I just posted the first story from the Patreon campaign over there as well as mailing it out. It’s a story set in Altered America, a steampunk version of 19th century America that I’ve been working in recently. If you read Raapacini’s Crow, which appeared on Beneath Ceaseless Skies this month, it’s the same world.
19th century America is one of my favorite historical periods, and I’m looking forward to bringing in some of my favorite figures as characters, such as Lucy Stone, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Victoria Woodhull. You’ll find a somewhat altered Abraham Lincoln as well, who has made a terrifying choice in order to win the Civil War, one that will affect the country for decades, possibly centuries, to come.
The story is inspired by the television show, Wild Wild West, which was steampunk back before anyone knew the term. The pair of Pinkerton agents in the story have already appeared in one other story, and I suspect there’s plenty more of their adventures lurking in the wings.
Here’s the first few paragraphs:
Frenzies of gingerbread adorned the house’s facade, but it was splintery, paint peeling in long shaggy spirals that fuzzed the fretwork’s outlines. The left side of the house drooped like the face of a stroke victim, windows staring blindly out, cataracted with the dusty remnants of curtains.
Agent Artemus West thought that it would have given a human man the chills. He glanced back at Elspeth to see how she was taking it, but her face was chiseled and resolute as a fireman’s axe.
“You all right?”
She swabbed at her forehead with a bare forearm, leaving streaks of dark wet dirt. “Thank your lucky stars you’re mechanical and don’t feel the heat,” she rasped.
Hot indeed if enough to irritate her into mentioning that. He chose to ignore it.
The house sagged amid slumping cottonwoods, clusters of low-lying trees, their leaves ovals of green and pale brown. Three stories, and above that, two cupolas thrust upward into the sky, imploring, the left one tilted at an angle. The wind whistled through the fretwork, a shifting, hollow sound, like a jug’s mouth being blown across. There had once been a flower garden towards the back. Weeds had claimed most of it, but the papery red heads of poppies blazed among the tangle. The sky stretched high and blue and hollow overhead.
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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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Creating an Online Presence for Your Group: Some Basic Steps
Trying to set up an online presence for your group or organization? Here’s some basics to think about.
One: Include a blog on your website that has new content on a regular basis.
This first step is key to a better social media presence, because it influences your search engine rankings. Better search engine rankings draw more traffic to your site, as do good keywords, and if your blog features information about the group, it’s pretty much guaranteed to have the appropriate keywords.
Establish realistic criteria for “regular”: daily? weekly? biweekly? What can you actually expect to do?
Figure out how you will generate such content. Some suggestions:
Group member announcements, interviews, and guest posts.
Group events and news.
Posts drawing on other social media, such as announcements of new videos on the Youtube channel (see point 4) or Pinterest boards (see point 5).
Calls for volunteer positions and interviews with volunteers.
Yearly best-of lists or review columns.
This blog should drive the group’s presence on social networks. Posts should automatically propagate to other networks, thereby relieving the pressure for someone to be managing and posting to individual streams, such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as presenting a more unified and consistent approach.
Two: Keep your Facebook policy simple and free.
Social networks rise and fall, but currently Facebook’s attempts to monetize itself by making you pay for messages or pay extra to reach people is making it less useful to those of us who want the most bang for the buck. Simply put, recent changes make is so not everyone who’s liked your page or followed you is seeing your posts.
Basically all you need is a public Facebook fan page to which blog posts (generated in point 1) are automatically posted and which people can “like” in order to receive news of the organization via that social network. Here’s a sample of my writerly FB fan page and one I did for a recent book. (Feel free to “like” them!)
Three: Use Google+.
As Facebook’s popularity falls, Google+’s is rising, particularly internationally. There’s space to be innovative here. Set up an open community. Certainly blog posts should get propagated to here, but make the most of Google+ technology and encourage people to use Hangouts, share documents, etc.
Four: Use Youtube.
Users like more than just text, and video is one way to get more interest, if your group is one likely to generate videos of events, gatherings, speeches, etc. Each time a video is put up, there should be a blog post with a link and brief description, thereby generating blog content.
Six: Make it easy for your group members to connect.
Make social media information, such as Twitter or Facebook handles, available to users. Provide directories of alumni on the various networks. For example, someone joining Twitter might find a list of all group members currently on Twitter useful. Here’s my list of Codex members on Twitter.
Seven: Make it easy for your group members to create community.
Provide a way people can upload announcements to the blog for a moderator to check and post on a daily or weekly basis. Encourage people to reply to each other’s posts and pass them along on social networks by noticing and rewarding community efforts as well as by leading by example and being an active and responsive community member.
Eight: You don’t need forums or mailings.
Creating a log-in for a forum or subscribing to a newsletter is one way for people to reach you, but social media has the advantage of reaching out to new as well as established community members. It’s as easy — in some cases easier — for someone to check your group’s Facebook page as it is to log into a forum. Physical mailings are costly; e-mail lists need to be maintained.
Nine: Use the community.
Your members include people who are invested in the organization and are also social influencers. The organization should be making the most of this. Here’s some possible ways to do so.
Create social media posts that include calls to action, asking people to pass along information.
Generate guest posts for the blog from the community by calling for volunteers to write them.
Generate Youtube videos and Pinterest boards via the community by issuing calls to collect images or videos for a specific event or contest.
Ten: No matter what, have a succinct and coherent plan.
Figure out what the social media mission is (perhaps increase membership and establish brand). Establish (again, realistic is important) criteria for success in the various social media, such as number of website hits via Facebook each month, number of Twitter followers, etc. Check the success rate on at least yearly basis, perhaps better every six months or even three, given how fast social media can change.
Give things a unified feel. The background on the group’s Twitter page should be the same one used on Facebook or on the blog. Use the same font where possible.
Have someone who’s in charge of all this, rather than trying to do it by committee. Having someone oversee things makes sure that gaps don’t get missed.
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Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.
This Sunday’s online class is Literary Techniques in Genre Fiction. Come and pick up some new tools to use in your fiction!Hello folks! January has been crazy, and I have been bad about blogging. One thing I’m going to be doing going forward is scattering in some food posts, because I’m cooking a lot this year as well as working with the SFWA Cookbook Project.
BEASTS OF TABAT is coming out on March 27, 2015, at Emerald City ComicCon, which is very exciting, but also blindingly fast. If you want to get news about the book and other projects, please sign up for my mailing list:
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Meanwhile, I’m working away on two book projects, one a YA novel, the other Book 2 of the Tabat Quartet, HEARTS OF TABAT. It picks up halfway through BEASTS OF TABAT and involves three of the secondary characters. Book 3, EXILES OF TABAT, will take up the characters from BEASTS OF TABAT again at the point where BEASTS leaves off. Book 4, GODS OF TABAT, is plotted but I’m still figuring out the viewpoint stuff.
One of the viewpoint characters of HEARTS OF TABAT is Adelina, Bella’s former lover and closest friend. I’ve been writing about her this morning:
Adelina knew that in producing only one child, Emiliana had replicated the structure of the family from which she’d come. She wondered sometimes if her mother ever had, like Adelina, wished for a sister. What would it be like to have another soul that knew all the peculiar circumstances of your family existence, the conglomeration of odd relatives and circumstances and situations but more than anything, knew all the little sore spots that the world insisted on imposing, like the way her mother could, with a single look, indicate so much disapproval of an outfit.
Adelina straightened her shoulders. This was the first time she’d appeared in front of her mother wearing the cut and device of a Publisher, the open pages of a book, edged in the gold lines that indicated she was the head of a house. There were only five people in Tabat qualified to wear that device, but Emiliana refused to see any distinction in that. A house that worked in paper was lower status than one that worked in metal, let allow the heights that a banking house like the Nettlepurses were at. In Emiliana’s eyes, Adelina had stripped herself of all that, had stepped down into what was for Emiliana the equivalent of a puddle of shit when compared to the rarefied heights she had been born into.
Adelina imagined a sister standing beside her, whispering in her ear, “It’s all right. She doesn’t understand what an advantage such an outlet could be to a banking house.” A sister would have been willing to take the reins of the Nettlepurses and work together with Spinner Press, taking advantage of all that the two could offer each other.
But that was the other part of Emiliana’s disappointment. There were others who could take Adelina’s role, certainly, but they were all of distant blood, rather than her child.
And while Adelina could argue the advantages of her having formed the publishing house over and over again, she couldn’t argue with that disappointment, the real reason that underlay the look Emiliana gave Adelina as she came into the breakfast room.
But Emiliana said nothing, only offered a sharp nod of greeting, and returned her attention to the newssheets in her hands, the accounts of the morning arrivals at the docks, which ships carrying what, traveling mainly from the Southern Isles or elsewhere on the coast, but sometimes from the Old Continent or even places like the Rose Kingdom or the Winterlands.
In other news, I’ll be speaking briefly at an animated short films presentation that’s part of the Seattle Asian-American Film Festival on February 14th. See the Supernatural Seattle blog for details, and follow it on Twitter in order to get news of events and posts as they appear.
I just posted the first story from the Patreon campaign over there as well as mailing it out. It’s a story set in Altered America, a steampunk version of 19th century America that I’ve been working in recently. If you read Raapacini’s Crow, which appeared on Beneath Ceaseless Skies this month, it’s the same world. 
