I can hardly believe 2025 is already here, which means we are only a few weeks away from Arisia, the “big tent” science fiction/fantasy fan convention in Boston. Well, this year in Cambridge! And in early February I’ll be in Chicago for Capricon, as well.

Arisia has relocated from their longtime home on the Boston waterfront to a hotel on the Charles River, the Cambridge Hyatt Regency (sometimes nicknamed “the ziggurat”). The author Guest of Honor is Moniquill Blackgoose, and if I haven’t already gushed at you to read her book To Shape a Dragon’s Breath, consider this your exhortation to do so (buy it at Bookshop or Amazon or your local bookstore).

It’s basically… what if there was an anti-colonialist, feminist “magic school” book but with dragons?

The worldbuilding is so great, and the characters are sharp, and smart, and caring. I’ve been beating this book’s drum for a while, partly because I published some books of hers back in the day with Circlet Press, but also because it’s so damn good. Awards seem to agree: I’ve lost track of all the ones it has won, but they include the Nebula and the Lodestar, and it made the Locus Awards, BFAs, and Astounding finalist lists.

The new Arisia hotel is smaller, and VERY close to my house, so I decided not to get a room this year and let folks coming from farther away have the rooms. This means I’m not throwing a party this year (unless someone with a party suite wants to lend it to me for a tea party on Saturday afternoon?)

Here’s my schedule of panels, as well. As of right now, it does not appear that I’ll be doing a Friday night erotica reading. (I’ll make up for it at Readercon this summer, where I’ll be GoH.)

Mirrored from Cecilia Tan.

Well, that was fun! My talk with Ann Bannon went swimmingly. We could have easily talked for another hour. Over 200 people had RSVP’d for the event and all throughout, each time one of us said something funny or pointed, we could see the emojis floating up our screens in the back-end of Zoom.

The recording is now live on YouTube for anyone who missed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeyaveFkFXQ

Turns out Ann and I have a lot of parallels.

• We both studied linguistics in college and ended up with linguistics degrees.
• We both wrote defining works right when we were fresh out of college, her Odd Girl Out, me Telepaths Don’t Need Safewords.
• We were both writing about sexuality and lifestyle that were taboo at the time, but which later became acceptable to depict in the mainstream (lesbian relationships, kink & BDSM).
• We both had the experience of our publishers selling our books, successfully, to readers outside of our subcultures.
• We have both had readers treat our fiction as if it was some kind of how-to manual!
• We’ve both heard from readers who were validated by seeing themselves in our books, and whose lives were changed because of it.

And I’m sure there are more I’m not thinking of! I was particularly struck by the “how to” manual thing. At the time when Odd Girl Out (Bookshop.org | Amazon) was published, there was no way for people to find out what the lifestyle was like. All they knew was what their homophobic teachers, clergy, and parents told them. So Ann’s books really functioned as a window into how things could be…

Mirrored from cecilia tan.

I’m speaking at three cons in three months to start 2024:

• Arisia: January 12-15 in Boston
• Capricon: February 1-4 in Chicago
• ICFA March 13-17 in Orlando

Details below!

Mirrored from cecilia tan.

This morning was the ICFA panel on “Editing Beyond the Non-Western World,” which was intended to feature guest of honor Oghenechovwe Donal Ekpeki, as well as myself, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Neil Clarke, and moderator Mimi Mondal. As it has turned out, Oghenechovwe was detained when he traveled to the USA to attend the NAACP Image Awards and denied a visa for entry, meaning he could not attend ICFA, either. And I am missing the convention also, even though I’m currently only a 90-minute drive away, because I’m in the Tampa area where my father’s health is failing. (He was giving last rites in the hospital a few days ago when his doctors believed his expiration was imminent, so I cancelled my plans to go to Orlando, but now that he is home and having home hospice care, he seems to be holding up…! Thank you everyone for all your good wishes and prayers!)

Although the panel room had no WIFI, Mimi had the idea to try to bring us into the panel via Zoom using her own cellular data plan, and this effort was largely successful, but in many ways was a perfect metaphor for the difficulties of publishing writers from outside the USA or Great Britain. One common theme of the panel’s remarks was that there are systemic and logistical barriers to entry for writers from the non-Western world, including issues with currency conversion and difficulty of access to markets and source materials. And another theme was how often the only entities redressing the situation were individuals applying their own resources.

Mirrored from cecilia tan.

I’m on my way in a matter of hours to Portland, Oregon, for AWP. For those who don’t know it, AWP is the “Association of Writing Programs” (i.e. MFA programs) and their conference is a massive, massive writers conference of epic proportions.

I’ll be speaking on a Thursday afternoon panel on “Hybrid Sex Writing” with Erica Jong, Thad Rutkowski, Larissa Shmailo, and Jonathan Penton.

Here’s the official panel description:

1:30 pm to 2:45 pm
R223. Hybrid Sex Writing: What’s Your Position?
B116, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
(Larissa Shmailo, Jonathan Penton, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Cecilia Tan, Erica Jong)

In The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault argues that sex was not repressed in past centuries, but codified. How does contemporary hybrid sex writing crack these codes? Is there a relationship between gender politics and hybrid writing? How does hybrid writing give voice to marginalized gender identities? What is hybrid ecstasy? Is there a special connection between transgressive sex and hybrid writing? Panelists will discuss these questions with a focus on 21st-century writers.

Ooh! Come at me Foucault! I’ve prepared remarks that cover a lot of ground, including the sex-positive feminist and queer literary movement of the 1990s, how societal expectations control erotic literature counter to capitalist freedoms, and how the #MeToo movement and the runaway phenomenon of 50 Shades of Grey are linked.

I’m also keen to hear Erica Jong speak about censorship in the literary era before mine. This should be loads of fun.

Meanwhile, the conference has literally hundreds of panels and workshops. Many other ones on sexuality and erotic writing of course, including: “Reaching Climax: Girls with Sexual Agency (YA),” “Write to Climax: Women Writers on Writing Sex and Intimacy” and “Assimilate This!: Queer Literary Community as Sites of Mobilizing & Resistance.” Sassafras Lowrey is on that last one and I hope I catch it!

Plus a ton of science fiction and fantasy, of course! The conference is so large there are not one but two tribute panels on Ursula K. LeGuin. I started making a list of my sf/f peeps to try to catch at the conference and ended up giving up. The list is long:

• Nisi Shawl
• Alaya Dawn Johnson
• G. Willow Wilson
• Maryanne Mohanraj
• Alexander Chee
• Carmen Maria Machado
• Daniel Jose Older
• Kelly Link
• Nalo Hopkinson
• Maria Dahvana Headley
• Rose Lemberg
• Jonathan Lethem
• Karen Joy Fowler
• Rebecca Roanhorse
• E. Lily Yu

A highly diverse assortment of writers, too, I can’t help but notice. This fuels my optimism.

Of course what I actually should make sure I spend some time doing–whether I do it in my hotel room or in tea shops and cafes–is some writing. My plan is to not overdo my conference participation and to get a few hours of writing in per day. We’ll see if I succeed. There are a lot of people I want to visit in Portland, too! And so many excellent restaurants!

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

I’m teaching a workshop tonight at the Artisan’s Asylum, the awesome makerspace in Somerville, and thought I’d share this handout list here since then all the links can be live.

This is a list of all the free or open source bits of software and other things that I’ve used in my publishing ventures. I’ve also used a lot of expensive things like Adobe Photoshop, Quark Xpress, and so on. But not everyone has the money or the access to the high-priced programs, so part of my workshop is basically how you can do it all using free or very inexpensive options.

Book-making Software & Free Stuff You Will Need

Download a printable one-page version here: PDF

OpenOffice/NeoOffice/LibreOffice

• free/donationware open software “clone” of MS Office suite
• OpenOffice “Writer” is the Word equivalent

OpenOffice Plugins:

• Altsearch – Alternative Find/Replace (so you can find non-printing characters) http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/project/alternative-dialog-find-replace-writer-altsearch
• Writer2epub (http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/project/writer2epub)

GIMP:

• Image editing software (https://www.gimp.org/downloads/)
• Cover designs for ebooks must be 1400 pixels x 2100 pixels minimum

Free image sources:

• Pixabay.com (free portal to Shutterstock)
• FreeImages.com (very limited, free portal to Getty Images)

Cheap image sources:

• Dreamstime.com
• iStockphoto (also owned by Getty), Shutterstock, a few others

Sigil

• WYSIWYG epub editing software INDISPENSABLE (https://github.com/Sigil-Ebook/Sigil)

Calibre

• meant to be used as an ebook library tool but has crude/ugly format conversion functions and DRM stripping functions (https://calibre-ebook.com/download)

ePub Zip/ePub Unzip

• Script that unzips your epub and then puts it back together again, allowing for manual deletion of encrypted files (http://en.freedownloadmanager.org/Mac-OS/ePub-Zip-Unzip-FREE.html)

Typesetting and layout

• Scribus is open source free https://sourceforge.net/projects/scribus/
• Adobe Indesign is the standard, costs $74.99 for one month cloud access, $39.99/mo for 1 yr.

Epubcheck

• Online code validator: http://validator.idpf.org/ (does files up to 10MB)

Barcodes and Createspace Templates:

• Bookow.com free barcode generator: http://bookow.com/resources.php#isbn-barcode-generator
• Bookow Free createspace template: http://bookow.com/resources.php#cs-cover-template-generator

You might also be interested in my other posts:

1. Farming Out to Professionals
2. Elements of Book Design
3. Page Layouts
4. Widows, orphans, and hyphenation
5. “Smart” quotes, section breaks, and fleurs
6. Ebook design versus print design

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

Here I am in Chicago! It’s very foggy here. Figured I’d post a rundown of what I’m doing and where to find me in case any of you need it:

SATURDAY May 14 at The Book Con

at the McCormick Place convention center, Chicago

1pm – 1:30 pm AUTOGRAPHING
at the Romance Writers of America (RWA) Booth 1716
I’ll be signing copies of TAKING THE LEAD, my latest kinky rock star romance.

1:45 – 2:45 pm AUTOGRAPHING (YES MORE AUTOGRAPHING)
at the Grand Central Publishing/Hachette booth 1716
with my fellow Forever Romance authors Elizabeth Hoyt and Debbie Mason!
I’ll again be signing and giving away TAKING THE LEAD

3:00 – 4:00 pm DIVERSITY IN ROMANCE PANEL
in Room W470
Very excited to be speaking on this panel on a subject very important to me, moderated by Joyce Lamb of USA Today’s “Happy Ever After” blog. Official description: The #WeNeedDiverseBooks initiative is being passionately embraced by readers of all genres – and authors of romantic fiction are absolutely passionate about the movement! Browse the selection at booksellers, and you will see ever-increasing title offerings that feature LGBTQ characters and couples; books that feature multi-ethnic perspective and give love to the silver fox set. In this panel, moderated by Joyce Lamb, curator of USA Today’s Happy Ever After blog, and featuring Cecilia Tan, Taking the Lead (Forever), Sona Charaipotra, Tiny Pretty Things (Epic Reads), Dhonielle Clayton, Tiny Pretty Things (Epic Reads), will frankly discuss meeting reader demand for Diverse Books in the romance genre; as well as propose tactics on how to support the growth of this market segment.

Sunday May 15 at the SFWA Nebulas Weekend

at the Palmer House Hilton

11am – 12pm Web Serial Toolbox
I’ll be teaching a crash course in everything you need to know to start your own web serial. If you can blog, you can publish a web serial! I’ll be talking about both creative and business reasons to serialize, as well as why *not* to serialize, and discuss what free & inexpensive tech tools are out there to keep your overhead costs non-existent to under $25.

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

I’ve been so busy running from event to event to event this month that I haven’t had a chance to blog my thoughts from the NELGBTC Conference until now, 10-11 days later. NELGBTC is a queer student activism conference that moves around annually from campus to campus. I was invited by the SUNY Stony Brook TNG group and presented two sessions there. Far as I can tell in my digging and research NELGBTC is the successor to what was called the NELGSAC/NELGSU Conference back in 1985, which I attended as a newly minted queer student activist at Brown University. (NELGSU had reformed as NELGBSA by 1992 and the mantle of national student queer organizing umbrella organization had been taken up by NELGBTC by about 1997, far as I can tell from searching Internet archives.)

When I got to college in 1985 I knew I was bisexual but didn’t know what that “meant” as far as answering the question “who am I?” I was trying to figure a lot of stuff out (as usual at that age) about sexuality, including what it “meant” to be a sexually active woman (even heterosexually) in a society that was pretty condemnatory about that (I was still technically a virgin at that point, btw) and how to deal with stuff like the fact I wasn’t comfortable being/presenting as a typical cisgendered female–especially when the (bullshit) messages I was getting from society were that if I wanted to explore sexuality then adopting cisgender female attire and “looks” was how one was supposed to signal sexual availability. The “problem” of course wasn’t me, it was society, and the fact I hadn’t yet found “my people,” i.e. other folks whose identities and sexualities were outside the heterosexual cis norm.

I found those people at my first LGSA (Lesbian Gay Student Alliance) meeting, even though at the time there was no “B” in the name and I still wasn’t totally sure if as a bisexual I was welcome in that space. Well, first it was me who wasn’t sure I was committed to entering that space. I had seen the posters advertising a meeting and I had tried to “casually” pass by the meeting room to “just get a look” before committing to going in. But at the time of the meeting…the room was empty. How weird, I thought. I went back to the bulletin board to check the time and place. I wandered around trying to pretend I had another reason to be in that building. I buzzed past the room again. Still empty. My anxiety about this whole thing was starting to spike and I thought forget this, I’ll just go back to my room.

I stepped outside the building and there were a bunch of people unloading grocery bags of snacks and soda from the back of a car. They took one look at me and said, “Oh are you here for the LGSA meeting? Can you help carry this?”

Well, apparently “my people” recognized ME and knew I belonged. So my very first act of queer student activism was to help set up the snacks and drinks for a meeting that I had not been totally sure I was going to attend. (I was soon taught about “gay standard time,” LOL.)

I stayed the whole meeting and was active in the LGSA for the next 4 years–and that first year was when Brown happened to host the NELGSU conference.

Here’s an indicator how much of an outsider I still felt, though…

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

Registration for RWA National opens next week (on Feb 2, according to the RWA website), and so now’s probably a really good time for me to blog about the pros and cons of attending big romance cons, specifically the cost. Really, for me, the only downside is how expensive it is to attend either of the two biggies on the romance calendar, RWA and RT Booklovers (often just called RT).

I mentioned in my email newsletter recently that I didn’t attend the 2011 RWA conference in New York City because I simply couldn’t afford to. But now in 2016 I can’t afford NOT to. Here’s why.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

I’m sitting here in bed on the last night of RT Booklovers, with my knee up on pillows with an ice pack. Ouch. You see, at Heather Graham’s Vampire Ball, they had a charity fundraiser for a pediatric AIDS organization, where for five bucks you could dance with the cover model of your choice. So I danced with the delectable DeLonn Donovan, which was lovely. But then the next time I tried to stand up, my left knee was so swollen I could barely limp back to my room.

Great thanks to Sarah Frantz Lyons and L.A. Witt (aka Lauren Gallagher) who retrieved me a bag of ice. I did myself a mischief, it would seem!

I figure to recap the convention I should note a couple of things. Like how about my awards speeches? That’s a good thing to blog!

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.