• Mood: happy
• Music: Mana mana (doot doo do doo do).

Bits and pieces for a Thursday.

1. admnaismith to the white courtesy phone, admnaismith to the white courtesy phone; you have won an ARC of An Artificial Night. Please email me with your contact information, using the contact form on my website, before Sunday, or a new winner has been selected. Also, I totally need you to come make me a drink, because damn.

2. Evolution is awesome, and more bizarre than you can possibly imagine. The best thing about real life is the way that it doesn't even need to pretend to make sense. Also, it allows for factual statements like "those little hornless males have giant testicles" and "they change their color pattern and rearrange their tentacles in a more typical female arrangement." How can you not love this world?

3. Actually, you know what's better than evolution? Drunken paleontologists being allowed to name the dinosaurs that they have discovered. Yes. Thanks to the glorious power of beer, the chasmosaurine ceratopsid family has a new member: the Mojoceratops. How can you not love this dinosaur?! It has a heart-shaped frill, people. A heart-shaped frill. This is like, Barbie's Dream Dino. Great Pumpkin, thank you for the drunken paleontologists and their glories. Thank you.

4. Remember that I'll be at Borderlands Books in San Francisco, California this Saturday, appearing with the lovely jennifer_brozek as part of the second stop on the Murder and Mayhem Tour. Also, we'll have delicious cupcakes from Cups and Cakes Bakery, because we all know that's really why you attend my book events with such alacrity. Be there if you can!

5. We're less than a week out from the San Diego International Comic Convention, which, this year, I will be attending with Amy McFiddler and the fantastic Tara in tow. So, y'know, that should be a good time, apart from all the flailing and hysteria. I'll be posting my panel schedule early next week, and if you're going to be at the convention, you should totally let me know. I'd love to see you.

6. X-Men: Second Coming is over. Several characters are dead. I'm sad about some of them, not so much about others (and barely remembered a few). I really want them to get Elixir on the business of growing back the various severed limbs, as, well, this is all a bit grim for an X-book. But hey, Jean Grey is still dead, Emma Frost is still pretty, and we still have three Stepford Cuckoos wandering around. So it's hard not to be happy.

7. Other things that make me happy: Warehouse 13, Eureka, Unnatural History, Leverage, and So You Think You Can Dance. Why yes, I am a media whore. Why do you ask?

8. Zombies are love.

9. In addition to the San Diego International Comic Convention being in less than a week, I'm about two weeks out from SpoCon, where a) I'm the Music Guest of Honor, and b) Tanya Huff is the Writer Guest of Honor. DAW GIRLS IN THE HOUSE! We shall wear our Urban Fantasy Mafia colors with pride, yo.

10. The turtle can't help you, but Alice will be happy to shed on you. Just ask her.

What's news with you?