Embroidered Worlds Release Day!!!

Today is the official release day for Embroidered Worlds: Fantastic Fiction from Ukraine and the Diaspora!!!

A desperate trek through the icy canyons of Mars, a doll-sized family with giant-sized opinions, a defiant princess whose fate must remain a secret… Welcome to the wild, colorful, and ever-blossoming landscapes of the Ukrainian imagination. Embroidered Worlds presents a bold glimpse into fantastic storytelling throughout Ukrainian culture, from science fiction, fantasy, and horror to slipstream, fairy tales, and more.

This collection gathers 30 short stories from writers living in wartime Ukraine, their work translated into English for the very first time, as well as from international authors of Ukrainian heritage. Come, now, and experience the magic, the terror, and the wonder-filled surprises of the worlds they’ve brought to life.

It’s a beautiful book, put together by a team of talented and dedicated people. I’m so excited that it’s out in the world, and soon physical copies will be in the hands of readers. Thank you to our publisher, Atthis Arts, for making this all possible.

As soon as the Kickstarter campaign successfully funded, the translators, publishers, and editorial team hit the ground running to get Embroidered Worlds ready for print to meet our deadlinelong days and nights spent communicating over time zones, hundreds of emails, dozens of messages, so many drafts, each one improving upon the previous version. We did it! This creative community came together to verify words, edit content, fine-tune intention, and review all the many details.

AND as we were doing that, Ukrainian pysanka artist Anna Chychula was at work crafting this beautiful, one-of-a-kind fantastic Embroidered Worlds pysanka!

I love seeing the energy of this project manifest in this beautiful pysanka. You can read more in Anna’s Embroidered Worlds Kickstarter guest post here.

AND here’s a peek at our limited edition Embroidered Worlds bookplates being printed at Bookplate Ink, in Yellow Springs Ohio!

I have more to share about the process of editing this anthology and the stories and writers and translators, and I’m hoping that things can slow down a little during the end of this year so that I have time to catch up with writing and posts and upcoming projects! This is Mother Christmas season after all….

Blessings of peace and love during this season.

 

How Amazing Could This Ukrainian SFF Anthology Get?

On September 4, 2023, we reached a landmark $10,000 goal for the Embroidered Worlds anthology Kickstarter. Thank you! Now we work to spread the word far and wide about this collection of Ukrainian authors, many of whom have never been translated into English before.

The more people we can reach during the Kickstarter campaign, the more incentives we can unlock to make this book even more special!

If we reach our $30,000 goal, we will hire three Ukrainian artists to create interior illustrations, and include those in all editions of the book.

At $50,000 we will make available a limited-edition, numbered hardcover, with art prints of the cover and illustrations that can be framed.

HOW AMAZING WOULD IT BE TO HAVE ILLUSTRATED, LIMITED-EDITION NUMBERED HARDCOVERS WITH ART PRINTS!?!

We raised $10,000 in 4 days. Can we double that in a week?

Embroidered Worlds is scheduled for publication in December 2023. Anyone wishing to join in supporting the book has until Sept. 30 to do so, at levels ranging from a $1 ebook order to a $1,000 benefactor gift.

In the Kickstarter video that launched our project, my segment follows the two Ukrainian editors. I wanted to share it here.

I invite you to follow the link below and order your copy of Embroidered Worlds, and please spread the word to other readers who might like to add it to their libraries. For $20 you can order a paperback edition and also get an e-book copy!

Between readers of imaginative fiction and supporters of Ukraine, the potential audience for this book is large and diverse. Please support and share as you can!

Thank you to everyone who has pledged and shared so far! (If you have ideas how to spread the word, reach out. I welcome your ideas!)

E

Find Embroidered Worlds on Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atthisarts/embroidered-worlds?ref=9cyosw 

Share the Magic of Mother Christmas

Thank you to everyone for your support and enthusiasm about Mother Christmas!

The cover image for Mother Christmas features a woman wearing a warm blue cloak, lined with fur at the collar. We see her only from behind. She is carrying a sack of presents filled with old fashioned toys over her right shoulder, In her left hand, she is holding a frame drum decorated with an image of the sun. She is standing in a snow filled forest, and she has glowing horns and long flowing black hair. A few people have reached out to ask how they can help spread the word about the book. Thank you so much for those offers. I really appreciate them. One of the reasons that my first book The Silence of Trees became an Amazon bestseller when it was first published was because people talked about it.

Here are a few ways you can help to share the Mother Christmas magic:

  • Share a review on  Amazon or Goodreads. Even just a sentence is a great help in making it easier for readers to discover the book. (You should be able to log in to Goodreads using your Amazon account.) 
  • Request that your local library order Mother Christmas for its collection.
  • Post a link or pictures on social media! Personal recommendations and word-of-mouth are the best publicity !
  • Share the Who’s Your Muse quiz. Hopefully it will get people curious about the graphic novel.
Image of a young woman in flowing dress and headscarf sitting on the steps of a temple reading.

(Thanks for this helpful list to my talented friend Stephanie Feldman, whose second novel, Saturnalia, was just released last month — and with whom I’ll be doing an online Winter Ghost Story event next month!)

I hope to have information about signings and events this week, so you can come and get your copy of Mother Christmas signed or pick up a copy.

If you have other suggestions about how to increase visibility for Mother Christmas, or if you have a bookstore or comic shop that would like to plan an event, you can contact me here.

If you’re new to Mother Christmas and want to learn more, you can read my blog post, “Why Mother Christmas?

Thank you and blessings of the Muses to you. ?