Have you always wanted to attend one of my book events? Well, here's your chance!

The Traveling Circus will be reuniting this Saturday, September 18th, for a gala bash at Borderlands Books in San Francisco, California! Festivities will commence at five, and continue until nine, by which point the bookstore will have had more than enough of us, and will doubtless shovel us all out into the street.

Will there be music? Yes, there will be music. With Amy McNally, Michelle Dockrey, Betsy Tinney, SJ Tucker, and Brooke Lunderville in attendance, music has become unavoidable. The musicians will be back in the bookstore this time, leaving the cafe open for the consumption of delicious, delicious beverages, and even more delicious food.

Will there be a raffle? Yes, there will be a raffle. Awesome prizes are being prepared as we speak, tucked into their box with care as we get ready for the big night. All attendees will get a raffle ticket automatically; get another ticket by making a purchase at either the bookstore or the cafe (three tickets per person, maximum).

Will there be cake? Yes, there will be cake. It's Toby's one-year publication "birthday," and cake makes every birthday better.

Will there be pendants? Yes, there will be pendants. chimera_fancies will be in attendance, with a never-before-seen batch of pendants created from an ARC of An Artificial Night. They're some of her best work to date, and will be available for sale throughout the evening. Seriously, you don't want to miss these.

Remember that, if you can't attend, Borderlands is happy to take requests for signed and personalized books, and I'd be thrilled to sign a book to be mailed to you. They have all three Toby books, Feed, The Living Dead 2, and—the last time I checked—one of the last remaining retail copies of Ravens in the Library. So show up if you can, and consider placing an order if you can't!

This message bought and paid for by The Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling Show, LLC.

First up, Edmund Schubert at Magical Words posted this lovely set of thoughts on the naming of stories, and why it matters. Go forth, read, consider, and take a look at your own works in progress. And now...

I have always had a very love/hate relationship with titles. A good title makes everything wonderful. A bad title does the exact opposite. Most of my songs have titles that are so generically descriptive as to be direct quotes, usually taken from the chorus, usually forgotten in favor of "let's do that one, you know, with the buffalo stuff in the chorus." (This does not apply to "Wicked Girls," which couldn't have had a different title if I'd wanted it to.) Titling songs is hard.

Titling books is a little easier, because most of my books come sort of "pre-bundled" with their titles. There are books in the InCryptid sequence that have titles and point-of-view characters, and not very much else. This can be disconcerting when a book gets re-titled on me, as happened with Feed—a decision I think was absolutely the right thing for the book, but after literally years of calling it Newsflesh, it took me a while to change gears. It was easier when book two became Deadline two-thirds of the way through the writing process, because it had already had one name change (from The Mourning Edition). I really don't know what I'll do if I'm ever told I have to change a title I'm really emotionally attached to, like Professional Goreography, or Sit, Stay, I Hate You.

My short story titles are the ones I'm really proud of. The long, Tiptree-style titles. "Dying With Her Cheer Pants On." "The Tolling of Pavlov's Bells." "Laughter at the Academy: A Field Study in the Genesis of Schizotypal Creative Genius Personality Disorder (SCGPD)." "A Citizen in Childhood's Country." The short, accurate but interesting titles. "Lost." "Indexing." "Knives." "Let's Pretend." Again, the titles usually accompany the stories they describe, and changing them is even harder than changing the names of books, but some of them make me really, really happy.

(And if I ever publish a collection of short stories, I am going to fight like a cat in a sack to title it Dying With Her Cheer Pants On. Because dude, would that not be an awesome book to read on the train? Knowing me, and knowing my overall body of work, it's more likely to be called The Tolling of Pavlov's Bells, but a girl can dream.)

I guess it's sort of like naming babies. All the care in the world to find something that fits, something that's right, and most of all, something that won't rhyme with any unfortunate swear words or insults (for those halcyon playground days). And half the time, we grow up and shorten or change the names our parents gave us—so Rosemary and Rue becomes Rosemary, Newsflesh becomes Feed, and Dying With Her Cheer Pants On becomes "no, really, it's about cheerleaders fighting an alien invasion."

Titles are evocative and magical and strange and enticing, and can make the difference between an impulse buy and a dismissal.

Food for thought.

Words: 4,444.
Total words: 4,444.
Reason for stopping: I have finished chapter one.
Music: random shuffle. Lots of angry rock.
Lilly and Alice: flopped on the bed.

Well.

I just wrote an entire first chapter in one long sitting. Like, the whole thing. Beginning, middle, end. I'm just saying. That's a thing. Anyway, here we go again. I recommend hanging onto your seats, because it's going to be a bumpy-ass ride.

Rise up while you can.