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Revisiting cover art

The other day I noted, with some enthusiasm, an image that comes super super close to the kind of cover art I’d love to see for Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title). I did try to track down the artist by following Tumblr links, but…well, if you’ve ever tried to trace the path of a Tumblr image that’s been shared a bunch of times, you’ll know that “There be dragons there”.

Somehow, though, the artist found the post today, and left a gracious comment. Her name is Liza Van Rees, and she is a talented Dutch illustrator. Check her work out!

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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

A friend of mine who is, shall we say, well-endowed in the strongly-held-opinion department, recently informed me that John Denver sucks.

To which my basic response is:


Here’s a bit of John Denver!


Well, that’s cheating a bit, since the Muppets are there. But hey, the Muppets!

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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

I know I’ve used this for the Daily Dose before, but…well, this is one of the staples for me. Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” is only tangentially about Christmas, I suppose — just the song’s setting, on Christmas Eve, in the very first verse, and then Christmas isn’t really mentioned at all after that. But still, the song almost perfectly captures something about Christmas that doesn’t tend to be talked about much.

Christmas is such a time of emotion, isn’t it? It’s almost certainly our most emotional holiday. I really think it is. Nearly every emotion the heart produces has a home in Christmas, and that includes the sad ones, too. I’ve not yet met the person who wasn’t at least a little bit reflective at Christmastime, some more than others to be sure, but…in amidst the joys of this season, it seems terribly natural to me to also think of choices not made, roads not taken, lives not lived. It’s not always bad, even, but there are moments of sparkling sadness when I wonder what else I might have done.

This shouldn’t imply dissatisfaction, although for some people, I suppose it does. But I can’t imagine that the happiest person, the person most satisfied with the warp and weft of their time on Earth, doesn’t at least once in a while glance back and wonder:

“Is she happy now?”

“What if he had lived?”

“Why didn’t I accept that offer?”

“Would they be proud of what I’ve done?”

These feelings always bubble up at Christmastime, and I’m not entirely sure why. Lots of reasons, I suppose — the holiday’s sacred undertones, whether you believe or not; the timing, putting this season at the end of the year, so you can’t help feeling the weight of more time behind you. I wonder if Christmas would feel a little less melancholy if it took place in January.

Anyhow, “Same Old Lang Syne” famously recounts the tale of when Dan Fogelberg had a chance encounter in a convenience store with an old girlfriend from years before. They spend the night catching up, talking about where their lives have gone, the good and the less good. There’s no affair here, no one-night stand — they meet by chance, they talk a while, they part — and Fogelberg sings of remembering “that old familiar pain”, which is such a perfect way to put it.

“Same Old Lang Syne” absolutely is a Christmas song, because it expresses something true about Christmas. It’s not all about jolly elves and babes in mangers. It can’t be, because we’re human and we humans bring an awful lot of messy stuff to the table.

Oh, and the song is really best listened to in the car. Even if it’s in a parking lot with the engine off.


And for those wondering, yes, the song was inspired by very real events.

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You will RUE THE DAY!!! (Rue the day? Who talks like that?!)


I’ve pretty much run out of people to query. Time to start looking into self-pub indie efforts. #AmWriting, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

I received another rejection note yesterday for Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title), which brings the total to…somewhere I don’t want to tally it up, actually. Suffice it to say that I am just about out of places to submit this book, either as a direct submission to a publisher or a query to an agent. Nobody has bitten, and I find myself just about at that point where I have to admit that nobody is likely to bite at this point.

Which reminds me of that scene in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, when Kirk — having been refused permission to return to the Genesis Planet to pick up Spock’s body — tells his officers, “The word is no. I am therefore going anyway.”

I’m not really sure what the process is from here, so I’m going to have to do a lot of research and discussing with people who have been there, but unless something very strange happens, I will be getting Princesses out there myself. I’m going to aim for November 2014 for release (although at this date, don’t even think of holding me to that). I know I need to do another round of edits and then start working toward getting this book put together into a coherent form. I’ll need cover art, and I know there’s a lot of file-formatting work to be done.

Plus, I intend to create a separate website for my work, as a promotional tool. That will also be aimed for late 2014. I want to have multiple books in the pipeline at all times, when I “go live”; I want to be able to say to readers, “If you liked Princesses, tune in late 2015 for Princesses II.” And, of course, other books along the way!

The least of this news is that, if all goes as intended, the ACTUAL TITLE will be revealed by the end of the coming year.

This is exciting stuff! I’m fortunate to live in a time when this sort of thing is possible. I’m reminded of Neil Gaiman’s words, from that remarkable commencement address of his:

We’re in a transitional world right now, if you’re in any kind of artistic field, because the nature of distribution is changing, the models by which creators got their work out into the world, and got to keep a roof over their heads and buy sandwiches while they did that, are all changing. I’ve talked to people at the top of the food chain in publishing, in bookselling, in all those areas, and nobody knows what the landscape will look like two years from now, let alone a decade away. The distribution channels that people had built over the last century or so are in flux for print, for visual artists, for musicians, for creative people of all kinds.

Which is, on the one hand, intimidating, and on the other, immensely liberating. The rules, the assumptions, the now-we’re supposed to’s of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. You can be as creative as you need to be to get your work seen. YouTube and the web (and whatever comes after YouTube and the web) can give you more people watching than television ever did. The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are.

So make up your own rules.

That’s what I’m gonna do! Maybe this story won’t get read by a lot of people. Maybe it will. But it’s not going to be stuck in a drawer, counted among my “practice” books before I finally manage to break through, becoming one of those novels nobody ever sees but the author, who takes out the manuscript once in a while and remembers with fondness the investment in a tale that was doomed to the drawer.

This book is my story. And it’s coming. Soon.

(Give or take. Like I said, uncharted waters and all.)

Zap! Pow!!

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Sunday Burst of Awesome (and spectacular FAIL)

Oddities and Awesome abound! As do, unfortunately, colossal screwups.

:: In the Awesome department, if you ever wondered what it’s like taping The Price is Right — more specifically, the mechanics of moving all that crap onstage around — this video sums it up nicely.




Somehow, as a kid, I always envisioned that soundstage as being absolutely immense. It always seemed to me like they were taping that show in the Astrodome or something.

Link via.

:: Here’s a wonderful defense of Love Actually, in response to the same loopy-headed article I frothed about last week.

And you know what? Mustering the courage to say “Hey, i have some feelings for you” is not some inconsequential thing. As anyone who’s ever been at the beginning of an affair knows, getting the nerve up to say “Want to take this further?” is a huge deal! It’s hard, it’s terrifying, and when it’s over, you either live to romance another day, or the relationship ends. That’s what Love Actually is about. Those terrifying moments before the proclamation. It isn’t about afterward, where reality lives. It’s about the beginning of the feeling of love.

I said on Twitter the other day that I have come to see the Keira Knightley storyline in that movie as a kind-of Rorschach test. People who hate the movie often seem to completely get that storyline wrong. Mark doesn’t go profess his love to her in hopes that she will leave her husband; he knows she won’t. He goes to get it all out, and admit his feelings as explanation and atonement for his having not been terribly nice to her until then. How people miss this is absolutely beyond me.

:: Finally, the FAIL of the week. I was thoroughly gobsmacked by this. You know those little decals that lots of people put on the back windows of their cars? The ones that depict their family’s composition, with stick-figure parents and kids and dogs and cats and stuff? Well, the fine folks at ThinkGeek came up with Star Trek versions of those. Which is kind of a nifty idea. They even include aliens. Only…well, here’s the set:

Take a close look at Lt. Uhura. Notice anything distinctive about the way they depict her in decal form? I congratulate Nichelle Nichols and Zoe Saldana on their mutual designation by ThinkGeek as Honorary White People!

I can only shake my head at shit like this. It’s maddening. It can’t be any kind of production issue, since they managed to get the skin tones of the aliens right. And they made the tribble brown. But the black human woman? The one who was played by a real life black woman? They whitewashed her, but good.

Unbelievable. Although actually, the sad thing is…it’s not that unbelievable, really.

More next week, maybe.

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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

My alma mater, Wartburg College, does a big yearly music production at Christmas, called Christmas With Wartburg. It’s always quite a production, with several vocal groups coming together with several instrumental groups to present a sacred program. Putting it together was a lot of work each year, and the performances consumed an entire weekend — at the time we would perform twice on campus and then once in Cedar Falls, IA (a bigger town twenty miles away) and once in Des Moines.

I mention all this because our main rival school, Luther College, does a similar thing. Here’s their rendition of “Angels We Have Heard On High”, one of my two favorite Christmas hymns (I can’t choose between this one and “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing”). As a still-loyal Wartburg grad, I’d love to be able to say that those nitwits from Luther screw it up, but…no, I wouldn’t love to be able to say that. There’s just as much talent there as at Wartburg, and this is really well done.


(But still…go Knights!)

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The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer

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