1. My beloved personal superhero, dianafox, is giving away a copy of A Local Habitation. Read her post for details (and don't ask me about them, since it's not my giveaway). Here's your opportunity to make my agent give you stuff! A chance like this doesn't come along every day, not even for me!

2. You still have four hours in which to enter my random drawing to win a copy of Feed. I'll be picking a name at noon California time, and all you have to do is leave a comment. You now how to leave a comment, don't you? Just type some things into your browser and click.

3. The fantastic talkstowolves has gone to the trouble of working up a linked list to all the free fiction on the Locus recommended reading list! These are the stories that professional reviewers selected as the best of 2009, and they're totally free for you to read. So if you get bored, you should do that.

4. There is no number four. Move along, citizens, move along.

We are now twenty-five days from the official street date of A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy], the second book in the October Daye series. If I had a penny for every day remaining, I would have a quarter. If I had a quarter for every day remaining, I would have six dollars and twenty-five cents, which isn't really enough to do anything useful. If I had a dollar for every day remaining, I'd probably just blow it on Diet Dr Pepper and Dance Dance Revolution down at the arcade, so I guess it's for the best that I haven't got a dollar.

I guess.

I'm pretty much just as nervous now as I was this time last release, thus confirming my belief that the pre-release crazies are an ongoing condition, not a once-in-a-lifetime event. They're like the flu, rather than like smallpox (which you're only likely to catch once, assuming you can survive that first encounter). I think I would have preferred smallpox. The flu can also be fatal, and smallpox, at least, doesn't happen on an annual basis unless you're really, really unlucky. I've started having the classic* anxiety dreams, I'm twitchy, and I find myself tearing up over episodes of Wizards of Waverly Place.

I'm both excited and terrified. Terror is winning at the moment, but I'm sure that, too, will pass, given sufficient caffeine and maybe a cupcake or two (dozen). Twenty-five days and this stage of the terror will be over, replaced by new and exciting types of terror into which I can dive.

I need a nap.

(*Classic for me, that is, which means they mostly involve being late for flights, missing connections, missing planes, and Ebola outbreaks wiping out the state of California. I haven't had the "you lost your luggage on the way to the con because your plane went down and now you're dead but you can't let anybody know" dream yet, but I'm sure that's coming. It's always coming. My brain is awesome.)

...lostwind! You have until noon on Sunday to email me your address through my website contact link, at which point I will happily pop an ARC of Feed in the mail for you.

More giveaways to come!