Tag Archives: Mercenary Calling

Laura Montgomery’s Website

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Laura Montgomery is many things to me.

College roommate from days of yore. Friend. Fellow writer. Cool lady. First reader. Talented science fiction author.

I could go on. But within the compass of this blog post, she’s a client! Because she hired me to revamp her author website.

As many of you know, I love playing with graphics and will seize any excuse to do so. Thus I’ve created many a bundle cover, covers for my own novellas and shorts, and even the occasional book cover for a friend.

Laura has seen most of my portfolio, so when she decided her website needed an overhaul…she hired me to do it. (A website is a bit too large of a job to do just for the fun of it—although it is fun. For me.)

I think it turned out really well (pleading guilty to bias), so I wanted to show it to you!

Here’s a screenshot of the Home page. You can click on the image, if you’d like to go visit the real thing. Laura’s a space lawyer, so her blog is an intriguing blend of space law, space colonization, and science fiction. Go look! I’ll wait. 😀

Don’t you love the art?

It’s from the cover of her latest release, Long in the Land. Isn’t the site itself clean and inviting and harmonious? It’s built on the theme Lyrical.

I could gush about all the things I think are cool about the site…but I won’t! 😉

Instead I’ll show you a screenshot of a blog post page. Clicking this image will allow you to see it at a larger size, large enough to read. Although…if you’re interested in reading the post, go visit her site!

Cool, yes?

Okay, I’ll stop blowing my own trumpet. 😉 But I can’t sign off without talking about Laura’s books!

I’m a fantasy writer and a fantasy reader, but I also read in other genres, science fiction among them. And Laura has written two of my favorites.

Here’s a little bit about them:

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Exoplanets. Terrorists. Lawyers…

Calvin Tondini has his first client, but he may be in over his head.

It’s the twenty-second century. Humanity’s first and only interstellar starship returns safely. Its mission to discover a habitable planet succeeded beyond all hopes, but there’s one problem. Captain Paolina Nigmatullin of the USS Aeneid left an unsanctioned human colony behind and now stands charged with mutiny.

Calvin must defend her!

Mercenary Calling on Amazon
 

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FAA attorney Terrence Rogers dreams of space, but he spends his days on informed consent for space tourists.

Young foreign service officer Hal Cooper faces real change with the arrival of an alien spaceship, but it means something else for Terrence.

“Rapunzel”—a short story—has an awesome twist, and it’s available for free. So if you enjoy SF and have a yen to try Laura’s fiction, give it a look.

Rapunzel on Amazon

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For more of my designerly play, ahem—work, see:
Covers, and More Covers
A Boatload of Covers

For more about Laura’s books, see:
LauraMontgomery.com/Books

 

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How Many Writers Make a Conference?

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A few days before I was due to meet my writer friend Laura Montgomery in Culpeper (for a lunch of Chinese stir fry), she announced that she was christening our meal the Midway Writer’s Conference.

We both chuckled. Can a gathering of two really be considered a conference? Despite our laughter, we gave the question serious thought.

We’re old college friends who lost touch over the years and then reconnected in the comments of the wonderful blog run by Passive Guy, aka David Vandagriff.

We were astonished and delighted to learn that our lives had acquired some curious parallels. She’s the mother of twins; I’m the mother of twins. She’d launched herself into indie publishing writing science fiction. I’d done the same writing fantasy.

How cool was that!

After a bunch of cordial emails and some beta reading for one another, we decided to meet up for a cup of tea. After the briefest of pleasantries—“You look just as I remember you!—we talked writer shop for 2 hours straight. At the next meeting we talked for 4 hours, this time mixing publishing shop in with the writer shop talk.

Our latest meeting was 6 hours, with a focus on the marketing angle of indie publishing.

Yes, these really were conferences. Although this time we actually did manage to talk about our kids. Who knows? Maybe next time we’ll even chat about our spouses. 😉

One of the topics we discussed in Culpeper was the nature of genre and whether or not I wrote epic fantasy. Laura blogged about the question (and our conference), so I’m going to quote her. She said:

We tried to figure out if…The Tally Master was epic fantasy or not. 

I was arguing it was. The troll wars rage across the Northlands. Weapons are forged. Our cursed main characters live in a troll tower of monumental proportions. It all seems pretty epic to me.

Jessica demurred.

The hero is a bronze-age accountant. She was telling a small tale. It was a mystery about missing tin, a matter of seemingly little moment.

But, said I, it has large consequences, it’s part of a grand, epic sweep. A light bulb went off in my own mind…

And now I think I’d better send you off to Laura’s blog to read the rest. It’s really not fair for me to steal her audience.

So click HERE and go read. She’s witty in an understated way that I love, so it’s worth the click. I’ll wait while you visit her. Promise. 😉

Did you go?

I’m going to pretend you said, “Yes.” You did, right!

(The Sky Suspended features the patent fight she mentioned. Mercenary Calling presents the mutiny charge in a suspenseful story that also kept me in a ripple of internal chuckles the whole way through. I do love Laura’s dry humor.)

What did you think about her light bulb?

I thought she was clever—and correct—in her assertion that we both like focusing up-close-and-personal on a hero caught in the sweep of epic events.

But does that truly make my books epic fantasy? I know I’ve asked this question before, but I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to decide the answer for certain.

I’d love to know what you think. 😀

 

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