Looking for a great way to launch your summer reading?
Last month, Heather Albano’s Timepiece: A Steampunk Time-Travel Adventure hit #1 on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes and Noble, and Google Play in the Steampunk genre! It was part of a two-day promotion that was more successful than we could ever have hoped.
Well, in case you missed it, here’s your chance to get the book free! Continue reading Launch your summer reading with a free time-travel adventure!
Stillpoint author and publisher David Kudler will be giving a talk this Saturday at the California Writers Club Sacramento on the subject of “The Enduring Hero’s Journey®: How to Make your Writing Compelling and Memorable.”
Kudler, who has worked with Joseph Campbell Foundation since 1999, will talk about Campbell’s concept of The Hero’s Journey®, as it was laid out in his seminal book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Kudler edited the 2008 edition of the book. He will look at the ways in which the Hero Journey can serve as a blueprint for creating an enduring, transformative story.
Location: Cattlemens Restaurant, 12409 Folsom Blvd., Rancho Cordova, CA
Date/Time: Saturday May 20, 2017, 11:00 AM-1:00 PM
Website: http://www.cwcsacramentowriters.org/2017/luncheon-david-kudler/
Sign up now on Goodreads for a chance to win a copy of Timepiece: A Steampunk Time-Travel Adventure by Heather Albano!
It’s 1815, and Wellington’s badly-outnumbered army stares across the field of Waterloo at Napoleon’s forces. Desperate to hold until reinforcements arrive, Wellington calls upon a race of monsters created by a mad Genevese scientist 25 years before.
It’s 1815, and a discontented young lady sitting in a rose garden receives a mysterious gift: a pocket watch that, when opened, displays scenes from all eras of history. Past…and future.
It’s 1885, and a small band of resistance fighters are resorting to increasingly extreme methods in their efforts to overthrow a steampunk Empire whose clockwork gears are slick with its subjects’ blood.
Are these events connected?
“Waterloo and time travel are made for each other and Heather Albano has done a wonderful job of giving us a delightful cast of characters, tasked with stitching together the proper nineteenth century while fending off several monstrous alternatives. Propulsive adventure with historical insight.” – Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars and 2312
“Austen, meet Waterloo. When a genteel 1815 heiress is given a strange watch, she time-travels to an 1885 England where history has gone hideously wrong. Now she has to change it back to what it “should” have been—and that never works out well, does it? A delicious supercharged blend of steampunk and the Napoleonic Wars, with a thrill on every page.” — Sarah Smith, The Vanished Child
“If Jane Austen and Mary Shelley had locked H. G. Wells in a dungeon and revised his wildest work, the result would have been something like this rollicking steampunk time-travel adventure that still manages to be a comedy of manners. Albano’s delightful characters confront the not only monsters and killer robots, but their own divided loyalties between personal happiness and the fate of their country.” – Ken Schneyer, The Law & the Heart
We’re excited to share with you the cover of Timekeeper: A Steampunk Time-Travel Adventure by Heather Albano:
I’m going to be running a workshop as part of Redwood Writers 2017 Academy on Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Hero Journey as it applies to exploring setting for writers!
Every story explores a hero’s journey along a path toward discovery. It’s easy to focus on the hero or on the goal, but what about the path? With David Kudler (author, publisher, and editor for the Joseph Campbell Foundation), explore the ways in which you can enrich your settings using the hero cycle explored by Campbell in his classic The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The Workshop will be Saturday, March 25 from 9:30 to 12:30 in Santa Rosa.
If you sign up for all three monthly workshops, you’ll get a discount; space is limited, so register now! Continue reading The Power of Where: Setting, Place, and the Hero’s Adventure
It is interesting that St. Valentine’s Day, celebrated in the second month of the year, is the festival of romantic love in Western culture. Interesting for a couple of reasons — the first being that poor Valentine wasn’t really much of a lover himself, as nearly as we can tell (though he was martyred for marrying Christian couples). Of course, his symbol has become the stylized “heart” shape, and the heart has long been identified, both East and West, as the seat of love. And so where earlier Europeans identified May Day and Midsummer Night as the festivals most connected with passion, the Christian world focussed on the day of the saint of the pierced heart.
The other interesting thing about February 14th being the lovers’ holiday, it seems to me, has less to do with Valentine, and everything to do with when it occurs: smack dab in the middle of the second month. Continue reading Two by Two: Happy Valentine’s Day!
Over the next few posts, I’ll be showing you how ebooks are coded and formatted. We’ll look at the anatomy of an ebook, and what makes it tick.
You’ve heard me call an ebook a website in a box. This time we’re going to talk about what’s inside the box.
First thing’s first: let me share an ebook with you. It’s the ePub file for a short story of mine called White Robes.
You’re welcome to read it, obviously, but for the purposes of this post (and the next two), we’re going to be opening up the box and dissecting the ebook.
This is the actual production file that I’ve uploaded to Amazon, by the way — it includes all of the coding and formatting that I typically include in creating an ebook. It will be the model that I’ll be using over the next few posts in discussing an ebook’s innards.
Stillpoint Digital Press authors are keeping very busy! In addition to multiple appearances, we’ve got news to share about a great interview, a chance to vote in a red-carpet award ceremony, and a sneak preview from a much-anticipated book! Continue reading Stillpoint Author News: An Interview, A Preview, and Appearances
New England fans of speculative fiction, take note! Stillpoint/Prometheus authors Heather Albano and Kenneth Schneyer are appearing this weekend at Boston’s Arisia 2017 conference, “New England’s largest, most diverse sci-fi and fantasy convention”!
Heather Albano, game writer and author of the recently published time-travel adventure Timepiece, will speak on three panels:
She’ll also be signing copies of Timepiece at the Dealer Room table of Broad Universe, an organization dedicated to promoting, encouraging, honoring, and celebrating women writers and editors in science fiction, fantasy, horror and other speculative genres. Go say hi, and pick up your signed copy!
CHECK OUT HEATHER’S SCHEDULE ON HER BLOG
Kenneth Schneyer, award-winning short writer and author of the collection The Law & the Heart, will be appearing no less than five times:
CHECK OUT HEATHER’S SCHEDULE ON HER BLOG
Check them both out—though you’ll have to choose this evening! In addition to being wonderful writers, they’re both wonderful speakers about their craft.
Heather Albano is a storyteller, history geek, and lover of both time-travel tropes and re-imaginings of older stories. You most likely know her from her game design work (which most recently included A Study In Steampunk, produced by Choice of Games, and contributions to TimeWatch and The Dracula Dossier, both published by Pelgrane Press)—but she writes non-interactive fiction too. Like the Keeping Time trilogy. Read more at heatheralbano.com
Kenneth Schneyer forgot he wanted to be a writer for 25 years, until he was ambushed by a gang of plot bunnies in 2006. Since then, he has sold stories to many science fiction and fantasy magazines and anthologies, several of which can be found on Amazon. His novella “Selected Program Notes from the Retrospective Exhibition of Theresa Rosenberg Latimer” has been nominated for a 2014 Nebula Award and a Theodore Sturgeon Award for best short science fiction.
Ken attended the Clarion Writers Workshop at UCSD in 2009, and joined the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop in 2010. Mostly he writes science fiction and fantasy, but he’s been known to write crime stories, poetry, and anything else that strikes his fancy.
He was a theater major at Wesleyan and briefly a semiprofessional actor before attending law school at the University of Michigan. He teaches legal studies and humanities at Johnson & Wales University, and has published numerous articles on the constitutive rhetoric of legal texts.
Born in Detroit, he now lives in Rhode Island with one singer, one dancer, one actor, and something striped and fanged that he sometimes glimpses out of the corner of his eye. He’s interested in astronomy, history, politics, philosophy, presidential trivia, brain science, and practically everything else. He cooks better than most people you know.
Arisia 2017 is a volunteer-run convention that covers all aspects of science fiction and fantasy literature and media.
It is taking place this weekend, January 13–16, at Boston’s Westin Boston Waterfront.
It’s June 18, 1815, Waterloo, Belgium, and if Wellington’s beleaguered British army doesn’t get help soon, all will be lost. The indomitable Duke of Wellington sends for reinforcements…
And the aid that comes is not General Blücher’s Prussian forces. Rather, the rescuers of the Empire are a nightmare regiment dreamed up by a mad Genovese scientist.
Read the exciting prologue to Heather Albano’s Timepiece: A Steampunk Time-Travel Adventure — the first volume in the Keeping Time trilogy!
“Waterloo and time travel are made for each other and Heather Albano has done a wonderful job of giving us a delightful cast of characters, tasked with stitching together the proper nineteenth century while fending off several monstrous alternatives. Propulsive adventure with historical insight.” – Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars and 2312
It’s 1815, and Wellington’s badly-outnumbered army stares across the field of Waterloo at Napoleon’s forces. Desperate to hold until reinforcements arrive, Wellington calls upon a race of monsters created by a mad Genevese scientist 25 years before.
It’s 1815, and a discontented young lady sitting in a rose garden receives a mysterious gift: a pocket watch that, when opened, displays scenes from all eras of history. Past…and future.
It’s 1885, and a small band of resistance fighters are resorting to increasingly extreme methods in their efforts to overthrow a steampunk Empire whose clockwork gears are slick with its subjects’ blood.
