News Round-Up

         It’s time for updates on a whole slew of recent projects…

        1. Back in December I participated in “Speed-Date a Book” with Strong Women-Strange Worlds, in which I made a fun two-minute pitch for Bittersweetness & Light in the form of a fantastical weather report.  Alas, the recording isn’t perfect: at the end it doesn’t show the whole panel of “contestants,” and even worse, during my pitch it shows only my slides and not me, which is in keeping with technology’s increasingly emphatic attempts to gaslight me.  I assure you I was there in front of the screen during the live event!  (Have I somehow become a ghost or a vampire?)  But at any rate, you can still enjoy my pitch, which you can watch here.

        2. Also back in December I had several art shows and was working on several blocks.  Here’s the progress I’ve reached: one had a test print and is ready for final tweaking and proper printing, one is probably about two thirds of the way finished, and the third is just barely begun.  I’ll need to start two more to use as sample blocks at upcoming workshops in the next month, but I’m certainly hoping to get back to more of my own sweet carving, as well.

        3. More recently I just spent the weekend at the Arisia sci fi/fantasy convention in Cambridge, MA and it was fantastic!  I was on the half-dozen panels listed in my last post,

plus two group readings.  I sold lots of books and a ton of art, and my piece “Symbiote City (Venusian Medusae)” won the Con Chair’s Choice Award!  You can read more about the piece at this prior post (which is also relevant for the panel I was on, about “Designing Things that Don’t Exist”).  And on top of all that, I had a lot of really nice conversations with people about art and writing and sharing the things that give us hope.  Really Good Stuff!

        4. Looking somewhat ahead, I am plunging into work on my next book, Beyond Pomegranate & Thorns, because it’s high time to get cracking on decisions about what to include, what order to put things in, what additional pieces of artwork I need to fill in gaps, and so on.  I just received marketing postcards in time to give them out at the conventions; I just received the enamel pins that are one of the Kickstarter backer rewards; and I just got a bunch of beta reader feedback that I need to digest and process and use for decision-making.  It’s all very daunting and very exciting!

        5. Meanwhile, there will need to be lots of matting and framing for Boskone in three weeks… not to mention all the other stuff I was complaining about in my Jan. 5 post!  (Also meanwhile, I’ve had to migrate to a new newsletter program and at the moment I cannot even express how intensely I’m hating it.  Ugh!  But there are plenty of other things to worry about, both more positive and more negative, so that’s a problem for another day.)

        6. Another fun tidbit is that I currently have artwork on display in public outdoor art galleries in two towns.  I absolutely love this format, in which the artwork of multiple artists beautifies otherwise boring or ugly fences around town, and the selection rotates to new locations at intervals so that it stays fresh and interesting to everyone going about their daily rounds.  It’s an honor to have my work accepted in these two projects, and between this and my successes at Arisia I’ve been feeling very affirmed in my art recently.

        All of which means that, as always, I do hope you know that if you’ve bought my work, read my books, left reviews, told your friends, or supported me in any one of  many ways either tangible or intangible, it really does make a difference to me and I do appreciate it very much.

[Pictures: Screen shots from my Speed-Date pitch for Bittersweetness & Light, all graphics by AEGNydam, 2025;

Rubber blocks plus test print of Needham cupolas by AEGNydam, 2026;

Photos from Arisia, (photo of me at Broad Universe Rapid Fire Reading by Randee Dawn), 2026;

Photos of assorted other projects and art by AEGNydam, 2026.]