Arctic Light

Reading my flist, I came across this announcement and wanted to pass it along.

Little White Mouse is a very fun comic about a girl trapped on a space station with nothing to keep her company but homicidal robots, the memory of her dead sister, and a ghost who may or may not actually be there. It's sweet, poignant, funny, and fascinating, as well as full of sci-fi goodness like space pirates, alternate timelines, street punks on hovercycles and bad guys in battle cruisers.

I started reading it when I was still doing the self-publishing convention circuit back in 2002 or so; Paul and I both lived in the Midwest and had tables at a lot of the same shows. And then he married one of my best friends and turned out to be a really awesome guy as well as simply a very nice guy when I'd say hi to him at cons. At the time he was publishing LWM through a small-press publisher; since then he's regained the rights to it and moved into self-publishing, which is a tricky game at the best of times (believe me, I know) and is downright rough with the economy like it is.

I suspect that an all-ages comic with a female, PoC heroine would be Relevant To The Interests of quite a bit of my flist, either for yourself or maybe a Christmas present for a kid, niece, sister, sci-fi-addicted older relative or whatnot. It's all available online for free (ETA: Okay, the cover link doesn't click through to the rest of it: start here instead and let me know if you have any further problems; I'll pass them along.) And if you sample and like it ... get the book! If possible, ordering it through a comic shop would help Paul out a lot -- there are details at the above link, but basically, you bring the Diamond order code "DEC100959" into your comic store and ask them to order it for you. That way, Diamond gets good sales figures for the book, and they carry more of his books in the future. (But I know most of you aren't really comic-shop-going people, so, you know. Get the book wherever it's most convenient for you. :))

Have I mentioned fanart_recs lately? :D It's patterned after other reccing comms like crack_van and stargateficrec; this one's for fanart, obviously, and you sign up here to do at least four recs in your chosen fandom for a month. I'll be reccing Dresden Files in December -- I was doing SGA, but switched at the last minute because, well, Dresden Files is what I'm into right now ... which means they have no SGA reccers for December; anybody wanna? :D (You do need a DW account in order to rec, though not, obviously, to view it.)

sga_flashfic/sga_flashfic is having an Amnesty round, which means that any of their past challenges (scroll past the "author" tags to the "challenge" tags) are available for writing! Blood, anyone? Sharks? Cake or Death? Not Dead Yet? Role Reversal? Secret Superpower? This may well be the comm's last hurrah (*sniffles* ... omg, I've been posting fic there since 2006, wtf) so, hey, if you're looking for inspiration, go poke through the tags and see if there's anything that begs to be written. :D

And finally, there is fandom_stocking (multi-fandom), where you can leave a wish list here, and poke through other people's "stocking" posts to see if there is anything you might want to leave for them.