Two more days remain in our pre-release countdown, which has been a surprisingly fun and distracting way to pass the time between now and A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy]. So that's a big "hooray," at least on my part. I like distractions that actually work, rather than ending with me starting a new essay series or something.

2 Things About the October Daye Series.

2. People periodically ask me "well, if you had your way, how long would this series go?" And to them I must say...I don't actually know. See, I know how it ends. I have detailed outlines through book seven, and looser outlines for books eight and nine, as well as a lengthy list of things that happen after that. Also, there's a prequel called Strangers in the Court that's supposed to happen between books six and seven; it's about how Toby got knighted, and it's going to be lots of fun. I always know where I am in relation to the ending, and I can always get there in one volume, but I don't have any sort of firm "it is X books long" statement that I can go bandying around.

1. I really do take a malicious glee in doing horrible things to Toby's car. I mean, people are like "why do you do those things to Toby's car?", and I'm like, "BECAUSE IT'S FUNNY." I also enjoy preventing her from sleeping, taking away her food, and denying her coffee. I am a cruel, cruel author.

We are now officially entering release week for A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy]. Yes, I know that the book has been unpredictably available for the last week and a half or so, but as of tomorrow, we're really and for truly in the realm of "this is your release week," and I will become prone to bouts of random twitching.

I don't know, honestly, whether release week trauma is a thing I'll ever fully get over. When I look at my saved email, the earliest mention of Toby Daye is from January 6th, 1998. That's officially more than twelve years ago. For a decade, Toby was just this weird girl who lived in my head, and who I sometimes claimed to be writing a novel (or novels) about. Some of my friends read those early drafts, and gave me useful critique, and I kept writing...but for a really long time, she was practically my Mr. Snuffleupagus, the protagonist of a series I kept saying existed, yet could never produce.

It is constantly strange to me that people I don't know have met Toby. She's not my secret friend anymore; she's everybody's, and they get to have their own ideas about her, about the things she does and the places that she goes. People send me letters thanking me for writing. How weird is that? Writing is that thing my friends yell at me for doing when they're having parties, not something that I get thanked for. It's bizarre. So when release day rolls around, I get a little twitchy, waiting to find out that it was all just a dream; I didn't get to kick the football, nobody went to Oz, and Jean Grey isn't dead after all.

So. Weird.

Thank you all for reading, and for being here, and I'll do my best not to rip a hole in the fabric of reality, allowing the black hounds of the unreal to pour through and devour all that lives or dreams on this plane of existence. Promise.