Mailing list a-go-go

My shiny new mailing list is up and running! Starting next week I'm going to be giving away free weekly short stories every Tuesday.

https://www.subscribepage.com/laylaslist

The first story (which will drop in your inbox on March 3), “Hetsie’s Wonders,” was one of my earliest published stories, an 8000-word tale of Weird West time travel that appeared in a long-defunct small-press SF magazine called Crossed Genres back in 2009.

This is separate from my Lauren Esker mailing list - that is, being on the Lauren list won't get you emails for this pen name.


I'm also currently doing a mailing-list-building promo through BookFunnel, with a free giveaway book (Finder's Keeper, an F/F fantasy novella that I had out through Storm Moon Press several years ago). The below link will take you to the promo but not directly to my book - you'd need to look through the books and find the relevant one. Just clicking on the promo link won't sign you up for anything; basically you can browse through the various books and click on each book individually, and it takes you to a page where you can choose to sign up for the author's mailing list in exchange for the free book.

And here is the link for that!

If you JUST want to get Finder's Keeper and not bother with the promo or mailing list, you can download it here!

Happy fandom things, links and so forth

genfreeformexchange is having signups now! AO3 collection here. I am 1000% on the fence about this one - it is SO MUCH my thing, but I'm definitely doing HurtComfortEx, and I'm running SSRC in March, and I still haven't started my Id Pro Quo assignment, so ... yeah. Also, thus far I would be completely unmatchable. But the tagset looks so good, and it's being run by the lovely snickfic, and I am Indecisive. Signups are open 'til March 5, so I still have lots of time to decide.

The HurtComfortEx tag set continues to entertain and delight. Current favorite off-the-wall tag: Sunburn from Perineum Sunning. (ETA: Oh my god, this actually happened to Josh Brolin. I'm sorry, it's probably terrible, but I can't stop laughing.)

ANYWAY, the tagset is still open for nominations until Friday, and signups open next week!

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I am very entertained by this Iron Fist edition of the "tag yourself" Tumblr game.

For the non-Tumblr people, these are graphics done in an intentionally rough "made at 2 a.m. in MS Paint" collage style with descriptions of the characters that are meant to read like they were written by someone with only a vague osmotic knowledge of the canon, except they manage to hit all the points that you would want someone to pick up on because of course they're written by someone who knows it inside and out. It's hard to describe; it's a very Tumblr thing.

Anyway, "looks like he would kill you but actually can't" (regarding Ward) is going to make me giggle for ages.

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Speaking as a feral watercolorist, this tutorial on painting simple leaves in watercolor looks super useful and I'm linking to it so I can find it again later.

I'm looking up links on the 1964 Alaska earthquake tonight because I was thinking about using a picture from it to illustrate one of the mailing list stories. This story about a little girl who had to watch two of her brothers swallowed by cracks in the ground while she tried to rescue them - holy shit. (And the poor mom! Do not read if child harm is a triggery issue for you.) There are also some good pictures of the post-quake rubble here, including a 1960s newsreel with video footage I haven't seen before.

During the earthquake, several oceanfront subdivisions in Anchorage collapsed and slid into the sea, and were later made into a wilderness area called Earthquake Park. When I was a young child, which was only about 15-20 years after the earthquake, there was still a lot of debris in the park, random holes in the ground and big chunks of concrete and that sort of thing. These days, 55 years after the earthquake, all of that is gone and it's just woods networked with bike paths and hiking trails. I remember climbing on big pieces of concrete and boulders there when I was a little girl, and my mom explaining that it was because of the earthquake. I had no idea, at the time, that there were unrecoverable bodies buried under the park, which was one of the reasons they made it into a park.