1. I have been blazingly ill since Sunday afternoon, and spent most of yesterday and Monday in a cold medication haze. I am thus behind on LJ comments, email, snail mail, passenger pigeon mail, Facebook mail (well, I'm always behind on Facebook mail), sending out the mail, opening the mail, and anything else that required actual effort on my part. If you're waiting for a response from me, please, be patient. If your request is urgent, please, mail again. If I do not consider your request to be actually urgent, like you're asking for kitten pictures or something, I reserve the right to delete your email and scowl in your general direction.

2. Despite being blazingly ill, I managed to make my word counts on Blackout both days, and am on track to hit 100,000 words on April 23rd. This is good, since it means I may actually finish the book, you know, on time. I love finishing things on time. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and slightly less completely deranged.

3. Saturday night was GP's birthday party! I did not come home that night, as it was late and we were all exhausted and sort of drunk (and yes, this may have dealt my immune system the fatal blow). Thomas showed his disapproval by climbing onto my computer desk, gently nudging aside the dolls on the second shelf, pulling down the jar in which I store my earplugs, opening the jar, dumping out the earplugs, and eating half of them. I do not know why he is so obsessed with eating the damn things, but he's why I bought that jar in the first place. Now he shits little pink bullets, and looks smug.

4. My vet has confirmed that this won't hurt him, but is also sub-optimal. I have moved my earplugs.

5. The first draft of "Crystal Halloway, Girl Wonder, and the Terror of the Truth Fairy" is finished and being hacked at by the Machete Squad. This is seriously the most depressing, nihilistic story I think I've ever written. Which makes it appropriate that I wrote it while I was sick even unto death. This thing reads like the prologue to a Vertigo comic series.

6. I am not writing a Vertigo comic series. Unless, of course, DC asks me to.

7. I also got started on the first draft of "Rat-Catcher," a Tobyverse story set in London, in 1662 (yes, only a few years before the Great Fire, and the Great Plague). In it, a young Prince of Cats named Rand must stop playing theater cat at the Duke's Theater long enough to find a way to deal with his father, keep his sister from doing something monumentally stupid, and oh, right, maybe save the Cait Sidhe of London from a fate worse than death. Is this Tybalt's origin story? Why yes. Yes, it is.

8. Things already pulled from my research shelf in service of "Rat-Catcher": The Writer's Digest Guide to Character Naming (second edition), London: A Biography, Sex and Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, and The Wordsworth Dictionary of Shakespeare. Make of this what you will.

9. Being sick did allow me to catch up on some of my cache of SyFy Original Movies, including the second half of Meteor with Marla Sokoloff. This was a disturbingly good, surprisingly high-budget feature, especially for a SyFy Saturday. Also, not only were women competent and realistic characters, they didn't all die. Well done, SyFy. Keep up the good work.

10. Zombies are still love.

What's up with you?

Oh, happy day! I am now chortling in my joy, because I have an AWESOME ANNOUNCEMENT to share with everybody: Conjure Oils is now offering sampler pips of the current Toby Daye perfume line. There are TWENTY-ONE scents available, including "Toby Daye" (cut grass and copper), "April O'Leary" (ozone and electricity), and even "January O'Leary" (ozone and pine). These things knock my socks off. Seriously, they are all amazing, and so, so perfect.

Since not everyone wants to gamble on a 5ml bottle of a perfume they haven't smelled before, Conjure Oils is now allowing orders of seven "pips," little 1/32 oz. sampler vials that let you play with a perfume without taking the full risk. This is a truly awesome thing, and it shows a lot of faith in the line as a whole. Hooray!

I am so excited. And I smell like May Daye.

Words: 15,687.
Total words: 85,743.
Reason for stopping: finished chapter seventeen and book three. Time to work on something else.
Music: random shuffle, with multiple replays of the new Ludo album and The Broken Bride.
Cats: all three are on strange cat errands elsewhere in the house, granting me a rare moment of peace.

As of tonight, the manuscript for Blackout is over 300 pages long, and we've entered Book III, "Foundations," which signals the book coming into the home stretch. I'm already starting to see the parts I'm going to need to tighten up or flesh out in draft two, which is always a good sign. Soon, I'll need to add the "words remaining" line to my word count template for this project. And that is wonderful.

Finishing a series is something totally new, and totally fascinating. I've never had to tie off all the loose ends and cauterize all the wounds like I'm doing right now. There may be other books set in this world (one of them, Rewind, is already in outlines), but there won't be any more about this particular set of characters, or this particular set of circumstances. So a lot of questions have to be answered, and a lot of endings have to be arranged. It's kind of awesome, in a soul-suckingly terrifying sort of a way.

I have loved my time with these people very much. They've taught me amazing things about how to be a writer. But it's time for me to let them finish.

This is where we have to Rise.