If you’d like to preorder Near + Far from Hydra House, you can do so here. We will have some copies with us at WorldCon. If you’re there and around Saturday night, please stop by our Pink + Blue party, up on the 32nd floor.
I’ve been working on the jewelry, which got pretty much finished up today. We’ll be giving away 30-35 of those at the party, plus books, stickers, CDs, and handmade journals.
Here’s a bunch of the pieces laid out:
Here's most, but not all of the pieces. There's still about twenty to be done at this point.
And here’s closeups of some of the same image. One thing is for sure — each of these is unique!
The various jewelry accoutrements came from the Redmond Ben Franklin's. This early batch has some blotchiness, which we learned to avoid in subsequent batches by laminating the paper onto the tile or into the finding before resin was applied.
I’m working on a piece for the SFWA Blog about promotional giveaways. What are the best — and worst — ones you’ve seen? What resources would you recommend to people? The stickers are the interior art, done in a nice size that’s big enough not to lose but small enough to be able to use in a number of places.
These are waiting to get filled with resin. They'll take a few days to cure, but when ready will look like glass, and all the roughness here, created by brush marks in the mod podge, will be imperceptible.
One of the things that’s emerged from the discussion so far is to use things that people will use and keep on using, whether it’s bookmarks, pens, notebooks or a host of other clever items. The fans Mary Robinette Kowal has been giving away with Glamour in Glass were mentioned several times, and I know I thought of her cleverness with temporary tattoos to address an issue with the first edition.
Here's the same image, which reminds me of a little rocket ship, done several different ways. I like the way all of them turn out, honestly.
