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Teaser From Another Unfinished Steampunk Story

Photo of a Glasgow train engine, accompanying a steampunk short story snippet from speculative fiction writer Cat Rambo.
If you're interested in my steampunk stories, you might start with "Clockwork Fairies," which originally appeared on Tor.com
I’ve been writing a lot in a steampunk world lately; this is the fourth story set in this world. The passengers are headed to Seattle, but a version much grimier and war-ridden than our own. The Civil War is three years over; another war, over a substance called phlogiston, has arisen.

Jemina noticed the Very Small Person the moment she entered the train.The child paused in the doorway to survey the car before glancing down at her ticket and then at the other half of the hard wooden bench, high-backed, its shellac peeling, that Jemina sat on. Jemina tucked the macrame bag beside her in with her elbow.

The child was one of the last on, which was why Jemina had been hoping against hope to have the bench to herself, at least all the two day trip to Kansas city. The train began to roll forward, a hoot of steam from the engine, a bell clang from the caboose at the back of the train, the rumble underfoot making the little girl pick her way with extra caution, balancing the small black suitcase in one hand against the pillowy cloth bag in the other.

She arrived mid-car beside Jemina and nodded at her as she struggled briefly to hoist her suitcase up before the elderly man across the man did it for her. She plumped the cloth bag in the corner between sidearm and back and sat down with a little noise of delight as she looked around. Catching herself at the noise, she blushed, fixed her gaze sternly forward as she folded her hands in her lap, and peeped at Jemina sidelong.

Jemina tried to imagine how she might appear. She knew herself thin but nicely dressed and pale-skinned. The lace at her throat was Bruges, the cross around her neck gold. She looked like a school-teacher, she imagined, and not a particularly nice one. She felt her lips thin further at the thought.

The child, interpreting the flattening of Jemina’s mouth for disapproval, fished in her bag and took out a small blackbound Bible. She began to read.

“Oh, it’s all right,” Jemina said. Her boldness surprised her, but this was a child, after all. “I’m Jemina Iarainn and I’m a scientist, headed to work at the War Institute in Seattle. Who are you are where are you going?”

The smile bestowed on her could have lit a room. The Bible slid back into the bag. “Oh thank goodness! I’m Laurel Finch and this is my very first train ride ever, up to Seattle too, and I was hoping I’d have an agreeable companion on my voyage.”

She stumbled a little over the solemnity in the last words. Jemina said, “Trips are much, much nicer with someone to talk to. Where are you going in Seattle? To visit relatives?”

“To the Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home there,” Laurel said, and her mouth drooped before she summoned her smile again. “I’ve been staying with my uncle for the last three years but he is traveling to China as an ambassador. It’s all right, he’ll come back for me, but in the meantime I’m to live there for a few years.”

“Seattle is very nice,” Jemina said. Her mind raced along the years before this child, living among orphans with no chance of adoption herself. Bleak, as bleak as any of Jemina’s childhood years. “You will meet Princess Angeline, Chief Seattle’s daughter. She lives down near the market and is a real Indian princess.”
“Do you know Seattle well?”

Jemina shook her head, then nodded. “My twin sister is out there already and she has been writing me long letters.”

“Is she also a scientist?”

“She writes for the newspaper.”

“Oh! Like Nellie Bly!” Laurel clapped her hands and Jemina sighed internally. A daredevil reporter was more exciting than a scientist, but she was the one constructing giant killing war machines, after all, even though she was not at liberty to talk about any of that.

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

~K. Richardson

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Social Media and Internet Links for November, 2014

Photo of a clock shaped like a Neko Cat, altered with the Percolator app.
Covers the basics of creating and maintaining an online presence for writers. What you need on a website, how to effectively use social media, how to find readers via social media, what free resources are available to writers, whether it's worth it to pay for online advertising, and, most importantly, how to promote yourself online without using all your valuable writing time.
Nobody reading your blog? 10 reasons to persist!: Tne more than valid reasons to keep blogging, even when the only person commenting is your mother.
12 Places to Find Fabulous Content: Some good stuff here that’s adaptable to whatever type of blog one might be working with. “Your own bloopers,” for example, is a nice one.
How to Use Social Media Listening to Create Better Content for Your Audience: Along the same lines, identify relevant topics to write about on social media as well as identifying influencers and building relationships.
How to Get Interviewed by Popular Blogs (Even If You’re Not a Big Shot): If you’re trying to build your authority — as well as links to your website — getting interviewed is a valid strategy. This should help get you started, but be aware it requires a little bit of brazeness.
Content Distribution Tools: A variety of additional ways to share content, such as a list on List.ly
13 Experts on How To Promote Content Before Hitting Publish: Some of these steps seem more actionable than others, but some useful stuff to think about when strategizing content production.
7 Practical Ways to Find Content Your Followers Will Love: Primarily about tools rather than different approaches. Covered are Buffer, BuzzSumo, ContentGems, Feedly, HootSuite, Klout, and Swayy.

Community
Building a Sustainable Community. As a sometimes moderator of the SFWA boards, and the person the moderators currently report to, I keep an eye out for interesting or useful community building pieces. This is one,although it’s aimed at a community of fans.

Privacy and Security
No one knows where it came from, but there’s new spyware called Regin out there, and it is widespread in crucial industries such as energy, telecom, hospitality, and travel. It’s there and actively monitoring, but experts don’t know why. “Once they [Regin’s operators] gain access, they can remotely control a person’s keyboard, monitor Internet activity, and recover deleted files….O’Murchu said Regin is part of a disquieting trend of government-written and government-enacted malware.”

Social Media
What Is Pinterest? A Database of Intentions: An interview with Evan Sharp, one of Pinterest’s co-founders, about the image-centered social network. “What’s cool is that because every object was put there by a person. It’s not the largest inventory in the way that maybe a nerd like me would get excited about. But everything that’s on there, at least one human found interesting, so there is a very good chance that at least one other human is going to find that interesting. So, it’s a good set of objects. It’s the world’s largest set of objects that people care about.”
I put a couple of Twitter-related blog posts out in November. They were Twitter Basics and Best Practices and The One Twitter List You Should Be Keeping: My thoughts on some Twitter best practices.
2014 Social Media Image Size Cheat Sheet: “Understanding why you should use images is the easy part. It’s the mastering of how to actually do it that can be tricky. In addition to finding the right images to post, tweet, pin, and share across your different networks; you also need to figure out the right dimensions for your images, as well.” That’s pretty dead on, which makes this a very useful resource.
The 10 Latest and Greatest Social Media Strategies to Boost Your Results and Save You Time: Some useful and interesting stuff here, at least a couple of which I plan to try.
Social Sharing Powerhouses: Some places (or strategies) you may not be trying, like Guy Kawasaki’s approach of tweeting a piece of content four times over the course of eight hours.
10 Data-Driven Steps To Dominate LinkedIn Publishing: I still don’t feel like I’ve got a good handle on how to use LinkedIn, but this article may provide a decent starting point.
Whats the Best Way to Spend 30 Minutes of Your Time on Social Media Marketing? Unsurprisingly, being able to schedule content plays a part here too. Includes the 12 tasks of a social media manager.
8 Piece-of-Cake Ways to Get More Pinterest Followers: Pinterest remains a social network of interest to me. These are some decent best practices for posting on there.

Technology
10 Boring PR Tasks to Automate: Some of this is probably stuff you don’t worry about doing, like tracking the click rate of your e-mails, but I strongly suggest automating social media where you can with something like the Buffer app.
What do I mean when I say something like click rate? Here’s a basic overview of terms like click rate and conversion.
List-Building Strategies: Your email list is supposed to be your best place for selling things. Here’s some hints on building that mailing list.
7 Indispensable and Free Website Graders and Content Scorers: Some useful ways to look at your website for weak spots. Very nice to have something to looks at accessibility issues, which is a review that (IMO) websites should conduct every year.
How Big is Email? This big.

I follow links like this in order to keep my next edition of Creating an Online Presence up to date. If you want to track my links as they occur, you can follow me on Delicious. If you’re interested in the next online class on it, it’s Sunday morning, February 15th, 2015, 9:30 AM-12:30 PM PST. The cost is $89 for former students; $99 for new students.

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Twitter Basics and Best Practices for Writers

Why Talk About Twitter Basics and Best Practices?

Cover for Creating an Online Presence
Cat's first nonfiction book talks about how to set up and maintain an online presence -- without cutting into your writing time.

This year I switched the focus of my social media efforts to Twitter, because it seemed to me Facebook was an increasingly ineffectual way to reach fans. Because of that, I’ve been spending a lot more time looking at the people following me on there as well as thinking about Twitter, its philosophy, and its uses overall.

Why does a writer want to be on Twitter? The reason is more than just “sell books”. It’s often a way to network with existing fans (who will buy more books in the future), cultivate new fans, connect with peers and other industry professionals, to find out industry and writing news and yes, of course, to procrastinate in a thousand different ways.

I used to automatically follow people who followed me but nowadays I spend a few minutes to click through and look at their page and the tweets it contains. I’ve noticed that a lot of people are doing it “wrong,” or at least in a way that ends up detracting from their purpose. Most of these are easy fixes. Here’s some tips for setting up an account on there and as well as for maintaining a presence.

The Basics of Setting up a Twitter Account

If you have never experienced Twitter, it’s basically a way to post short messages. I suggest reading some of these basic tutorials on it. Once you’re ready, create your account, keeping the following things in mind.

  1. A picture’s worth a thousand words. Include both a profile and a background picture. Please don’t just make it the default Twitter “egg”.
  2. Give people a reason to follow you. Tell them who you are, but do it in an interesting way.
  3. Give people a way to find out more. Include your website in your profile.
  4. Remember that profiles include SEO keywords. Think about what sort of searches you want readers to be finding you by and include them (gracefully!) in your bio.
  5. Don’t sell stuff via an overt link in your profile picture, background picture, or bio. It comes off as over-eager and clueless.
  6. Make it look nice. Proofread!

Best Practices on Twitter for Writers

Part of successful social media is consistency. You have to do something on at least a monthly basis, and really probably a bit more often than that unless you’re determined to be as barebones as possible, in which case you might as well just renounce the world electronic and move to the woods to live off the grid. (IMO).

  1. Don’t sell, sell, sell. If your stream is nothing but links to your book on Amazon, I’m not following you back. My rule of thumb is at least four non-selling Tweets to every selling one. Examples of nonselling? Promoting other people’s stuff, cat or child pictures, observations about life, interesting or enlightening quotes, links to articles that interested you, and snippets from your own #wip are all valid.
  2. Don’t be negative. Don’t be jaded or whiney or bitter or angry or mean. Just don’t. Studies show people prefer a positive or cheerful Twitter stream.
  3. Answer and acknowledge. When people RT, my habit is to thank them and also to add them to a special Twitter list. When I’m skimming through Twitter for things to amuse/entertain/idly chatter about/RT, I often look at that list because it’s people who’ve proven they want to build a Twitter relationship.
  4. Be a little selective about your followers. On a daily basis I look to see who’s following me. No profile info? Nothing but book selling? No tweets at all? I don’t follow back. Periodically I run the justunfollow tool and clear my follower list of people I don’t know but am following while they’re not following me back.
  5. It’s okay to repeat yourself (a little). Think that latest blog post was particularly noteworthy? Repeat the announcement the next day, and then again the following week. Build a list of such posts for a “best of” category on your site.
  6. Automate SOME things. Don’t auto-message followers, for example. But do use a tool like Buffer to schedule tweets so you catch a variety of times, such as those repeated posts.

Want to know more about how to use social media and your Internet presence to sell books and find new opportunities without wasting all your time staring at kitten pictures? Check out my book, Establishing an Online Presence for Writers.

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