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In this newsletter

• Thinky Thoughts: Going to Great Lengths to Definitely Not See The Sun
• Daron’s Guitar Chronicles new vols 1, 2, and 3 are live!
• Free read: my oldest story on the Internet
• Book rec: The Night Eaters
• RomCon in Ashland, May 18th! Neon Hemlock live on May 22!
• Photos from ICFA!
• WIP Report: dragons are eating my brain!
• A recipe: Scones!
• One Featured Backlist Book: Wild Licks

Thinky Thoughts: Going to Great Lengths to Definitely Not See the Sun

After seeing the total solar eclipse in 2017, and noticing that a 2024 eclipse trip would land on my birthday weekend, we started planning to see it right then. A year ago we booked our hotel, rental car, and flights to Austin, Texas, which would normally have the highest chance of being sunny in early April of anywhere in the country. By contrast, New England typically has the highest chance of being cloudy. So it made sense to plan well in advance to go to Texas.

However, Mother Nature had other ideas.

Our flight TO Texas was cancelled because New England was experiencing a nor’easter with ice pellets being driven by 60 mph wind gusts. Because we were going to be delayed by a day or more, we lost our rental car reservation. AND for the entire week leading up to when we were supposed to leave, we’d been watching the cloud cover predictions and Texas was looking like it might be entirely clouded over along the path of totality.

Well. I took the cancelled flight as a sign. We did not go to Texas.

Mirrored from cecilia tan.

Ars Technica published an article by me on Pride Day (yesterday, traditionally the last Sunday in June) entitled “Coming Out as a Slytherin.”

In the article I detail how there have been a series of “closets” whose doors I have had to kick down, from coming out as bisexual in the 1980s, to coming out as a pro who also wrote fanfic in the 2000s, to, eventually, realizing I had to come out as Slytherin, too.

In the article I talk about the pervasiveness of the anti-Slytherin bias in the books, which carries right through from Harry’s first hearing of the word through the epilogue:

“One of the magics of the Potter books for me was that as I read them, I was transported back to feeling like a kid again. … My journey as a fan… started from a childlike devouring of the books where I took Harry’s journey at face value. Harry hated Snape and Draco? I hated Snape and Draco. Harry thought all Slytherins are bad? I thought all Slytherins are bad. It’s a book for kids, right? A simplistic worldview is appropriate and comforting.”

“But the moment I leapt into fandom headlong was also when book six, Half-Blood Prince, came out. In that book, Harry keeps on thinking that Snape and Draco are villains. It’s also a book where many adult readers started realizing that Snape and Draco are victims. I went back and re-read the entire series through Snape and Draco’s eyes and what I saw was very different.”

“I guess you could say it was the Potter fandom equivalent of being woke.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

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.

This is exciting! Something new! RT Book Reviews will be hosting me and Tara Sue Me (author of the Submissive series) in a live YouTube chat this Friday, Feb 5th at 12 noon to 1pm (Eastern US time). Her new book THE MASTER is out this week, and of course my TAKING THE LEAD just hit last week!

Want to leave a question for us to answer? Post it over at RT Book Reviews here: http://www.rtbookreviews.com/blog/87694/live-chat-cecilia-tan-and-tara-sue-me-friday-february-5-noon

Here’s the chat video stream window, embedded:

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

I was up all night last night when I discovered David Bowie had died. My entire Twitter feed turned into a wake until dawn. 100% of the tweets, except for the promoted tweets about the movie The Martian (eerie coincidence) having won a Golden Globe award. Spiders from Mars indeed.

I’ve talked about Bowie a lot, and written about him a little. Most recently the essay I had in QUEERS DESTROY SCIENCE FICTION I talk about how as a misfit 11-year-old I found a role model in Bowie not only for daring to declare himself bisexual, but in the embrace of science fiction analogies to define himself “Other.” He created a persona that was a space alien. Later he created other personas…some of which were space aliens pretending to, or learning to be, humans. Just knowing he existed was a spark of encouragement that growing up a sci-loving nerd with gender conformity issues was going to turn out OKAY.

At the time I didn’t grasp that his true role as my guardian angel had a third component, that of creative person and artist itself.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

Last night we went seeking the wonders of the world. And we found them.

I had read on Twitter early in the evening that a “geomagnetic storm” was going on and that there would likely be amazing auroras to be seen, but corwin and I both had to work until 9pm and I didn’t even think of going hunting for it. But after we’d finished dinner, around 11 o’clock at night, I saw a photo on Twitter taken from the bay in Salem, Massachusetts that looked spectacular. Sure it was a long exposure photo, but Salem does not exactly have dark sky conditions and is very far south of where one normally thinks of seeing auroras.

I showed it to corwin.

“Want to go?” he asked.

“I’ll put on pants,” I replied.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

Just got this press release from NLA! Congrats to all these talented writers! Winners will be announced on May 1st!

SEMI-FINALISTS ANNOUNCED FOR 2015 NLA-I WRITING AWARDS

(Columbus, OH) — National Leather Association – International (NLA-I), a leading organization for activists in the pansexual SM/leather/fetish community, announced today the semi-finalists for its annual writing awards. Named after activists and writers Geoff Mains, John Preston, Pauline Reage, Cynthia Slater, and the groundbreaking organization Samois, they are awarded annually to recognize excellence in writing and publishing about Leather, SM, bondage and fetishes.

The semi-finalists for the Cynthia Slater Non-fiction Article Award are:

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

I have so much going on these days it’s hard to keep up with it all! So as it happens two important milestones are coming next week. One is the release of the new edition of THE TOWER AND THE TEARS, book two of my Magic University series, in all new paperback, never-before-heard audiobook, and new ebook editions from Riverdale Avenue Books. The other is we’ll be hitting post #600 of Daron’s Guitar Chronicles. Yeah. That’s a whole lotta webserial.

So I’m doing two chats back-to-back on my YouTube Live channel on Tuesday, January 20th:

From 8-9pm I will do a Magic University chat, read an excerpt from THE TOWER AND THE TEARS, give away some copies of the gorgeous new paperbacks, answer questions about magic, sex, and magical sex.

From 9-10pm I will do a Daron’s Guitar Chronicles chat, give away a copy of the brand new DGC volume one paperback which just came in the mail, read Daron’s fan mail, field questions, and geek out about music and LGBT pop culture history.

Here’s the URL where the video will stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C4JIucBz8g

and you can subscribe to my YouTube Channel itself: https://www.youtube.com/user/ctanvideo/

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

How The Line Between Fantasy and Reality Defines Consent: And Why It Matters
by Cecilia Tan

This blog post is prompted by two things that happened today. One, a male writer friend I respect a lot and who is clueful about many things including sexuality and feminism asked me: “Serious question: I’d love to hear your thoughts, as a kink-friendly feminist Asian woman, about racial fetishes. Blog post?”

The other is that right before reading his message, I had just gotten email from a reader who wrote: “Anything that makes violence abuse and torture seem more attractive, i.e. associating it with getting off sexually or glorifying in anyway, is keeping us from developing into a more enlightened society” and also “those feminists who think that rape portrayed in any format is okay are just shooting a cause in the foot.” This fan is someone that I met at a BDSM convention and their email to me says they’re okay with common consensual BDSM activities like bondage and flogging and spanking. What prompted their reaction was not the convention, but reading some of my fan fiction that featured “non-con” — non-consensual acts. (If you’re new to me: I’m a professional writer of erotica, romance, and sf/fantasy whose fiction often deals with BDSM. I also write fanfic for fun.)

You might think that someone who was okay with BDSM wouldn’t be able to make a statement like “Anything that makes violence abuse and torture seem more attractive, i.e. associating it with getting off sexually or glorifying in anyway, is keeping us from developing into a more enlightened society.” The point I’d like to make here is not that this particular fan is confused or a hypocrite, it’s to point out that this particular kind of hypocrisy is VERY COMMON. So common perhaps we should say it’s human nature, except then we’d have to accept it instead of trying to change it. And I’m trying to change it. My activism and my creative life for the past 23 years have been built on trying to change it, on the following basis:

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

As many of you know, I’m a previous winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Leather Association, a leading organization for activists in the pansexual SM/leather/fetish community. Right now I remain active by helping to judge the nonfiction entries for the annual writing awards. I just got the press release announcing the finalists for the 2013 entries and I’m pleased to notice that two books published by Circlet Press have made it onto the lists! House of Sable Locks by Elizabeth Schechter is a finalist for the Pauline Reage Novel Award, and No Safewords edited by Laura Antoniou is a finalist for the Samois Anthology Award!

Winners will be announced this fall at the NLA-I general assembly (date/place TBD).

Here’s the full list of finalists:

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.