Smashwords!

So, I'm dipping my toe in the world of e-publishing. I have two pieces up at Smashwords: "Ideas in Abundance", my chapbook of poems inspired by the Sandman story "Calliope", and my novella "Killing Time".

The formatting wasn't terribly awful: most of the poems in the collection didn't require any special treatment. I did have to re-create the tesseract poem as an image: Smashwords doesn't support tables. They also don't support columns, which means that a piece of "Killing Time" that's meant to be a newspaper article, which I had formatted in two columns, had to revert to normal formatting.

What took more time than the formatting was the cover images. Here's the one for "Ideas in Abundance":



You can see I tried to replicate the funky white-on-black word balloons Morpheus uses in the comic. It came out OK, but the text is a little small for the thumbnail that Smashwords displays. I like the cover for "Killing Time" better.



The original image (Wikimedia Commons, you can see it here) has a wicked highlight on the hour hand. I erased most of it in the course of getting rid of all the other background stuff: it looked pretty weird, so I covered it up with the flare filter.

Both pieces passed the automated format check, first try: frankly, compared to uploading school district data to the state's data submission website, this is nothing... (I shouldn't crow about that too soon: I'm waiting to see if they make it through the manual check, at which point they'll get ISBN numbers.)

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Write Anything

So I have a gig as a contributor at the revamped Write Anything blog. My intro post is up here.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Mendage

Morning: a pale orange ribbon wrapped around the horizon behind grey cotton-puffs that fill a fragile sky. Frost is sparkling everywhere, like the imagining of shattered glass. The street is still.

Can you wake without disturbing the sleep of others? Tread softly. In summer I am wakened by someone else's clock, but today only crows and cockerels announce the light to me.

Dawn is said to break. Today let there be no shattering: let gentle clouds be our blanket and our cushions. Let the sharp intricacies of frost soften to the tenderness of dew. Let there be mendage.

Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Fresh Napkin

The world after snow
is like a table freshly laid
with spotless linen and clean forks.

But crumbs and crumpled napkins
testify to diners' pleasure
and make glad the cooks.

Stepping out your door in the morning,
enjoy that first crunch-- like the crust
on crème brulee. Rumple the cloth.

--image courtesy of Magpie Tales
Collection available! Knocking from Inside

Perversity

Spring has come according to
the calendar the daffodils keep.
Crocuses and violets spread across
the succulent lawns. Buds are fat
with sap everywhere.
Only a fool would lament for winter,
for the snow that wasn't
or the ice whose killing touch
passed us by.

Robins are looking out new
nesting holes, while geese discuss
points north. Mallards preen their new
plumage, seasonally green.
Squirrels drag out old maps
and trace the location of last year's cache.
Only the human heart can persevere
and hold on to winter
in the teeth of spring.

--for Big Tent's winter blues prompt
Collection available! Knocking from Inside