* Busier than God.

* Remember, this is a paid LJ, and emailing me is way more likely to get a response than sending something to my LJ inbox. Also, if you send something to my LJ inbox, you'll eventually get a response that includes a cranky request that you not do that anymore. Don't make me cranky. You wouldn't like me when I'm cranky.

* Maine Coons + fun with physics = hysterical win. Lilly observes Alice in her attempts to conquer gravity with an expression of amused disdain, like "I was never that young, that puffy, or that stupid." She's right on one out of three counts.

* DucKon is coming up faster than a runaway freight train bearing down on an innocent young heroine tied to the tracks by a dastardly villain with a curly mustache. I am not ready. I am never ready until my plane leaves the ground, so I'll land in Illinois totally prepared, but right now? Right now, I'm not ready.

* As soon as I get past not being ready for DucKon, I have to start not being ready for the San Diego International Comic Convention. Where I am going to be a professional this year. Me. A pro. At Comicon. Did I mention that I think I may have sold my soul at the crossroads?

* I am here, I am responsive, I am doing my best to stay on top of the mountain. Please forgive delays.

Hey, folks, are you planning to attend DucKon, aka, "Seanan and company rock it down in Illinois"? Were you wishing for a little slice of awesome to have and to hold forever and evermore? Well, it seems that I may be able to help you out with that.

Please visit the DucKon Filk Fund Page for details about the concert recordings which are currently available through the DucKon store. These are currently Schrodinger's recordings, as we're asking you to order something that doesn't exist yet. In an attempt to make this not so surreal, I'm offering a little sweetness: if you place your order before June 8th, and if you comment here to confirm that you have done so, on the 8th, I will select one commenter to choose a song from a special list*. This song will be guaranteed a place in the concert, barring rain of frogs or other amphibious mayhem.

(*By "special list" I mean "something we already know." I live in California. None of my partners in crime live in California. I enjoy Tony not beating me to death with an amplifier.)

Comments received after June 8th will be ignored. Comments going "oh, I know Bob ordered one" will be ignored. Demands that we play "Freebird" will be ignored.

Game on!

It's one month to DucKon (http://www.duckon.org/)! The biggest hootenanny of the summer, packing a whole lot of hoot and a whole lot of nanny into one short weekend in Naperville, Illinois. (Urge to parody "One Short Day In the Emerald City" rising...) You can view an early draft of my schedule on my appearances page; I'll also be posting it here when we're a little bit closer to the convention, but you can at least start planning your exciting adventures now. Remember, online registration closes this Friday at midnight Central, so if you've been waffling, now's the time to square up your affairs and put your irons in the fire.

...I promise that's the last waffle pun I will attempt to make this year.

This convention is gonna be a blast. Not only do you get to see me going head-to-head with Jim Butcher (potentially world-ending), not only do you get to see me geeking out over pandemics and the X-Men—basically my drugs of choice—but you get to see me live and in concert with Vixy and Tony, Amy McNally, and Possible Special Guests. And there will be a reading. And there will be galleys, although the exact distribution mechanism has yet to be determined (pretty sure Kate won't let me play Pee-Wee's Playhouse and choose a second word...but she might let me play Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, and demand that you spin the Wheel of Fun).

Meet me! Meet my agent! Meet my musical dream team! Meet my graphic designer! And watch me baffle my handlers with my constant demands for more caffeine! Fun for the whole family.

If you can't make it to DucKon, I will be at BayCon next weekend in San Jose. Details to come when I've got them.

Dear Great Pumpkin;

I have continued to be a very good girl in the days since I last wrote to you. I have provided places for tired people to sleep, liquids for thirsty people to drink, and food for hungry people to eat. I have shared my ice cream and my candy corn. I did not spike the liquids for the thirsty people with interesting poisons. I have purchased and erected a cat tree so virulently orange that it sears the eyes of the unbelievers. I have not summoned the elder gods from their eternal dreaming. I have not purchased a chainsaw. Also, the swine flu isn't my fault. So clearly, I have been on my very best behavior for quite some time now.

Today, Great Pumpkin, I am asking for the following gifts:

* Freedom from typos, printing errors, and other plagues of the written word. Please, Great Pumpkin, guide my red pen through my page proofs and allow me to present Rosemary and Rue as the best book that it can possibly be. Please let all the errors be mine, and let them be reasonably small ones, so that I won't be forced to throw myself on my own machete. That would make me sad. Also, that would be messy.

* Wonderful author appearances, following a fantastic convention season. DucKon is approaching fast, Great Pumpkin, and so is the San Diego Comic Convention, which I'm going to be attending in full-on Disney Halloween Princess-mode. After that comes WorldCon in Montreal, and after that...after that, my book comes out, and I'm doing signings and raffles and all sorts of other things, many of them for the first time. Help me represent the orange, black, and green with honor, with dignity, and without overdosing on candy corn.

* Continued health for my cats. I have to admit, Great Pumpkin, you came through big time with that whole "perfect kitten" thing that I asked you for. I was dubious at first, since "Maine Coon" and "Siamese" are not the same thing, but Alice is amazing, and has won Lilly over completely, which is really what matters. (And if you think I don't know you had a hand in this, you're out of your gourd. So to speak. Betsy hasn't had a blue in years, and don't think I missed those smoky orange undertones. You are a very cunning supernatural force. I bow before the sanctity of your patch.)

* The perfect house for Newsflesh, wherein the Mason twins deal with politics, the Internet, blogging, dead stuff, each other, and their completely insane co-workers as efficiently and politely as possible. "Polite" usually means "with bullets and bitching." If you give me this, Great Pumpkin, I promise you at least three more short stories featuring the Fighting Pumpkins cheerleading squad, and another Velveteen adventure involving the denizens of Halloween. If you give me a trilogy sale, I'll actually do the origin stories for Hailey and Scaredy.

* A lack of total meltdown over this swine flu thing. I know it's not the slatewiper pandemic, Great Pumpkin, because you would never do that to me this close to my first book's release date. So clearly, this is just a minor plague, meant to remind the world that we need to wash our hands more often. Please let people remember to wash their hands and cover their mouths and take deep breaths (okay, maybe not that last one), so that we can get through this without anybody setting anybody else on fire.

* My galleys. Please let them come today, Great Pumpkin, as my twitchiness is beginning to bother people. I think some of them are becoming concerned that I may destroy the planet in a fit of pique, and frankly, I share their concern. Please, Great Pumpkin, help me to leave enough of the world's population alive to properly honor you on the next Halloween.

I remain your faithful Halloween girl,
Seanan.

PS: You did an amazing job with the cover thing. Thank you so much.

So as most of you hopefully know by now (or will be delighted to discover), I'm about to be the Music Guest of Honor at DucKon 18. The convention is legal this year! It can now vote, get drafted, and buy cigarettes for my mother. DucKon will be happening in Naperville, Illinois, from June 12th through June 14th, and you should totally come. Why? Well, it's gonna be awesome, for one thing. I'm updating my appearances page as details are confirmed, but here are the things I can promise you:

1. I will be there.
2. My fantastic agent, Diana Fox, will be there, as the Agent Guest of Honor. Meet my personal superhero!
3. Tara O'Shea, who does my website's graphic design, will be there.
4. My concert will be OFF THE SCALE in AWESOME. Why? Why do I say this egotistical thing?

Because the DucKon Filk Fund allows their Music Guest of Honor to invite a guest of their very own, to help them with their concert. And I, just like the girl on America's Next Top Model who chooses to share her prize with the people who can help her look amazing, have selected Vixy and Tony. Yeah. ME AND VIXY AND TONY, LIVE IN CONCERT, IN THE MIDWEST, FOR THE FIRST TIME!!!!

Oh, and did I mention that Amy "The Fiddler" McNally will be there, too?

So here are two requests from me, if you would be so kind. First, take a look at the DucKon Filk Fund website, and see if there's anything there that catches your eye. They have some pretty spiffy stuff for sale, and some of it is totally not available anywhere else. Tell your friends. Help replenish the fund after they have so generously and wonderfully allowed me to bring two of my favorite people (and favorite performers) along for the ride.

Secondly, if you would be interested in being able to purchase a DVD of my DucKon concert, please take this DucKon survey indicating your willingness to acquire such a thing. The Filk Fund is willing to set up a pre-order system if there's enough interest, and just to make things a little more tempting, if...

...there is sufficient interest that they make pre-orders available...
...you pre-order...
...you comment on a post I will set up for this very purpose, telling me you've pre-ordered...

...I will include your name in a random drawing. The winner of this drawing will be emailed with the list of songs that we have prepared to play together, and allowed to pick a song. That song WILL be in the set list. So not only do you get the DVD, you know for sure that your favorite will be on there.

Thank you buckets.

10. Betsy -- aka "the breeder from whom I am purchasing my new Maine Coon" -- emailed me last night to get the last of the information she needs to fill out Alice's health certificate. (The airlines require you to have a health certificate for any animal you wish to carry onto a plane; something about not really wanting to deal with a rabies outbreak at thirty thousand feet. This just shows that they don't want me to have any fun.) So it's officially official, and I'll be bringing home my new baby girl this weekend. Perhaps then Lilly will allow me to sleep through the night. Unlikely, but a girl can dream, right?

9. The word counts have been missing lately because I've been continuing to hammer on the reboot to Late Eclipses, trying to yank the book into alignment with the awesome I know it truly has the potential to be. I'm about a quarter of the way through the text at this point, and things really are becoming visibly more and more awesome. We haven't reached the point in the revisions process where I can no longer make fair and measured assessments of quality, and that's good.

8. People everywhere are getting their copies of Ravens In the Library, and while I haven't seen any full-length critical reviews, I'm generally seeing positive reactions to the book itself. (I am, of course, primarily interested in seeing the book do well, because it's for an excellent cause, and in being my usual neurotic little blonde self about reactions to my story. But at least I'm up-front about it, which makes it a little less crazy-making.) Remember, the book will only be available until Sooj's medical bills are fully covered.

7. I have registered for World Fantasy, booked my hotel room for San Diego, applied for professional membership to San Diego, and arranged for hotel space in Montreal. I am, in short, basically done with my convention arrangements between now and August. (BayCon is local enough to require little pre-planning on my part, while Duckon is taking care of all the arrangements for me, on account of I'm one of their guests. It's nice.) I'm always happier when I know that things have been set up as far in advance as humanly possible.

6. Zombies are still love.

5. In the last several weeks, my website has gone from "idle" to "awesome," with almost all our functionality now up and online. The only things still pending are the forums and the mailing list, and both these are being held up by issues on the server side, which we're working to resolve. (Getting the forums up and functional now gives my mods time to try to break them before I'm banned from that part of the site nigh-completely. Planning ahead. It's what's for dinner.)

4. While I'm still not sleeping nearly enough, thank you Lilly, I feel somewhat less like a corpse today than I did yesterday, probably at least in part because I forced myself to go to bed immediately after Big Bang Theory last night. Nothing says "a good night's sleep" like adorable physics geeks and inking before turning in. Although losing my pencil for half the episode really didn't help.

3. I have seriously not read a book that was anything short of awesome in the past week. They were YA and adult, mainstream, fantasy, horror, and science fiction, and all made of pure, unadulterated awesome. If all books were as good as the ones I've been reading, the bar would be set so high we'd need a telescope to see it. I couldn't be happier with my recent reading choices. I really couldn't.

2. In two days, I go to Seattle. In three days, I see my Vixy. In four days, I see Kitten Sundae live and in concert. And in five days, I get to take Alice home with me, thus ruining everything, in the nicest way. (Obligatory Jonathan Coulton reference for the quarter!)

...and the number one good thing about today...

1. My life is so wonderful right now. I'm tired, I'm grumpy, and I'm inclined to smack anyone who pokes me with a stick, but at the end of the day, even I can't pretend that my life isn't amazing. Rosemary and Rue is well on its way to publication, and according to Amazon, 90% of the people who visit the page are buying the book. Lilly and Alice are both healthy. My back is behaving itself remarkably well, and spring is springing up all around me, making my normal walking habits much less crazy. I have the best friends in the world -- everyone should have the best friends in the world, because it makes everything better -- and I own more bad horror movies than I could watch in a lifetime. The world is wonderful.

I think we're gonna be all right. So what's new and awesome in the world of you?

So here are our ribbon options; vote for your top five. Keep in mind that we want to go for both variety and interest, and that some of these will have a longer projected 'shelf life' than others (as, well, the ones with release dates are only really good through WorldCon). Adding a 'fun' ribbon or two will make people more likely to take the more obviously promotional ones. Psychology is fun!

Many of these would be/will be split onto two lines.



Vote, and be heard. Feel free to comment with additional suggestions, or with color ideas.

Hey, folks -- the Bay Area convention season is kicking off, and that means it's time to return to our fannish roots and celebrate with geeky bling. I mean, of course, BADGE RIBBONS. Because nothing says 'love' like pieces of fabric that you can stick to yourself. (Some people say that ribbons are over. I say that these are people who never played Halloweentown fairy princess when they were kids. We shall love our accessories until we die.)

So what do you think I should put on ribbons for this year? Suggest anything you like, from the silly to the sublime, and we'll see where things wind up going. Suggest a ribbon that I actually make, and I'll send you one, even if you're not attending the convention. Keep in mind that we're trying to drum up interest and attract attention, but should still make a vague amount of sense while we're doing it.

Game on!

Since tomorrow is the official beginning of Wondercon, this seemed like a good time to go ahead and post the remaining four cards. (In addition to forcing myself to be strong and not do 'one little replacement card,' I had to keep reminding myself that ten was a nice, round number of cards, even if it didn't give me a nice, even number in the two scans. Sometimes living inside my brain can be a real merry-go-round of mathematical fun.)

As always, clicking the image will take you to a bigger version. I give you the final four cards:



Just to restate the rules, cards will be available for the first ten people who find me at the convention and ask about Rosemary and Rue [Amazon][Mysterious Galaxies]. I'm intending to be at-con for at least part of all three days. And yes, after you ask me about the book, you do actually have to stand there and listen to me talk about it before I'll let you have your card. No reservations for specific cards are being taken.

Let the games begin!

Remember those convention-special art cards I've been threatening to do for Wondercon? Well, they're all done, and I love them all, to the point that I've had to talk myself out of just doing 'one little replacement card' several times now. Since I'm still planning to be at the con, I thought I'd offer a little preview of the goodies to come.

As always, clicking the image will take you to a bigger version. I give you the first six cards:



Cards will be available for the first ten people who find me at the convention and ask about Rosemary and Rue. I'm intending to be at-con for at least part of all three days.

Let the games begin!

So, in an effort to get people to stalk me -- I mean, ah, 'track me down' -- at Wondercon, I have declared that the first ten people to track me down and ask me about Rosemary and Rue will receive, gratis and on-the-spot, a specially drawn art card made entirely for the purpose of being given away to at-con, er, trackers.

Because I never work very well under 'you must do X by Y and PS don't screw it up' pressure, I decided the best way not to make this a crazy-making thing would be to do it entirely at random -- as in, just sit down, draw ten art cards, and whatever they turn out to be, that's what Wondercon gets. So I did. And the result was...

1. The Kitsune Girl from the Babylon Wood.
2. A very unhelpful turtle.
3. Toby, stark naked, in a pond, looking pissed.
4. Angie the centaur pirate (long, long story).
5. Bunny with an Electric Knights poster behind her.
6. The Rose-Owl from the Babylon Wood.
7. Cassie Hack from Hack/Slash.
8. Alice Healy with a nice cake.
9. Velveteen in her Junior Super Patriots yearbook picture.
10. A man-eating plant eating a human arm.

Don't worry if not all of those make sense to you -- they barely all make sense to me, and I drew them. Still, I think they're all pretty nifty, and I'll scan them in after I've had a chance to color them.

Life is good. Time to sleep.