Saturday, I stopped in at the Other Change of Hobbit to pick up copies of the July issue of Locus Magazine and chatter with the staff, since they're all super-interested in the whole process, which means I can talk about it without feeling like I'm being a weird obsessive. (Seriously, right now, I could talk about the publishing process for about three days without stopping, and since new things keep happening, I keep getting more things to talk about. I am a faintly neurotic soul who likes to talk things to death. Having people who are actively interested and ask me questions spares all the rest of my friends from a death worse than fate.) Being as I was in the store and already spending money, I decided to browse around and see whether I could find anything I particularly wanted to read.

Now, I am a reader of urban fantasy. That's probably part of why I became a writer of urban fantasy. (My lifelong obsession with folklore probably explains the rest.) I've watched the growth of the genre with delight shading into bewilderment -- delight because there are so many awesome titles out there these days, bewilderment because about half the covers show women crouching in black vinyl catsuits and wearing impractical heels. None of my urban fantasy heroines would be caught dead in a black vinyl catsuit, wearing impractical heels. And they don't, as a rule, crouch. All the other covers show half-naked women or carefully chosen bits of women, usually accessorized with some sort of weapon. That's actually a little more understandable. There are lots of way to get a character naked.

As I sifted through stack after stack of urban fantasies I'd never heard of before, I realized one horrible, irritating thing: I couldn't tell the porn-with-plot from the plot-with-porn. I've already read most of the 'sure things' -- the books I know meet my specific preferences in terms of the balance of 'sex' to 'not sex' -- and what I was left with was a whole lotta books where their back cover blurbs could have made them anything from the next Anita Blake to, well, the next any heroine who can keep her pants on for more than six pages at a stretch.

It's not that I dislike porn-with-plot. I read romance novels -- hell, I write romance novels -- and sometimes there's a very good reason to get everybody hot and bothered. It's just that I really prefer to choose my erotica, rather than accidentally tripping over it and falling into a puddle of unexplainable fluid. This isn't the fault of the authors. This is just, well, packaging combining with genre trends to leave me deeply perplexed. But there is a solution!

The pie chart.

I say we start stamping all urban fantasies somewhere discrete with little pie chart symbols detailing the ratio of 'plot' to 'porn.' If that sounds too judgmental, we could go with the ratio of 'naked' to 'clothed,' or even 'sexual tension,' 'action,' and 'actual pay-off.' I'd wind up following series where they started with a lot of the sexual tension pie and moved on to the actual pay-off pie after I was already invested in the relationship, while other people could go straight to the 'lots of kinky sex' pie, and everybody would win! Also, I wouldn't accidentally stumble across sex scenes that would make a porn star blush. Again, everybody wins.

Now to sell it to marketing...

Updated book stats:

Total words: 149,220.
Previous words: 156,890.
Loss between drafts: 7,670.
Total chapters: thirty-one chapters, divided into five 'books' and a coda.
Total pages: 544 (30 page decrease).
Draft one started: September 4th, 2005, on the plane back from Seattle.
Draft one finished: December 27th, 2007, sitting at Tony's kitchen table, in Seattle.
Draft one edits finished: June 3rd, 2008, in my bedroom.
Draft two started: June 3rd, 2008, also in my bedroom.
Draft two finished: July 7th, still in my bedroom. I don't move much.

I have finished the second draft of Feed, my epic novel of zombies, politics, blogging, how George Romero accidentally saved the world and the tragic duty of the journalist. Now I get to process copy-edits and frantically jab my subject matter experts with sticks. ("Hey, you said my tech was outdated. Dude, can you tell me how? Please? Ack!")

Seriously, this book has been so much work, and there's more work to come, but wow, has it turned into something amazing. I am so very proud of this entire thing. It's huge and sprawling and epic and wonderful, and I still love it, even after hammering my head against it for all this time. Which I think is a good sign.

I love my little zombies.