If you go browsing around my blog today, you may find yourself faced with a few...surreal...changes. For one thing, the tag labeled "deadline" suddenly points to a lot of entries (as opposed to the tag labeled "deadlines," which mostly points to panic attacks). For another, clicking on that tag will take you to a lot of current project and word count posts, going back quite some time.

No, you haven't slipped into a parallel universe. The second book in the Newsflesh trilogy has changed titles, going from Blackout to Deadline, which was originally the title of the third book. The third book is now titled Blackout, bringing us full circle in our ride on the Ferris wheel of what-the-fuck.

No, I didn't do this just to be confusing. While I, personally, wouldn't put that sort of thing past me if I got bored enough, The Other Editor would never let me do it. So why the title change? Several reasons, really. Let me explain.

When I got the new issue of Locus, I saw that Connie Willis had a new book coming out. Now, Connie Willis is an author I very much respect and admire, and I was very excited. She wrote some of my favorite books, like Promised Land and Bellwether. So I looked up the name of her exciting upcoming release...and saw that it was a hardcover titled Blackout. Whoops.

The normal life-cycle for hardcovers has them coming out in paperback six months to a year after the original hardcover release. This seemed to me to be uncomfortably close to the release of the second Newsflesh book, and so I contacted The Other Editor to flail a bit. I'm good at flailing. Once I was finished flailing, we took a critical look at all three titles, and realized that they were wrong anyway. Book two is about racing a deadline you can't see or stop, and book three, well...book three makes a much better Blackout.

Trust me.

Now, I might have been a little more unhappy about the title changes, if I weren't so busy doing the dance of joy. It's pretty common knowledge that deadlines make me crazy. I was thus reasonably concerned about what would happen when I spent an entire year writing a book that was actually titled that. "I have to make the deadline on Deadline" just seems like the sort of statement that's designed to make me start biting people at random. Switching the names means that I just spent an entire year working on a book called Deadline, only I didn't realize it, and hence didn't freak out. Score one for weird psychology.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Newsflesh trilogy:

* Feed, May 2010.
* Deadline, May 2011.
* Blackout, May 2012.

When will you rise?

From the new issue of Publisher's Weekly:

McGuire follows 2009's Rosemary and Rue with a fast-paced cross between a murder mystery and a slasher film, liberally spiked with magic and technology. Half-faerie PI October "Toby" Daye leaves San Francisco for the nearby County of Tamed Lightning to check up on her patron's niece, January, who's uncharacteristically fallen out of contact. Toby soon realizes that ALH Computing, the county's secret seat of power, has big problems. Someone doesn't want outsiders snooping around, and as the body count rises, Toby will risk life, limb, and soul to find out what's really going on. While most of the deaths could have been prevented with a little less plot-mandated stupidity, the world-building is solid, the storytelling energetic, and the atmosphere sinister as mythological creatures face off against mad scientists. (Mar.)

Yay! (I don't completely agree that most of the deaths could have been prevented with a little less plot-mandated stupidity, for reasons that I can't really go into beyond "in Faerie, when your liege gives you an order, you follow it, whether it's stupid or not." But that's besides the point.) Getting a good review in Publisher's Weekly makes me feel like a real girl. For, y'know, the ten minutes before I find something else to get freaked out about. Today's terrifying adversary: oxygen. It's a corrosive poison, you know.

A Local Habitation is on the verge of becoming a really and truly real book, available for really and truly real purchase at a store near you. For some values of "near," anyway.

Whoa.

Words: 21,383.
Total words: 124,708.
Estimated to go: 20,292.
Reason for stopping: ...I appear to have just finished Book IV. I think that makes it time to stop for the night.
Music: random shuffle, heavy on the Rob Zombie. It seems appropriate.
Lilly and Alice: bed and cat tree, respectively.

Holy crap.

That is all.