A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of being able to read and review the first edition of M. Holly-Rosing’s comprehensive guide to crowdfunding creative projects. It was full of useful information, marketing and promotion tips, personal stories of both success and failure in crowdfunding, and just about anything else you could possibly need to help budding creators on their way to launching their own successful Kickstarter campaigns.

I’ve been a Jack Campbell fan for quite a while. (His real name is John Hemry, and he was formerly a JAG officer in the US Navy.)  After discovering his Lost Fleet military space-faring novels, I read through them as fast as I could get them. My husband got hooked, as well, as Campbell is one of the few military sci-fi writers who depict space battles with reasonable accuracy - meaning space is a big place, and it takes a long time for messages and images to arrive as well as using the three dimensions of space in battle strategy.  What I like best about Campbell is that he is living proof that a solid writer can get better – a lot better. You can see the improvement in The Lost Stars series.

Magic and science—a ripe combination for any story, especially one from the team from Mythopoeia.   Welcome to the first issue of Glow, another fantastic comic brought to us through Kickstarter.

In this penultimate issue of Snowfall from Joe Harris and Martín Morazzo, the line between terrorist and patriot becomes very thin.

Being a superhero or supervillian is tough. Being a process server who serves them is even tougher. Just ask brothers Clive and Cheech and their rag-tag team in Serving Supes.

Be careful who you love. That line might work as the tagline of The Shadow Glass from Dark Horse. Written and illustrated by Aly Fell, with letters by Nate Piekos of Blambot ®, this lush and beautiful graphic novel brings us to the time of the Golden Age of England (1500s), where magic and lust are intertwined.

I’m a genre person drawn to fantasy, steampunk, and science fiction, but I had the opportunity to pick up a free download of Shadow of the Knight. On a whim, I got it and discovered it was a nice break from my usual routine. A solidly written, fast-paced psychological thriller, it explores the dark descent of a woman trying to improve her life after surviving an abusive relationship.

If you are just joining the series, I would recommend that you start with Issue #1, as the story will make more sense; however, if you’ve been keeping up… good news! This issue tackles the complex backstory of Inspector Davitika Deal.

Would you destroy the world to save your daughter? Or would you be willing to sacrifice her to save it? These and many other questions are the underlying themes in the series Snowfall, written by Joe Harris with art by Martín Morazzo.
In Issue #5, the White Wizard imprinted enough of the formulary onto Anthony Farrow to draw the Cooperative’s mercenaries into a trap, but the ensuing firefight leaves both him and the former student and terrorist injured. Still free and in control of the formulary, his daughter, Chloe, clearly has a different agenda and seeks out the detained Inspector Deal to help her.  Now, with snow falling on Old New York City for the first time in decades, who really controls the formulary?

I have this really big pile of unread books and comics in my office, but I was delighted when the anthology The Sea is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia finally got to the top.  It came from a successful Indiegogo campaign that I backed some time ago, and it feeds into my desire to read Steampunk set anywhere but in England.  (Full disclosure: One of the editors took my “Crowdfunding for Independent Creators” class.)  Coming from an aesthetic very different from British-dominated neo-Victorianism and Steampunk, these stories explore technology, alternate history, and retrofuturism from a Southeast Asian viewpoint. I’m happy to say that each of these stories succeeds in their own way.