I'll have better things later today (and things which include slightly more in the way of "actual coherence"), but I was out late last night, and a nice big pot of link soup is currently about my speed. Yum, yum, link soup. Anyway...

SFX Magazine conducted this fun interview with me in my guise as Mira Grant with me at this year's San Diego International Comic Con, which means they transcribed my actual speech, thus leading to a lot of exclamation points. They had some fun new questions. I heartily approve.

And while we're in the Mira part of the library, Fantasy Magazine posted this excellent review of Feed. It's a fun read, even if it doesn't provide any good pull quotes for me to share with the rest of the class.

Pseudo Emo Teen posted a lovely review of Feed, and says, "Let me start out by saying: Feed is one of the best, if not the best, book I have read in long time." Okay, you know, that works for me. Let's just go with that.

Sometimes it's nice to get interviewed in my guise as, you know, me. So here's a fun interview that was conducted before my trip to Australia, during which I talk about the Campbell and the destruction of mankind. You know, the usual jibber-jabber around these parts. (The lovely lady who interviewed me posted her review of Feed after I won the Campbell, and you should read that, too.)

And now for something completely different...a review of Grants Pass, the first anthology I ever actually sold a story to. They call out my story, which makes this relevant. Also, it's a bad-ass anthology, and if you like horror, you should totally read it.

Monday morning, I woke up, and I had still won the Campbell. This was...something of a relief, since part of me had been vigorously insisting that I was going to wake up and it was going to have all been a VERY CRUEL DREAM. Because that is the sort of shit my brain thinks is funny. Well, at this point, if it's a very cruel dream, it's been going on for almost two months, and when I wake up, I'm kicking the living shit out of the Sandman.

After dressing, abluting, and giggling a lot, Jeanne and I made our way over to the convention center, where I had been added to the "Disreputable Protagonists" panel. I...didn't have that much to contribute, honestly. Toby is disreputable, but she's disreputable due to very world-specific things, not because she's actually a roguish naif. Ah, well. What I remember of the panel was fun (I had, remember, not slept much for almost a week).

We wandered around the convention a bit. We peered at stuff. And we made our way to my reading, which was governed entirely by consensus. What was I going to read from? Feed. Okay. Which part? The first part. Again, okay. I read the first chapter. And then I gave away books, so I wouldn't have to take them home.

We wandered around a bit more. I gave away more books, including one to Crystal, a very nice lady associated with Arisia in Boston. I ran out of books. We hooked up with what had become the Usual Suspects—Cat, Rob, Liz, Mundy, Mal, and a gentleman whose name I have since forgotten—and took cabs downtown, where we ate Italian food and threw things at each other and made fun of Scotland. Then it was back to the Hilton, where we drank cocktails and talked about many things, and flung cookies at each other, and generally were silly buggers until the time came for sleeping.

That's the end of AussieCon IV. To everyone who made my weekend so amazing, thank you. To everyone who would have done the same if they could have been there, thank you. And to Jeanne and Cat, thank you twice, because you made the weekend magic.

Australia!

Words: 3,022.
Total words: 104,023.
Reason for stopping: I need to eat dinner, or I am going to die.
Music: random shuffle.
Lilly and Alice: somewhere in the house, and conked out on the bed, respectively.

So it's been a little while since I've provided a concrete update on this book. I could make excuses about how busy I've been, but really, it's that for a while, updates have been borderline impossible, because my progress hasn't been something I could quantify. Have I been writing? Yes, I have. But half of what I've been doing has been revising, or taking old scenes, feeding them through the wood chipper, and stapling them back together in a new order. I've cut sub-plots and scenes, replacing them with new, stronger sub-plots and scenes. And it's been exhausting and hard to exactly measure.

But I think I'm a little more confident about my progress now, especially since this book is projected to be done when it hits somewhere around 107,500 words. I'm probably going to write to about 109,000 words, thus giving myself a little wiggle room when it comes to finding the (many many many) things that need cutting. And then I'm going to send it off to the Machete Squad and The Agent, and buckle down on my next set of projects: Blackout, Ashes of Honor, and Midnight Blue-Light Special.

I really am astonishingly excited about what One Salt Sea is turning into. This is so much better of a book than I thought it was going to be, and that's in first draft form, before the people who keep me honest have taken their shots at it. When they're done?

It's gonna be amazing.