• Mood: stressed
• Music: Hairspray, "Without Love."

Fifty days. How time does fly.

(Real quick: g33kboi, this is my last call. You have won an ARC of A Local Habitation. If I do not receive email through my website "contact" link with your mailing address by bedtime tonight, I will give your prize to someone else. For serious.)

As of today, we are fifty days away from the official release of A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy]. (Of course, if Rosemary and Rue is anything to go by, we're actually about thirty-five days away from my hysterical meltdown in the Borders near my office.) If I had a penny for every day remaining before the official release, I wouldn't have enough to buy myself a cup of coffee. I would have enough to make a penny roll, though, which is always soothing. I like penny rolls.

Rosemary and Rue [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] was my first book. It taught me a lot about marketing, pre-release crazy, post-release crazy, going crazy from good reviews, going crazy from bad reviews, living by my own rules regarding engaging reviewers and trying to explain myself, hyperventilating when I see my book on shelves, and trying to look nonchalant when I really just want to be screaming "I WROTE A BOOK OH MY GOD YOU GUYS LOOK LOOK LOOK YOU CAN TRADE MONEY FOR GOODS AND SERVICES AND THE GOODS AND SERVICES ARE MY BOOK!!!" while jumping up and down and providing expository hand gestures. It was, in short, a learning experience, and while I'd like to claim that it has left me a calm and mature author, prepared for anything, the fact of the matter is this:

I am so totally going to cry the first time I see A Local Habitation on the bookshelf. And then I'm going to call Vixy and make shrieky bat-noises until she talks me down from my happy hysteria. Because that's just how we roll around here.

I only have one convention between now and book release—Conflikt, in Seattle—and unlike last year, I'm not the Guest of Honor, which means that I have time to breathe. Of course, I have a convention immediately after the book is released (Consonance, in Santa Clara), but again, not Guest of Honor, just Head of Programming, so I'll be able to stop and stick my head between my knees every once in a while. This is A Very Good Thing, especially since, once A Local Habitation is safely out, I'm going to be putting on my Mira-pants and going immediately into freaking out over Feed.

Fifty days. A year ago, I was worried that no one would like Toby, that she'd just disappear into the urban fantasy jungle and never be seen again. Now I'm worried about not letting people down, and whether they'll still like Toby now that she's a little more comfortable with her new apartment.

Fifty days.

Wow.