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other people’s projects

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Day of Signal Boosting! And also news!

So happy Boosting the Signal Premiere Day, y’all! If you haven’t seen ’em already, I’ve got the first two posts up, featuring Genevieve Griffin and Anna Kashina!

Quite excited to give these authors a shot at getting the word out about their work, and I hope y’all will consider giving them a look.

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And now, additional items to signal boost!

Michael F. Stewart is a fellow former Drollerie author, and he’s got a Kickstarter! He’s writing YA, with zombies. And as y’all know, zombies ARE relevant to my interests!

If they’re relevant to yours, go give him a look and maybe a pledge, mmkay? Do it for Canadian indie science fiction! Do it for Michael! Do it for ZOMBIES.

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My pal Dejah Leger, about whom I have enthused on this blog more than once, performs with her family under the name La Famille Leger! And they’ve just dropped a brand new shiny album! It’s called L’étoile du nord, and it’s chock full of tasty Acadian music. If you have any interest in French-Canadian trad, you should totally check this out. This is La Famille Leger’s first professionally engineered album, and I’ve listened to it now streaming off of Bandcamp, and whoa and damn it sounds good. I particularly commend to your attention tracks 8 and 12–especially track 12, which contains a tune I’m learning how to play since we’re doing it in session! Come for Dejah’s lovely singing and the wry vocals by her beau-père Louis, as well! Stay for the cracklin’ foot-stompin’ tunes!

The album lives right over here on Bandcamp. And if you can see the embedded player in this post, you can just click right on it! Check it out! And if you like what you hear, give it a buy, won’t you? All that’s stopping me from buying this RIGHT NOW is that I’m buying a physical CD directly from the Legers. But the rest of you out there in Internetland, throw ’em some dollars through Bandcamp and tell ’em I sent you!

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And speaking of awesome French-Canadian music, Dara and I are about to scamper up to Canada for round one of our March musical shenanigans! We’re hitting Festival du Bois, the Francophone music festival in B.C., at which quite a few of my favorite musicians will be performing! Not only the aforementioned La Famille Leger, but also the Yves Lambert trio! Real excited about seeing Monsieur Lambert, since he’s the singer whose lead vocals on La Bottine Souriante way back in 2000 got me hooked on Quebec music in the first place.

And! AND! There will also be Vishtèn! Y’all may recall that Dara and I got to see them in Newfoundland in 2012, and they were awesome, and I am very much looking forward to seeing them again!

Last but most assuredly not least, my boys of De Temps Antan, about whom I have failed to be able to shut up, almost as much as I’ve failed to stop gushing over Le Vent du Nord. ;D

Forecast for this weekend is perfectly ridiculous amounts of fun, and I’ll be roping several friends into attending the shenanigans with us! Best of all Dara and I get to meet up with userinfomaellenkleth and userinfosiestabear for the De Temps Antan show at St. James Hall–two years and a day after the delightful Le Vent du Nord show at the same venue! Which means that Sunday night will be our second anniversary of getting Canada-married, which means we’ll have not only badass music to enjoy, but an anniversary to celebrate as well! SO AWESOME. \0/

The Internet

Plug post for three Kickstarters!

And now, three quick comments about Kickstarters currently on my radar!

First up, I give you take two of Leannan Sidhe’s attempt to fund her second album! Her first attempt sadly failed so she’s trying again with revised rewards and a lower funding target. She’s one of the musicians who’ll be working on the Faerie Blood and Bone Walker soundtrack, so I highly encourage you to check this project out if you haven’t already!

Secondly, here’s a kid’s adventure game that was brought to my attention, targeted for launch on PC and Mac browsers as well as iOS. Looks like it might be fun, so if you’ve got kids for whom this might appeal, give it a look!

And last but not least, indie magazine Crossed Genres needs to raise funds to continue publication, so here’s their project to do that! I’ve jumped in myself to support this one, with an eye for all the ebook goodies they’re offering to some of the lower tiers of supporters. But more importantly, there’s a promise of ongoing indie, QUILTBAG-friendly SF here, and I’m all about that.

Other People's Books, The Internet

And because signalboosting is love

In between smiling winningly at the lot of you in the hopes you’ll help me with my project, I’d like to take the opportunity to mention some other excellent crowdfunding projects going on. Because I believe in subsidizing awesomeness, not to mention arts patronage and signalboosting!

First, I give you We See a Different Frontier, which is on Peerbackers rather than Kickstarter–but the same general mechanism of crowdfunding. (Peerbackers collects payment via Paypal rather than Amazon.) This project is for an anthology about colonialism in space, but they’re specifically interested in non-white, non-First-World perspectives, and it’s headed up by Djibril al-Ayad, general editor of The Future Fire, who I know via the Outer Alliance.

Second, back over on Kickstarter, let’s talk THE WARLOCK’S CURSE: #3 in the Veneficas Americana series, which is M.K. Hobson’s effort to continue the series she started with The Native Star and The Hidden Goddess! I liked The Native Star quite a bit, so if you like steampunk with a heaping side helping of romance and magic, you might go check this out!

Third, if comics are more your thing, you might check out Whispers from the Void™, a project that came across my radar thanks to the Paranormal Mystery list I’m on.

And last but most assuredly not least, I’d like to give serious plugging love to Mine to Love, the Kickstarter by none other than Leannan Sidhe, a local musician who’s worked with (and performed with) my very own Dara! She’s working to get her second album out, and I’m here to tell y’all, girl can sing. She has an amazing sweet soprano voice, and so if you like music by oh, say, Loreena McKennitt, you cannot do wrong at all by checking out her work!

Anybody out there know of other awesome ongoing projects you’d like to promote? Link ’em up in the comments and spread the signalboosting love!