Yesterday afternoon, at the request of my/Mira Grant's publisher, I took my little FlipVideo camera and my little clicky-flashy digital camera down to Cups and Cakes Bakery to document the process of making the famous BRAIN CUPCAKES. Because, well, it seemed like a good way to kill an hour or two. The bakery is closed on Tuesdays, so Tuesday was the best time to have a slightly off-kilter author come in and point cameras at things. It was fun!

I am aware that this thread is useless without pics. Pics will be coming soon, although the odds are reasonably high that they will be posted, not here, but on the Orbit website. Why? Because dude, brain cupcakes. Also, that way Orbit has to do the video hosting, not me. I like things that lead to other people doing the video hosting. Things that lead to other people doing the video hosting are keen.

It turns out, by the way, that people are a lot less willing to accept random cupcakes from a random stranger when those random cupcakes look like tiny frosting brains. This is more of a sign of a survival instinct than I usually see from the human race these days, so I'm going to take it as a good thing. It probably didn't help that I looked bone-tired while offering the tiny brains to people, which created an overall air of "zombie pastry chef" that can't possibly have appealed to the public at large. Many of my friends, sure, but the public at large, not so amazingly much.

I love the simplicity of these tiny sugary treats, their iconic awesomeness, the way that they just say, very straightforwardly, "this is what I am, I am a brain, you can cope." I find myself pondering other ways to make cupcakes relevant to my various projects (although with some projects, this requires no effort at all—Velveteen gets red velvet cupcakes with vanilla frosting and rainbow sprinkles, for superficial childishness atop adult complexity; Clady just gets whatever you're not eating...), because dude, cupcakes.

Everybody loves baked goods.

We are now ninety days out from the release of An Artificial Night (October Daye, book three). It's up on Amazon.com, and people are pre-ordering. The ARCs should be arriving at my house any day now; they may even be waiting for me when I get home tonight. My page proofs have been reviewed, returned to DAW, and confirmed as received, which means this book is now officially outside my control: I can't change anything.

Ninety days.

An Artificial Night is the third and last book on my original contract was DAW. It's also the last book to be mostly complete at the time of sale. Barring editorial notes, small changes, and typo correction, all three have been done since before Rosemary and Rue was released. In many ways, this has been a great thing. On the one hand, it's meant that I couldn't change what I was doing based on outside criticism. On the other hand, it's meant that I couldn't change what I was doing based on outside criticism—I couldn't fix anything, but I also couldn't have a first-time novelist freak-out and wind up completely rewriting the rest of the series to meet an unreachable standard. I know this has been a luxury. It's one I'm very, very glad to have had.

This book is my favorite of the first three. I love the whole thing. I love the situation, I love the reality of it, and I love that Toby is finally past the events of the first book to such an extent that she can really stand up and do her job. I love that in just ninety days, you'll be able to hold it in your hands.

How many miles to Babylon?

Not that many.