Thursday, April 18
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Nov122016 by cleasaalNo Comments
Pencils 101

Pencils 101

From the archives
As some of you may know, a couple of years ago I got into a fight with my cover artist, one that not only caused me to lose one of my dearest friends, but also left me in something of a bind, as at the time I had two books that were ready to go to print, but no covers to go with them. This year, in an attempt to avoid a repeat performance, I decided to try to learn to draw. (more…)
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Oct232016 by cleasaal1 Comment
Of Shards and Shadows (science fiction)

Of Shards and Shadows (science fiction)

Front page, My Books, Science fiction
Announcing a new addition to the family! Title: Of Shards and Shadows Author: Clea Saal Born: October 15, 2016 Genre: Science Fiction Format: Paperback Page count: 206 pages ISBN:978-1539499770 Price: $12.95 Note: This volume combines a fully revised version of the book originally released under the title of The Shadow Walker and its sequel, The Shard (and that, in case you were wondering, is the reason The Shadow Walker is missing from the list). (more…)
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Oct222016 by cleasaalNo Comments
Talking to myself for fear of talking to anyone else

Talking to myself for fear of talking to anyone else

From the archives
Okay, this is getting ridiculous. I've been working on this website for a month, tinkering with countless little details, but dreading the day when I would have to tell others it actually exists. I don't know why am I so worried. I guess it's just that this is a big change. My old site was comfortable, familiar, and now I feel like I've just moved into this new house that looks nice, but where I'm not sure I know where anything is. Did I mention the fact that I hate moving? Well, I do, but it is something that I've had to do often enough. This is a different kind of move, so I'm writing a bunch of tiny posts that get deleted without ever seeing the light of day, but enough of that. The time has come for me to stop procrastinating, so tomorrow I'll let the world (or rather the three people ...
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Oct202016 by cleasaalNo Comments
Empty Spaces

Empty Spaces

From the archives
Note: what follows is a re-post of a post that was posted to booksandtales.com a couple of years ago. Okay, so I finished a first draft and formatted it to get a general idea as to what the page count was likely to be. This is usually a fairly straight forward process, but this time around the results were kind of borderline. Font size is a known quantity, as is line spacing, but the margins are a different matter. I admit that with my longer books I try to keep them to a minimum in an attempt to keep the prices down (that extra space really adds up when you are talking about a book that’s more than three hundred pages), but at the same time I do realize that wider margins make for a far more pleasant reading experience. The thing is that while with shorter works that’s not usually ...
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Sep202016 by cleasaalNo Comments
Someone’s missing from this book list

Someone’s missing from this book list

read, write, publish, repeat
Okay, if you've been following me for a while you may have noticed that there is someone missing here. That would be The Shadow Walker. The Spanish version is listed but not the English one, why? Well, because it is being effectively rewritten, or maybe expanded would be a better word. What happened was that I decided to write a sequel, but releasing a sequel to a 24,000 words long novella as a separate book felt more than a little silly, so I decided to rework the whole thing into a two part story that incorporates both The Shadow Walker, and its sequel. That one should be ready in a few weeks, though for the time being I chose to leave it out, especially because right now I'm struggling with the question of whether the new version should keep the same title, which I feel fits better, or ...
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Sep192016 by cleasaalNo Comments
So how did we get to this point?

So how did we get to this point?

Front page, Personal, projects
Okay, so maybe I should be saying 'Welcome to my new home on the web!' or something along those lines, and I do welcome you, but I also wanted to take this opportunity to explain why, after so many years, I decided to move to a new site, rather than keep updating booksandtales.com as I had been doing since the dawn of the millennium. The reason itself is simple enough: in the fourteen years since that site came online the web has changed too much, and booksandtales itself has accrued too much dead wood. The problem is that it's a kind of dead wood I don't really want to get rid of, not entirely. There is the print on demand comparison, which is now ridiculously outdated, but which was once a useful starting point for people looking to self-publish, and also my early attempts at writing ...
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