A first Kickstarter campaign for my graphic novel Mistress of the Winds

This Kickstarter will land you a solid 6″ x 9″ hardcover edition of Mistress of the Winds, printed in Canada by real nice people. At 92 B&W pages, it will include many sketches and behind-the-scenes extracts. The digital and paperback editions are already out.

Genre: SF, Planet-opera, YA
Length: 92 pages
Interior pages in B&W
All ages

Why a campaign? 

Crowdfunding does help authors to bring visibility to their creations. A practical aspect is that the category publication/fiction draws lots of new readers, eager to find new books.

As an artist, I supported many of my creative colleagues’ projects, not only on Kickstarter, but on GoFundMe, Indigogo, Ulule… and I ended up with more books than I can possibly read!  

So I discovered formidable writers, whose careers I am avidly following, thanks to their campaigns.

Why in English, if I am French-speaking?  

That first campaign is in English because of my writer friends living in the US, who have encouraged me to pursue my writing and get better. really, without them, I would have cease to be a writer… and a comic artist!

Some digital and paper rewards will be in French as add-ons. I point to my friend and colleague Frank Fournier who did the colors of my cover. And I will eventually prep a campaign for a French hardcover edition, too.

When does it start?  

On March 28. I do not have a very high ask, but it is essential that each participant to make a contribution in the first hours! A campaign that reaches its goal fast shines more brightly on the Kickstarter website.

Here is the link to register, so you get an email when the campaign launches. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/laframboise/mistress-of-the-winds-hardcover-graphic-novel

What was the hardest part?

Producing the intro video ! Reading a text in front of a camera doesn’t look natural. So I did my best to explain, share my project, without hiding my French accent. It took about six tries to find the right tone.

The project 

With Mistress of the Winds, you will discover a richly-developed world populated with vivid and endearing characters. Follow young Adalou as she struggles against powerful foes and her own body’s limits in the most prestigious kite contest of the planet!

This YA graphic novel kidnaps you into an alien civilization so out of this world that you will want to know more about it… and zoom through the pages to devour this delicious coming-of-age story!

It’s a date: my first Kickstarter campaign

To know more about the le graphic novel, here are some news about Maîtresse des vents.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/laframboise/mistress-of-the-winds-hardcover-graphic-novel

A colorized extract to whet your appetite! 

This is it: plunge headfirst in this adventure!

A Steampunk, Time-Travel Holiday Adventure!

A word from Winter Holiday Spectacular 2022 editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

“The Skeptic and The Primrose” is set in England in the late nineteenth century. The story has echoes of Wells and Verne as well as a touch of Sherlockian brilliance… with heroines who manage to save the world (or their corner of it) while wearing corsets and petticoats.

This story will be up for one week only. Enjoy!

Just so you know beforehand: I don’t believe in time travel. Never have. Until…

***

London, December 21^st, 1888

The conference had been set in the conservatory of the Royal Botanical Society’s Gardens in Regent’s Park, the air so stuffy with moisture for the exotic plants I felt my hair curling in Medusa-like wisps, escaping my carefully done bun. The temperature had convinced many in the first rows to pull off their shawls or overcoats. A few bright orange and yellow butterflies, ignoring the season outside their realm, fluttered from one  exotic corolla to the next. The rich leafy scent and the trickle of water falling on a rock pond added a poetic note to the ambiance.

Those sounds and smells distracted me long enough to miss part of a question, uttered in a snarky tone by a middle-aged gentleman sporting an impressive handlebar mustache, the iron-gray tips waxed so rigid they could easily poke a too-inquisitive eye out. He sat in our front row next to Mother, his legs nonchalantly crossed in the free space ahead, exposing black dress shoes covered with whiter-than-white spats. Those kinds of too-clean shoes never went within an inch of the melted snow mixed with horse dung covering the streets.

(This story has been available from Dec. 18th to dec.25th)

THE END

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Interested in this story?

There’s more on the WMG Holiday Spectacular 2022 Calendar of Short Stories

Michèle Laframboise is a Canadian SF writer, with more than 60 stories published. Her most recent story, I’ll Be Moon for Christmas, was feature on the Nov-December issue of Asimov’s SF Magazine. She is a fair low-level athlete runner, a lousy gardener, and avid birder. More on her official website here.

Q&A With Michèle Laframboise

My Asimov’s blog article, where I explain the joys and anguish of my writing SF !

From Earth to the Stars

Michèle Laframboise is a bilingual French-Canadian author who has appeared in our magazine with a number of “chocolate-hard” stories over the last two years. Here she discusses her relationship with our magazine, the value of a good rejection letter, and the perils of the publishing industry. Read her latest story for Asimov’s, “I’ll Be Moon for Christmas,” in our [November/December issue, on sale now!]

Asimov’sEditor: How did the title of this piece come to you?
Michèle Laframboise: “I’ll Be Moon for Christmas” is my 4th chocolate-hard science fiction story to be launched in Asimov’s. And, yes, the title and theme had been inspired by this unforgettable tune.

AE: How did this story germinate?
ML: The story took form only gradually, like the slow accretion of small, haphazard asteroids into a planet. The first tiny speck of story-dust was a room, set…

View original post 992 more words

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Bigger names this time grace the cover, but all are fantastic Table of Content neighbors!

Yes, my 4th Asimov’s publication is almost a song… And you can taste the opening pages on the Asimov’s website!

Trick the pre-Halloween atmosphere and enjoy this treat!

Story Excerpt 2

Coming Up Soon!

After a busy summer counting birds and writing, I come back with the first English graphic novel for a long time!

On the leafy planet Luurdu, young Adalou dreams of becoming a wind mistress. Alas, she faces a thorny competition because the kite choregraphy brings a high prestige to women who excel in this art. Adalou must overcome her family’s opposition, her biological limits and the jealousy of high-class rivals to conquer her place in the sun.

A graphic novel set in the universe of the space-faring Gardeners, sprouting from the fertile imagination of Michèle Laframboise.

My fresh new YA graphic novel, Mistress of the Winds, set in my Gardeners’ universe, will be out an about in September. 92 pages, B&W art. The pre-order link is here.

An extract here.

I’ll Be Moon for Christmas

My Holiday-themed story, “I’ll Be Moon for Christmas” will be featured in Asimov’s end-of-year issue. With fine cover neighbors like Kris Kathryn Rusch and Ray Nayler! I devored their previous stories, which doesn’t mean I won’t discover the new (to me!) voices in this upcoming issue.

This will be my fourth publication in Asimov’s, laying to rest the idea of a fluke when the magazine accepted my first story. It is also my first Holiday SF tale and. by the title, you may guess what immortal song is playing in my mind!

Meanwhile…

On the Canadian front, I will have two stories coming up in Polar Borealis 25 and 27, edited by Greame Cameron. On the French front, there will be a hard-SF story coming up in the French SF magazine Géante Rouge at some point in 2022 or 2023.

Meanwhile, I tend to lag behind in the reading department… I should finish my current SF mags OnSpec, Analog & and Asimov’s !

Collections of Short-Stories

I came to SF by reading the collections of short-stories on my father’s bookshelves. There was the Marabout collection (in French) of 1950s-1960s fantastic, SF and horror that got me acquainted with the genres. Reading a short-story gave me an open window on an author’s style, favorite themes and personal voice. It eventually guided me towards their longer works.

When you do not have a lot of free time, plunging in a 800-page saga that turns out to be disappointing (for any reason outside the author’s talent, like: not to your taste, or your favorite character dies to thicken the plot, or you’re not into space-faring, chocolate-sauce-gurgling vampires etc.)

Hence my own offering of short-story collections. As the number of my published works rises, I started to publish reprints in collections that won’t consume too much reading time, while giving a taste of my brand of science fiction. Most of those books are under 160 pages, their electronic edition easily affordable.

The two books on the ends are my collections in English ; the three others present my numerous French short-stories reunited under themes.

5 Hard and Crunchy SF Tales

Sink your teeth in those crunchy SF tales!

Welcome to the Big Bang Bar, where the playground of the ultra-rich spans whole solar systems. Follow a cyber-butterfly soaring over the scarred Earth, with strings attached! Watch a proud woman stranded in the pitiless Martian desert find her way out — or die trying. Discover why an alien ship must keep eternally shifting its parts. Or would you prefer to jump a few billions years forward to witness the end of our universe?

Five hard and crunchy science-fiction stories, cooked by multi-award winner Michèle Laframboise, with the help of translators Sheryl Curtis and N. R. M. Roshak for two of those stories.

• Thinking inside te Box (2017) Compelling SF 7
• Ice Monarch (2018) Abyss&Apex 67
• Closing the Big Bang (2017) Fiction River no 21
• Women are from Mars, Men are from Venus (2006), Tesseract 10, Edge publ.
• Cousin Entropy (2020) dans Future SF Digest 7

Get your copy

5 Histoires de SF dure et croquante (French collection)

The French version of 5 Hard and Crunchy SF Tales!

Five hard and crunchy science-fiction stories, cooked by multi-award winner Michèle Laframboise.

• Penser à l’intérieur de la boîte (2015) Géante Rouge 23
• Monarque des glaces (2010) Solaris 175 – Prix Solaris 2010
• Fermer le Big Bang (2021) dans Solaris 218
• Les femmes viennent de Mars et les hommes, de Vénus (2002), Solaris 140
• La cousine Entropie (2016) Galaxies 40

Pour l’acheter / buy it in French

5 Histoires de SF dystopique (French collection)

What will happen when AIs write better, and faster, than writers? When Montreal freezes under the ice and the budget cuts, will solidarity hold? See humans gifted with eternal life experience a cruel reminder of their mortality. A termite woman whose life in the mines has lost value wants to live her last vacation. And what about the young people trapped in a generation-ship that is falling apart over the light-years?

Five dangerous visions of Sf author Michèle Laframboise.

• Les âmes gelées (1999) recueil Transes Lucides, Ashem Fiction
• Quand le dernier écrivain est mort (2014) Solaris 92
• Petzis (2017) Solaris 203
• Dernières vacances de la femme termite, Solaris 215
• Un vœu sur l’Araignée Solaris (2018) Solaris 207

Pour l’acheter / buy it in French

5 Histoires de SF douce et fondante (French collection)

On Mars, an augmented gorilla must protect the cyber-pollinators in his garden… and the morale of his human colleague. Elsewhere, a first contact stumbles on an advanced race that shuns numbers. A lonely biologist wants to discover the secret of migratory trees threatened by a project. The captain of a cargo ship on a diplomatic mission must go out of his way to convince a talkative door to open. Finally, after the climatic catastrophe, what are we ready to pay to make the Moon habitable?

Five science fiction stories that melt on the tongue, by author Michèle Laframboise. A cocktail of science, humour and tenderness. 

• Tinkerbelles, Galaxies 61© 2019, Michèle Laframboise,
• Ceux qui ne comptent pas, Solaris 149 © 2004, Michèle Laframboise
• Sous réserve, Brins d’éternité 43 © 2016, Michèle Laframboise
• La récalcitrante du Cachalot, Anthologie Pulp Aventures Sidérantes © 2020 Michèle Laframboise
• Pitch de vente aux Archétypes, Galaxies 60 © 2020 Michèle Laframboise

Pour l’acheter / buy it in French

5 Hard and Hopeful SF Tales (upcoming)

A stomach technician experiences the pitfalls of living off the land, in the quest for a viable world. On Ganymede, a young girl receives an invasive lifeform for her eleventh birthday… A young heir discovers the exploited inhabitants behind a balmy resort planet. A weary cargo Captain deals with a stubborn door and a infected ship. On a luxury cruise ship, a lonely technician discover an eccentric lady, and an odd friendship blooms.

Five hard but hopeful science-fiction stories, cooked by multi-award winner Michèle Laframboise.

• Essential Maintenance (2022) NeoOpsis 33
• Moby Dick’s Doors (2022) in Space Opera Digest 2022 Have Ship, Will Travel
• Renter’s Report (2022) in Polar Borealis 21
• October’s Feast (2022) Asimov’s Vol 47 (Jan-Feb issue)
• Ganymede’s Lamps (2019) in Luna Station Quarterly

Coming in August !

Other collections are in preparation !

Good reading !

Double publication in Asimov’s and Analog SF magazines!

Currently on sale in kiosks and specialized bookshops.

I am sharing this special milestone with some trepidation: my double publication in the July-August issues of Asimov’s & Analog! *_*

I am still reeling from the shock of reading my name on the Asimov’s cover. I did not expect the simultaneous publications in both summer issues of Asimov’s et Analog. As I was born in July, I considers this double publication as a fine birthday gift. Especially as my name is featured on the Asimov’s cover for my third story there. My late father, who was an avid SF reader, would be proud.

In the SF short-story field, Asimov’s Science Fiction (founded by writer Isaac Asimov himself) and Analog Science Fiction & Fact (formerly Astounding SF, counting John Campbell as a long-standing former editor) are the top mags that receive thousands of submissions per year. So this represent an important milestone (but not the end of the road!) in my writing career.

My hard-SF stories there are :

Rare Earths Pineapple in Analog

Screaming Fire in Asimov’s.

As some of you know by now, I write mostly hard and crunchy SF stories!

Far from an instant success, this milestone is the fruit of more than 15 years of submitting stories to SF&F mags. I got more rejection letters than I can count, so I am taking a few hours to bask, then, it’s back to publishing my indie collections and the graphic novel. And submitting new stories to anthologies and magazines…

I do love telling stories, and whatever the number of readers, I am putting out new work every month.

I do not neglect the Canadian genre mags, because I currently have stories out in OnSpec 119 in Alberta and NeoOpsis 33 in BC. I am also regularly featured in the French SF magazines Solaris in Québec and Galaxies in France.

So if you are a writer and love telling stories, do not let discouragement bear you down. Go, learn, persist!

It’s been a long time… (since I published a graphic novel)

Feast yer eyes! A mock-up of the book.
I am waiting for my author copies…

I am emerging from a frenzy of art events in Montréal and the complexity of putting up a graphic novel with *Vellum* of all things. Now I can proudly boast my latest publication :  Maîtresse des vents, a 92-page graphic novel in French, from my own SF universe. My cover pic has been put into magnificent colors by my talented colleague Frank Fournier.

It is my first graphic novel published since a few years. I published with my own indie house because I was tired of waiting after various French publishers all hoping for the next popular thing.

I had a blast drawing 16 new pages and sketches to complete the story, and will work to distribute the paperback version in some outlets. Here’s one of those recent additions.

There is a section with various sketches at the end of the book. It will be a small pocket book format. The electronic copies are available on various platforms.

If you are patient, I will get the English version done as soon as possible. After all, the computer technology and Clip Studio make this endeavor less painful.

…

Useful infos

Title: Maîtresse des vents, Un récit de l’univers des Jardiniers

format: 5.25×8 in
length: 92 pages
B&W interior pages
Price: 14.95 cdn paper, 4.99 cdn eBook

https://books2read.com/vents

A Snowstorm of Publications

A snowstorm of publications happened this month, in both official languages.  I share this good news which, unfortunately, coincides with some not-so-good news in the vast world outside books and writing. (my good news coincides with the invasion of Ukraine, a country that has done nothing wrong, except being prosperous. By the way, yesterday I sent a short story for a collection in support of the Ukrainians.)

• 25 copies of 5 Stories of Hard and Crunchy SF have just arrived! Fresh from Rapido-Livres in Montréal. There will be some French copies of this science fiction stories collection at the Echofictions table at the Toronto Book Fair.

• Publication of my story Moby Dick’s Doors in the 2022 Space Opera Digest anthology HAVE SHIP, WILL TRAVEL, edited by Tracy Cooper-Posey
  

Le secret de Paloma (Paloma’s Secret) is a finalist for the Alain Thomas Award at the Toronto Book Fair. The show is held in person on March 19-20, 2022. (The award is the former Christine Dumetriu Van-Saanen Award, but we lost Alain, that dedicated worker, in 2020).

• Publication of Cousin Entropy in the Rosetta Prize Archives (a prize that rewards translations of a text published in another language). Thanks to N.M. Roshak for this beautiful work on La Cousine Entropie. See the Future SF site for more details. A Mandarine translation of Cousin Entropy should also be published.

The Rosetta Archives

• My illustration for the Salon du livre de Toronto (Toronto Book Fair) illustrating this year’s theme: our legacies. Our legacies, theme of the 29th Toronto Book Fair

• I just published a novel with Echofictions, Safe Harbor. Read more about it!
  
  A warning to my faithful fans: this is NOT SF! But an ‘eco-fiction’ with an ecological and human problem at its core, set in a coastal village. A tale of a beautiful friendship between two women who have each lost a loved one. Dedicated to my mother, Thérèse Laframboise née Lorrain, who grew up along the river and loves fishing harbors.

• Publication of my short story Essential Maintenance in Neo-Opsis 33, a Canadian speculative fiction magazine edited by Karl and Stephanie Johanson.

• And, to add to the flurry, an email last Thursday announcing a second SF short-story accepted at Analog! It’s a great start to the month, and to Women’s Rights Day, which is really encouraging for a female SF author

TL;DR : Michèle’s new books and SF short-stories publications are out in several venues, in both French and English

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Michèle Laframboise is a Canadian SF writer, with more than 60 stories published. Her most recent story, October’s Feast, is available in the Asimov’s SF Magazine. She is a fair low-level athlete runner, a lousy gardener, and avid birder. More on her official website here.

Diving into the Writing : Concentration levels

Some details missing like the scuba and palms, but you get how I feel when writing… or reading a good book!

Those who enjoy scuba diving (or who, like me as a kid, had watched Commander Cousteau’s documentaries) know that before going back to the surface, you have to make mandatory decompression stops to allow the molecules of nitrogen/ helium who had taken refuge in your tissus under high pressure to leave your body, via your exhaled air.

Otherwise, the nitrogen can decide to turn back into gas while it is still lodged in your veins and your cells, and it would not be a pretty sight. Decompression sickness is as dangerous as its opposite, the deep nitrogen narcosis which develops sneakily if you spend a too long time at 100 feet deep.

Diving in deep water

For me, writing feels like diving into deep water.

Except that my decompression breaks are in the opposite direction! It takes me a long time to reach the level of concentration deep enought to penetrate a story. Levels of ‘compression’ or concentration…

My first level takes about 45 minutes to an hour. I go over what I wrote the day before to get the story and its atmosphere back inside my head; I check notions, places, etc. If I write 100 words in that period, that’s normal.

At the second level, which takes me about an hour to reach, I am entering the story at 300-400 words per hour.

At the third level, everything becomes magical: my fingers hug the keyboard and the ideas are transmuted into words without my having to stop. I feel like the story is writing itself, and I’m approaching 600-800 words an hour.

If I keep this on without interruption, I reach my fourth level of concentration: the story tumbles like an avalanche in my head, fingers and words roll like marbles on a flat table. It is paradise. I smash through the 1000 words per hour wall. Often, this happens in the evening, when I have a deadline approaching.

BUT… I do not descend to this 4th level often.

Ah, if only my concentration levels were simple steps! (Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Pexels.com)

Interruptions!

On the other hand, to go up to the surface, there is no need for decompression stops. Any distraction can yank me up in a jiffy. The phone, someone calling me, or the family member.

As soon as my enthusiastic husband comes to tell me about a techno gadget he saw on the Internet or heard about on the radio, poof! immediate surfacing.

If the conversation is less than a minute or two, and if I don’t have to think to answer any complex questions, I can dive back in and get through my ‘focus’ levels pretty quickly.

Alas, this is rarely the case.

Another condition favors my rapid return to the depths: the certainty that I will NOT be disturbed again in the next few minutes!

So, after 5 or 10 minutes that ate my concentration. And, when the interruption ends, I have to dive back in and redo my stops. And, often, barely submerged, of course, it’s already supper time…

Confession of an unfocused writer

I created this article from a recent writing mishap.

Here I was, happily tapping on a wonderful science fiction story set in Antarctica, pom-pom-pom… when all of a sudden, a flawed scientific detail jumps out at me. Have I correctly calculated the position of the sun below the horizon during the southern polar night? Have I checked the right calendar for the current polar night?

Rising to the surface, opening the Internet, checking the info, then letting yourself drift on the Wikipedia sites, drift farther on the Scott-Amundsen station site, watching the web cam (it’s cold here, but not as cold as in the South Pole)… And, I came to my senses with the crucial realization of having wasted my time. It internally annoys me.

On the heels of that realization came another torment: should I change an explanatory paragraph to place it closer to the opening of the short-story? My words are so tightly knit together that moving one paragraph or one word requires rewriting several others, before and after. And so, I paddled on the surface to juggle these paragraphs.

Finally, after trying to dive back, I decided to go for a walk outside to clear my mind, and come back at another time. I told myself that it’s still warmer here (in Canada, Ontario) than at the South Pole…

TL;DR: Writing is like diving, but with the “concentration” stops going down instead of up.

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Michèle Laframboise is a Canadian SF writer, with more than 60 stories published. Her most recent story, October’s Feast, is available in the Asimov’s SF Magazine. She is a fair low-level athlete runner, a lousy gardener, and avid birder. More on her official website here.