A contest for your delectation

After cleaning my closets, I discovered many more copies of The Drowning City than I thought I had. And so I turn to the time-honored tradition of having an LJ contest to give some away. My Minister of Contests, tanaise, has decreed that this will be an artistic contest.

If you would like a signed copy of TDC with a mermaid or octopus or sea monster doodle (or another doodle--I take requests), all you need to do is:

Make a book trailer for The Bone Palace. I need to make a real one in the next couple months, and I need inspiration. Yours doesn't have to be good, of course. If you make a good one I'll give you more than a book. Stick figures and storyboards made in MS Paint are perfectly acceptable. If you make me laugh hard enough to have a post-bronchitis coughing fit you automatically win.

OR

Draw cover art for Kingdoms of Dust. I'm breathlessly awaiting preliminary art from Orbit, but I would like more breath and less waiting. So draw something to inspire me! I can't post the blurb yet because it has spoilers for TBP, but the book has deserts, jinn, spies, and formless entropy monsters.

If you're not artistic but still want a book, I'm open to suggestions for different kinds of contests.

Kill the meme when love is the law

No love for the contest? Alas. Okay, how about a different kind of contest? Share your best cupcake recipes. My favorite wins a signed, endoodled copy of The Drowning City. That gives you three different ways to win one, should you so desire.

Kingdoms of Dust

20500 / 100000 words. 21% done!

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And now I will finish off this meme. Question 29 is TSTL, and I'm not tagging anyone, so this is the end of it.

26. Let's talk art! Do you draw your characters? Do others draw them? Pick one of your OCs and post your favorite picture of him!

I do! I haven't done any big art projects lately, but I love drawing characters. I'm also making paper clay dolls out of some characters in my current Changeling game. csinman sometimes draws my characters, too, and I loff him forever for it. My favorite is his sketch of Jesse and Morgan from "Wrack". For bonus awesome, compare it to the Matt Hughes illustration the story got in Strange Horizons. (Scroll all the way down.) One of these looks like my character. One...not so much.

27. Along similar lines, do appearances play a big role in your stories? Tell us about them, or if not, how you go about designing your characters.

I need to know what my characters look like. There's a difference between "blonde" and "ash-blonde with pale freckles and a constellation of moles on her upper arm", and it's important to me. If I can find an actor who looks like a character, it helps with the little details I might not otherwise think about. Occasionally I build a character around an actor I love. Going into Kingdoms, for example, I knew Judi Dench had to be in it somewhere, and what started as a cameo turned into a very important character.

28. Have you ever written a character with physical or mental disabilities? Describe them, and if there's nothing major to speak of, tell us a few smaller ones.

Isyllt has a crippled hand, and I have a couple of characters missing an eye. My Changeling character is blind, and that will be an interesting story to write when I finally get it figured out. I don't think being self-destructive or generically batshit insane quite counts as a mental disability.