulp novels known as “The Beebo Brinker Chronicles.” Written from 1957 to 1962, the books were bestsellers when they were first released, and have had remarkable longevity, especially for genre fiction. They have been published in five different editions and in several languages and are often taught in women’s studies and LGBT studies courses. The books’ popularity and impact have earned Ann Bannon the title of “Queen of Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” as well as numerous awards for pioneering gay and lesbian literature. A play based on her books has been produced twice in New York and now all over the country, from Boston to Seattle.

Cecilia Tan is an award-winning writer of science fiction/fantasy, romance, and erotica, and a 2010 inductee to the Saints & Sinners LGBT Writers Hall of Fame. Her books include Bent for Leather, Black Feathers, and the Magic University series, named by Autostraddle a “Trans-Inclusive Fantasy Series for Harry Potter Fans.” Her short stories have appeared in Ms. Magazine, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Absolute Magnitude, Strange Horizons.

Please join us!

Mirrored from cecilia tan.

Speaking engagement plans for 2023 are shaping up:

• March 15-18: ICFA, Orlando, FL
• April 20-23: IMsLBB Piscataway, NJ
• May 19-22: MISTI-Con 10th Anniversary, Laconia, NH
• June 5: StoryStudio workshop online
• July 5-9: SABR National Convention, Chicago
• July 13-16: Readercon, Boston area
• August 20-23: EFACon, Alexandria, VA

Okay, maybe it’s a bit of an exaggeration to call this The Year of Speeches, but it’s what it feels like. Yes, I’ve been a keynote speaker or guest of honor for a few conventions before, including HELIOsphere and the OutWrite festival. But this year there will be two really disparate ones that really frame my extremes:

Mirrored from cecilia tan.

I’m teaching a workshop tonight at the Artisan’s Asylum, the awesome makerspace in Somerville, and thought I’d share this handout list here since then all the links can be live.

This is a list of all the free or open source bits of software and other things that I’ve used in my publishing ventures. I’ve also used a lot of expensive things like Adobe Photoshop, Quark Xpress, and so on. But not everyone has the money or the access to the high-priced programs, so part of my workshop is basically how you can do it all using free or very inexpensive options.

Book-making Software & Free Stuff You Will Need

Download a printable one-page version here: PDF

OpenOffice/NeoOffice/LibreOffice

• free/donationware open software “clone” of MS Office suite
• OpenOffice “Writer” is the Word equivalent

OpenOffice Plugins:

• Altsearch – Alternative Find/Replace (so you can find non-printing characters) http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/project/alternative-dialog-find-replace-writer-altsearch
• Writer2epub (http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/project/writer2epub)

GIMP:

• Image editing software (https://www.gimp.org/downloads/)
• Cover designs for ebooks must be 1400 pixels x 2100 pixels minimum

Free image sources:

• Pixabay.com (free portal to Shutterstock)
• FreeImages.com (very limited, free portal to Getty Images)

Cheap image sources:

• Dreamstime.com
• iStockphoto (also owned by Getty), Shutterstock, a few others

Sigil

• WYSIWYG epub editing software INDISPENSABLE (https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil)

Calibre

• meant to be used as an ebook library tool but has crude/ugly format conversion functions and DRM stripping functions (https://calibre-ebook.com/download)

ePub Zip/ePub Unzip

• Script that unzips your epub and then puts it back together again, allowing for manual deletion of encrypted files (http://en.freedownloadmanager.org/Mac-OS/ePub-Zip-Unzip-FREE.html)

Typesetting and layout

• Scribus is open source free https://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/
• Adobe Indesign is the standard, costs $74.99 for one month cloud access, $39.99/mo for 1 yr.

Epubcheck

• Online code validator: http://validator.idpf.org/ (does files up to 10MB)

Barcodes and Createspace Templates:

• Bookow.com free barcode generator: http://bookow.com/resources.php#isbn-barcode-generator
• Bookow Free createspace template: http://bookow.com/resources.php#cs-cover-template-generator

You might also be interested in my other posts:

1. Farming Out to Professionals
2. Elements of Book Design
3. Page Layouts
4. Widows, orphans, and hyphenation
5. “Smart” quotes, section breaks, and fleurs
6. Ebook design versus print design

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

Here I am in Chicago! It’s very foggy here. Figured I’d post a rundown of what I’m doing and where to find me in case any of you need it:

SATURDAY May 14 at The Book Con

at the McCormick Place convention center, Chicago

1pm – 1:30 pm AUTOGRAPHING
at the Romance Writers of America (RWA) Booth 1716
I’ll be signing copies of TAKING THE LEAD, my latest kinky rock star romance.

1:45 – 2:45 pm AUTOGRAPHING (YES MORE AUTOGRAPHING)
at the Grand Central Publishing/Hachette booth 1716
with my fellow Forever Romance authors Elizabeth Hoyt and Debbie Mason!
I’ll again be signing and giving away TAKING THE LEAD

3:00 – 4:00 pm DIVERSITY IN ROMANCE PANEL
in Room W470
Very excited to be speaking on this panel on a subject very important to me, moderated by Joyce Lamb of USA Today’s “Happy Ever After” blog. Official description: The #WeNeedDiverseBooks initiative is being passionately embraced by readers of all genres – and authors of romantic fiction are absolutely passionate about the movement! Browse the selection at booksellers, and you will see ever-increasing title offerings that feature LGBTQ characters and couples; books that feature multi-ethnic perspective and give love to the silver fox set. In this panel, moderated by Joyce Lamb, curator of USA Today’s Happy Ever After blog, and featuring Cecilia Tan, Taking the Lead (Forever), Sona Charaipotra, Tiny Pretty Things (Epic Reads), Dhonielle Clayton, Tiny Pretty Things (Epic Reads), will frankly discuss meeting reader demand for Diverse Books in the romance genre; as well as propose tactics on how to support the growth of this market segment.

Sunday May 15 at the SFWA Nebulas Weekend

at the Palmer House Hilton

11am – 12pm Web Serial Toolbox
I’ll be teaching a crash course in everything you need to know to start your own web serial. If you can blog, you can publish a web serial! I’ll be talking about both creative and business reasons to serialize, as well as why *not* to serialize, and discuss what free & inexpensive tech tools are out there to keep your overhead costs non-existent to under $25.

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

I’ve been so busy running from event to event to event this month that I haven’t had a chance to blog my thoughts from the NELGBTC Conference until now, 10-11 days later. NELGBTC is a queer student activism conference that moves around annually from campus to campus. I was invited by the SUNY Stony Brook TNG group and presented two sessions there. Far as I can tell in my digging and research NELGBTC is the successor to what was called the NELGSAC/NELGSU Conference back in 1985, which I attended as a newly minted queer student activist at Brown University. (NELGSU had reformed as NELGBSA by 1992 and the mantle of national student queer organizing umbrella organization had been taken up by NELGBTC by about 1997, far as I can tell from searching Internet archives.)

When I got to college in 1985 I knew I was bisexual but didn’t know what that “meant” as far as answering the question “who am I?” I was trying to figure a lot of stuff out (as usual at that age) about sexuality, including what it “meant” to be a sexually active woman (even heterosexually) in a society that was pretty condemnatory about that (I was still technically a virgin at that point, btw) and how to deal with stuff like the fact I wasn’t comfortable being/presenting as a typical cisgendered female–especially when the (bullshit) messages I was getting from society were that if I wanted to explore sexuality then adopting cisgender female attire and “looks” was how one was supposed to signal sexual availability. The “problem” of course wasn’t me, it was society, and the fact I hadn’t yet found “my people,” i.e. other folks whose identities and sexualities were outside the heterosexual cis norm.

I found those people at my first LGSA (Lesbian Gay Student Alliance) meeting, even though at the time there was no “B” in the name and I still wasn’t totally sure if as a bisexual I was welcome in that space. Well, first it was me who wasn’t sure I was committed to entering that space. I had seen the posters advertising a meeting and I had tried to “casually” pass by the meeting room to “just get a look” before committing to going in. But at the time of the meeting…the room was empty. How weird, I thought. I went back to the bulletin board to check the time and place. I wandered around trying to pretend I had another reason to be in that building. I buzzed past the room again. Still empty. My anxiety about this whole thing was starting to spike and I thought forget this, I’ll just go back to my room.

I stepped outside the building and there were a bunch of people unloading grocery bags of snacks and soda from the back of a car. They took one look at me and said, “Oh are you here for the LGSA meeting? Can you help carry this?”

Well, apparently “my people” recognized ME and knew I belonged. So my very first act of queer student activism was to help set up the snacks and drinks for a meeting that I had not been totally sure I was going to attend. (I was soon taught about “gay standard time,” LOL.)

I stayed the whole meeting and was active in the LGSA for the next 4 years–and that first year was when Brown happened to host the NELGSU conference.

Here’s an indicator how much of an outsider I still felt, though…

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

Registration for RWA National opens next week (on Feb 2, according to the RWA website), and so now’s probably a really good time for me to blog about the pros and cons of attending big romance cons, specifically the cost. Really, for me, the only downside is how expensive it is to attend either of the two biggies on the romance calendar, RWA and RT Booklovers (often just called RT).

I mentioned in my email newsletter recently that I didn’t attend the 2011 RWA conference in New York City because I simply couldn’t afford to. But now in 2016 I can’t afford NOT to. Here’s why.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

I’m sitting here in bed on the last night of RT Booklovers, with my knee up on pillows with an ice pack. Ouch. You see, at Heather Graham’s Vampire Ball, they had a charity fundraiser for a pediatric AIDS organization, where for five bucks you could dance with the cover model of your choice. So I danced with the delectable DeLonn Donovan, which was lovely. But then the next time I tried to stand up, my left knee was so swollen I could barely limp back to my room.

Great thanks to Sarah Frantz Lyons and L.A. Witt (aka Lauren Gallagher) who retrieved me a bag of ice. I did myself a mischief, it would seem!

I figure to recap the convention I should note a couple of things. Like how about my awards speeches? That’s a good thing to blog!

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

NOW UPDATED! The RT Booklovers Convention, colloquially known simply as “RT”, is a nonstop whirlwind of book love. I went to my first one last year, and it was simply an awesome time with a couple thousand passionate romance-novel-loving women (and a few men). It’s a place where no one’s afraid to wear their good cardigan sweater *and* custom Avengers high-top sneakers *and* rhinestone cat eye glasses. It’s a place where over a thousand introverts get showered with free books at parties where the publishers ply them with red wine and cupcakes. (I’m exaggerating about none of this: check my Instagram feed from last year for the proof.)

It’s a huge non-stop party, with a TON going on. Check out The Agenda, which isn’t even everything! There’s also an app! The one problem with the app and the online agenda, though, is if 9for example) you search for my name, only ONE of the events I’m doing comes up! It’s not all cross-indexed. (No, I don’t know why.)

If you’ve never been to RT before and you’re not sure you can commit to the whole thing, there are day passes, and Saturday (“FAN-Tastic Day”) is the day with the Giant Book Fair–you can also do book fair ONLY. But check out the agenda and see what you like.

Under the cut, here are the details on ALL the places I’ll be found during the convention:

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.