What a week! Things are crazy here so I wanted to bring you up to date on it before we crash into the weekend and the new school year, which starts Monday.
First of all… it’s August. When did that happen. I am not prepared.
Second of all… our roof is leaking. Into the house. So that’s a thing I was also not prepared for. Florida do be like that, what with all the tropical storms, but still. Replacing the roof was not on my wishlist for 2024.
Third of all: still no job. -_- Won’t belabor that. I’m still looking.
But on to the creative stuff: so we have about five months left in the year and my plan, tentatively, is to publish two books: FireBorn’s Legacy, and Surela’s Book 2, An Exile Amid Stars, which is about 10% done right now. I would have liked to finish more work this year but there’s no pushing it; in 2024-2025 my focus is absolutely on being mom because this is an important and busy year. So I’ll finish what I can, and focus on bringing in new readers as my stopgap for money since my art/writing income continues to be our sole income at this time.
I actually think the ‘bring new people in’ thing is slowly working, because I am seeing new names float by… courtesy of my shift in focus from retail sales to direct-to-audience sales (through Kickstarter, Patreon, and Shopify).
Aletsen, the Shopify store was a tremendous amount of work to set up (like four solid months of work) and even now I’m only calling it half done: the ebooks, audiobooks, and paperbacks are now available, but I have yet to touch artwork/merchandise. But what a return on that investment! It is truly rewarding to be able to keep nearly all the money I make through the store; to be able to choose how much I earn; to be able to run sales, or bundle books or series the way I see fit. To see names! Every person who buys through the store makes me light up a little when I see their name and address and imagine them on the other end of the transaction. So cool! I love that connection, no matter how fleeting.
I also love the feeling of breaking free from Big Retail and its algorithms. How I hated having to play the algorithm game… like walking into a casino, knowing the house always wins but you have no choice but to play. It’s also fun to feel like so many of my sales are now sliding under the radar. The sales I make directly to my readers and art-lovers are never reflected on some bestseller list or in sales rankings. I don’t have to play that game either. You don’t have to keep up with anyone else, because no one knows what you’re up to. I suddenly understand why my cat is so excited about finding a new blanket to hide under. You’re king of the world when no one knows what you’re up to…!
So that’s honestly been one of the most delightful things I’ve done this year, and I’m so glad I went for it.
The other thing I’m trying this year, as most of you probably already know from the Kickstarter, is bespoke special edition hardcovers. Having my work in hardcover with foil dust jackets and colored endpapers and all the other fancy things that only bestselling authors usually get has been a bucket list item for me all of my life! I wondered if producing it myself would make it feel less legitimate, but it turns out that being able to make them look exactly the way I want is far more important than feeling like someone else thought I merited the special treatment. FireBorn’s Legacy is the first book I’ve designed, and it was definitely a learning curve to figure out how to set up the files, design the covers and endpapers, do the interiors, etc. But I feel like it's nothing but upward motion from here. I want to do a fancy release like this for every book in the future, and get to the back catalog too! It’ll require doing extra art for every book, but… what’s not to love about that?
I’d be happy to produce a hardcover edition just so I can buy it for myself, but it turns out that lots of you also want it, because the Kickstarter skyrocketed when I added them as prizes earlier today. I am a little staggered. In a good way. But you can ask my family I’ve been calmly hyperventilating most of the day. XD
So that’s where I am in early August. My plan for the remainder of the year is as follows:
• Wrap up and fulfill the FireBorn’s Legacy launch
• Continue writing the serial for Patrelocals
• Finish writing and launch Surela 2
• Run one or maybe two more little sticker Kickstarters
• Continue building out the shop
• Continue reaching out to new readers (and rewarding longtime fans!)
And now I’m going to go back to staring at this hardcover. So shiny. Literally!
Oh, right, links:
Kickstarter (running now): https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mcahogarth/fireborns-legacy?ref=c07gmv
Shopify: https://studiomcah.com/
Or at least, I intend it to be relaxing. Hopefully it delivers.
4:22 minutes
Materials:
- Pen: Moonman Starry Glass dip pen, Mars: https://www.jetpens.com/Moonman-Starry-Sky-Glass-Dip-Pen-Mars/pd/31536
- Paper: Strathmore Writing Series 500, lined: https://www.jetpens.com/Strathmore-500-Series-Writing-Pad-8.5-x-11-Lined-50-Sheets/pd/15322
- Ink: Robert Oster, Rose Gilt Tynte: https://www.jetpens.com/Robert-Oster-Rose-Gilt-Tynte-Fountain-Pen-Ink-Shake-N-Shimmy-50-ml-Bottle/pd/25170
In which I talk about the paper, the paint, and the experience of oils versus gouache. Fun stuff, will do more.
Thank you Locals supporters! Your contribution to my art war chest here is what's powering these experiments and videos. For now I'm keeping them public but I may start doing some subscriber-only videos if you all are interested.💖
Thanks for your comments yesterday on the business post... all very provocative, in a good way. I'll try to respond to all of them today.
Some Alysha misc now, since I'm gearing up for the results of the Kickstarter!
Petrov is giving away coupon codes for every book in the Alysha series (and has some leftover coupons for Marda and the business book). You can pick those up here (and please do! The books are bought already, someone should use them!) https://twitter.com/PetrovNeutrino/status/1457344535843987461
Our own @JudasComplex sent along a sample of the Faith in the Service audiobook, which I've attached for your delight! I... haven't had a chance to listen to it. Don't ask me about my past week and a half or so. Putting it here will guarantee I get to it.
After hearing the amused comments during the livestream, I went ahead and added all the ship type illustrations I have inked from the 90s to the wiki. Glory in the rampant adorableness of their anthropomorphic stylings! See those ...
A little comedy today, at least in the link. Transcript follows.
Hi, all. Welcome to this episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
A while back I was introduced to a comedy sketch about Cuban coffee by a Mexican comedian, Gabriel Iglesias. ( The sketch begins with him greeting all his fellow Latinos and then backing up to say ‘but we’re all different, aren’t we’ which is a segue into a demonstration of how different Hispanics speak Spanish.
It is hilarious. First, because I am a Spanish speaker and a linguistics hobbyist, and his portrayal of various accents resonated with my experiences in trying to make sense of them myself… Not always easy, since from culture to culture, slang and accent are often totally different (and sometimes grammar! Spaniards use a grammatical construct that has died out in many other Spanish-speaking countries, the plural “you.”)
I also loved it because the Cuban coffee part is real. I grew up with Cubans. I know how we are....
One of the most common things I hear (and say) right now is "the asymmetry is the story." Here's one about how none of us are innocent of the sins we hate in others.
Hi, all. Welcome to this week’s episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
It’s been weeks since the Baen’s Bar incident and I’m still thinking about it... because the longer I do, the more I feel, overwhelmingly, that it’s obvious that the problem is deeper than “this forum was saying stuff that offended us.” We have to back up to the glaring fact that people on opposite sides no longer consider each other human. Nothing I say will matter because the people disagreeing with me don’t think I’m human. They have denied my humanity; they have not bothered to listen to my beliefs, or have fake-listened to them in that way that people do when they’re so ready to prove you wrong that they’re only using your speech to provide talking points for their own ideas.
We have forgotten how to listen.
Increasingly, we have also ...
What if I told you that, after years of requests for the return of my Stardancer.org gallery, I was in the process of recreating it?
Because I am…! RIGHT NOW. flail
CHALLENGES
First, let me tell you why I haven’t had an online art gallery since stardancer went down:
I did not want to put thousands of images on free gallery sites (like DA) because it would be a ton of work, and I wouldn’t have any control over the site (“what if they go down one day”, “what if they start charging per-upload fees”, “what if they have copyright policy changes I don’t like”, “what if they start using their corpus to train AI”, etc, etc, etc). Can you imagine dumping hundreds of hours into uploading stuff only to lose it because the site owners made questionable decisions? Ugh.
I wasn’t capable of coding my own gallery and I didn’t like the gallery plugins for various content management systems. I could have installed a package on my hosting service, but none of the ones I saw were customizable enough, or did ...
I'm just about done collecting all my notes to begin "Red Honey", a lot of which involves looking for sketches... and this one, I overlooked until just now, is of Kediil and Serel. I love toned sketchbooks! They are so satisfying.
Anyway, next week, we begin!
We’re just about at the midpoint of 2025, so I thought today would be a good day to do a Jaguar check-in! What a weird year it’s been. Very busy, family-wise, with lots of both good and challenging changes; I am using up a lot of time on that, but how is that news? You know how it goes.
My current major project is finishing up the second Jokka collection and mailing all the Kickstarter prizes. That should be wrapped up next month sometime, when we start the Red Honey serialization. I tell you, it’s a wild to be scanning old sketchbooks, only to find sketches of the Red Honey characters from the 2000s! This story has been on the backburner a long time! I also unearthed a lot of sketches from the development of the jokka.org website, which I used the wayback machine to archive (as much as possible). I’m thinking of restoring some amount of it to my current website, which is my other major project right now: my website. I feel like ...
We once allowed our neuters to rule us; they raised up a glittering kingdom, one that rotted from its core the longer we permitted that offense against nature to continue. When we refused to address that imbalance, the Brightness and the Void Themselves smote the World, so powerfully that nothing was left of that time save fearful rumors, whispered across generations.
To this day, the World suffers from the blow Its divine siblings struck against It. We should be more careful of our virtue… or we may not survive the second lesson.
