(A note: This was supposed to go up on the 9th, but I got distracted by banana slugs, Canadians, roadkill, and my mother. We'll be resuming the normal posting dates after today's interjection. Sorry for the confusion)

Hello, and welcome to my journal! I'm pretty sure you know who I am, my name being in the URL and all, but just in case, I'm Seanan McGuire (also known as Mira Grant), and you're probably not on Candid Camera. This post exists to answer a few of the questions I get asked on a semi-hemi-demi-regular basis. It may look familiar; that's because it gets updated and re-posted roughly every two months, to let folks who've just wandered in know how things work around here. Also, sometimes I change the questions. Because I can.

If you've read this before, feel free to skip, although there may be interesting new things to discover and know beyond the cut.

Anyway, here you go:

( This way lies a lot of information you may or may not need about the person whose LJ you may or may not be reading right at this moment. Also, I may or may not be the King of Rain, which may or may not explain why it's drizzling right now. Essentially, this is Schrodinger's cut-tag.Collapse )

1) I find it really interesting how many people, when presented with a time travel thought experiment, will proceed to do things that result in their original timeline being immediately and irrevocably destroyed. Time paradox is not a cuddly kitten that you want to bring home and play with! Time paradox is bad! Remember, kids, friends don't let friends mess around with the laws of time.

2) Books I have read and loved lately: I Am Not A Serial Killer. Saltation. Freaks: Alive On the Inside (which I found at the used bookstore, signed!). Unshelved: Volume I.

3) Books I have written and loved lately: Deadline. The Brightest Fell. This is a much shorter list, and that's a good thing, because it means I probably haven't actually sold my soul to the devil. Much.

4) I love superheroes. I love Disney. I love these Disney heroines presented in glorious super-heroic style. I especially love the zombified Snow White. This is because I am, in many ways, predictable, and I am not ashamed of that fact. Not in the slightest. Nor do I think I should be, really, as my predictability makes me easy to shop for.

5) Lilly and Alice have figured out that, together, they now possess sufficient mass and surface area to prevent me from moving when they don't want me to move. This is fine when I have a book with me and nothing in the oven, but other times...not so fine. In other news, the house did not burn down, although it was a somewhat close thing. And it wasn't my fault.

6) What he said.

7) This looks like it's going to be an amazing season for movies. My favorite so far this year are How to Train Your Dragon and Kick-Ass, with The Crazies coming in as a close third, but oh! The glories ahead! Nightmare on Elm Street, Iron Man 2, Prince of Persia, Shrek Forever After, and Letters to Juliet! Splice! Even Resident Evil: Afterlife, because my love for the franchise outweighs my scars from the third movie. What a wonderful thing a movie ticket can be.

8) I appear to be thinking in almost purely short fiction terms right now, as I recover from finishing Deadline and tackle the trickier bits of The Brightest Fell. So far this week, I've finished two Toby shorts, started a third, finished an InCryptid short, and started my story for an invite-only anthology. I'm hoping I can even get a Vel piece shoved in somewhere, before the steam runs out.

9) Guess what I get tomorrow. I get a Vixy. Do you get a Vixy? No, you do not. I am not much of a gloater, but right now? Right now, oh, I'm gonna gloat. Because I get a Vixy. Of my very own.

10) Jean Grey is dead, James Gunn needs to call me, and zombies are love.

It is now April 15th, which means a) I am way closer to the release of Feed than my nerves appreciate, and b) it's time for my monthly current projects post. This is the post wherein I prove to the curious that I either don't sleep or have access to some mechanism for stopping time (don't I wish). There's a reason I start to giggle and twitch whenever someone asks me "What are you working on?", and this post provides a bit of explanation. It also serves as something I can point to when the question gets asked, which it does. This is the April list of current projects, because I am the gift that keeps on giving.

To quote myself, being too harried to say something new: "These posts are labeled with the month and year, in case somebody eventually gets the crazy urge to timeline my work cycles (it'll probably be me). Behold the proof that I don't actually sleep; I just whimper and keep writing."

Please note that the first two Toby books (Rosemary and Rue and A Local Habitation) are off the list because they are now in print. Feed is off the list because it is in the process of being printed, and it's too late for me to make changes of any kind. The third and fourth Toby books (An Artificial Night and Late Eclipses) are off the list until The Editor tells me otherwise. Discount Armageddon and Deadline are off the list because they have been turned in to The Agent.

The cut-tag is here to stay, because no matter what I do, it seems like this list just keeps on getting longer. But that's okay, because at least it means I'm never actively bored. I have horror movies and terrible things from the swamp to keep me company.

( What's Seanan working on now? Click to find out!Collapse )

So let's review, shall we? I started this week a) exhausted from a comic book convention, b) with my back doing its best to murder me in my sleep, c) under deadline, and d) with the announcement that I am on the ballot for the 2010 Campbell Award. The first two have been sorting themselves out—I've had time to sleep, and my back is recovering, since I'm taking things relatively easy—but I'm still under deadline, and I'm still on the ballot.

(This whole thing feels a lot like when I first sold the Toby books. All I wanted to do was go up to strangers and be like "I just sold my first series!" All the strangers wanted me to do was leave them alone. So my friends wind up with a lot of really random-ass interjections. "What do you want for dinner?" "A tiara in Australia!" "Yes, but other than that, what do you want for dinner?" "I'm on the ballot!" "So we're having Baja Fresh again?" I try to keep this as non-offensive as possible, but really, it's like a constant GOTO loop at the back of my brain right now.)

Last night, I sat down with the goal of banging out 2,000 words on "Through This House," a Toby short set between Late Eclipses and The Brightest Fell. It's potentially for an anthology, and I wanted to make some definitive progress before I allowed myself to watch this week's episode of Castle. When I came up for air 4,000 words later, the first draft was done, and I felt vaguely as if I'd been hit with a brick. Tonight, I'm going to try to pull the same trick with "Build a Better...," an Alice/Thomas/colony of over-excitable pantheistic demon mice short (being written as the other option for the same anthology). Then, this weekend, I'll try to get three out of three by whipping through "Last Dance With Mary Jane," the Sparrow Hill Road story for June.

Sleep is for the weak and sickly.

In the cracks between the rushing, I've been dealing with taxes, trying to clean my room whilst entirely incapable of bending (it's a good thing I have flexible toes), and revamping both my websites, since the whole "on an internationally-published ballot" has been shoving a lot of traffic in my direction. It's fun like hysteria! And to be honest, I really am loving every minute of it. I am a sad, sad bunny-girl sometimes. So sad.

Next up, a webcomic endorsement, a Feed giveaway, some weird monkey noises, and a funky little dance. Whee!

I got up this morning and checked the AussieCon website almost before I realized what I was doing. I think I dreamt there had been a mistake or something. But there was no mistake, and I'm still on the ballot for the 2010 Campbell Awards. I am no less staggered by this than I was on the day I was asked to accept the nomination. (The comic strip about looking dumbfounded is coming. I was too staggered to ink. Seriously.)

catvalente's story of sex and the city (also sex with the city) is up for the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and her reaction post made me giggle and nod an awful lot, because she's as staggered as I am. Which I guess just proves that the shiny never wears off of the world if you keep applying coats of silver polish. We're going to wear pretty dresses and go to the awards banquet together, because that's just how we roll around here.

(And I am very proud of her. Palimpsest was the little novel that could, even after everyone said it couldn't. The fact that it's on the ballot is amazing, and testifies to all things finding their place, given space enough to shine.)

In further awards-and-Australia news, Grants Pass has won the Australian Shadows Award for best anthology. This award is granted by the Australian Horror Writers Association, and is given to honor the best new Australian horror (Grants Pass was co-edited by an American and an Australian). Jennifer is now an award-winning editor! Hooray! (Also, the judge's report called out "Animal Husbandry" as a stand-out story. I am honored.)

My friends are amazing, and they do amazing things.

What a wonderful world.

I am delighted (and still sort of staggered and awed) to announce that I have been nominated for the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. You can view the full ballot for this year's awards by following this link to the Aussiecon 4 website.

I. Uh.

Oh my sweet Great Pumpkin and pie, you guys, I made the ballot.

I literally started screaming when I got the email—like, high-pitched, sonic screaming—followed by crying hysterically for a good half an hour. Because I made the ballot. I'm an urban fantasist! Urban fantasists don't make the Campbell ballot! (I checked the last several years, because I am insane like that.) Urban fantasists don't get to buy pretty dresses and go to Australia and maybe win a tiara!

But this one does.

Wow.

I've updated my website to reflect recent changes, I've done the Internet equivalent of making the house look nice for all the new guests that are likely to come over and check me out, and I've managed, mostly, to stop crying. I'm on the 2010 Campbell ballot. I just...

There are no words. Just wow.

...quite soon, actually. Like, in a month. Actually, like, in twenty-nine days. (That's twenty-nine days if you believe the date I got from my publisher, IE, "May 1st." Everyone else seems to think the book comes out on April 27th. I am choosing to continue believing May 1st, because at least that's two months after my last book release, not one month after my last book release, and implies that I might have had the opportunity to take a nap in the interim.)

I am terrified, elated, and a whole bunch of other things that are surprisingly difficult to describe. See, Feed was a thought experiment. It was my game of "What if...?" What if the zombie apocalypse happened...and we lived? What if society had to restructure itself around the idea that the dead will always walk? What if this wasn't going to go away? What if?

I walked around for years with a zombie world and no zombie story. I tinkered with the ecology when I got bored, working out dozens of things that will never make it into the novels (as I lack a naturalist protagonist), but which combined to make a deeper, more convincing reality when I finally started really having a party there. I periodically bitched to my more understanding friends about how I had this truly awesome world, all full of zombies and personal firearms and stuff, and no story to tell there.

Then my friend Micheal Ellis said "Well, why don't you write about a Presidential campaign?"

And it all happened from there.

I'm sure I've told this story here before, because I've told this story a lot. But I'm still so grateful, and so overjoyed, that there are no words. I love the Masons, and my weird journalistic world, and everything else about this series, and for all that I am girl, paralyzed by fear, I really am unbelievably excited that you're going to get to meet them all.

One month 'til the Rising. Wow. It's been a long time coming.

It is fairly common for authors, on April Fool's Day, to announce utterly ridiculous projects and pretend that they're seriously writing them, no really and for honestly true. So I thought I'd do that this year.

And then I actually looked at the things I do write, and realized that there was just. No. Point. (Also that there was a good chance any "totally crazy ha ha funny right" idea I put out there would magically turn into the next thing I was actually working on, and I just don't need the extra work.) I mean, these are all real projects:

* Teenage horror movie geek discovers that she is, in fact, a werecoyote, horror movie monsters are real, and a serial-killing grizzly bear with a thing for hunting lycanthrope teens is on her trail.

* Hannah Montana follows Harry Potter into a dark alley, beats him up, and takes all his product endorsements before walking into a wall and developing traumatic amnesia.

* It's a romantic comedy. About jet lag.

* Perky blonde cocktail waitress fights to protect the cryptid and human races from one another using the combined powers of bullets and ballroom dance. Also, talking mice.

* Snarky brunette research geek fights to protect the cryptid and human races from one another using the combined powers of pit traps and punk music. Also, talking mice and traveling carnivals.

* The bastard daughter of Veronica Mars and Jareth the Goblin King decides to use Dante from Clerks as her role model, and wasn't even supposed to be here today.

* Bunny-themed superheroine fights the forces of evil (and corporate marketing) with her army of teddy bears.

* Hitchhiking ghost from the 1940s roams modern America in search of revenge and the perfect cheeseburger.

* It's about politics. And zombies. But mostly politics. Except for the zombies. And everyone's named after George Romero.

* Alien pod-plant with a conscience decides to assist the human rebellion in standing up to the forces of her own invading vegetable race.

I mean, this isn't everything—not by a long shot—but the things that aren't on this list aren't any less silly-sounding. I'm not sure I'm allowed to make an effort to be silly. Near as I can tell, silly just happens.

Hello! It's been a little while, but at last, I can welcome you to the forty-second essay in my fifty-essay series on the business, craft, and insanity that we like to refer to as "writing." This essay series stems from my original fifty thoughts on writing, which were written in no particular order, resulting in an essay series that has wandered drunkenly around the topic, usually stepping in something useful along the way. We're almost done, and here's our thought for today:

Thoughts on Writing #42: The Very First You.

To provide a little bit more context, here's today's expansion:

You are not the next Stephen King. You are not the next Emma Bull. You are not the next anyone. You are the very first you. Comparisons are wonderful things, because they tell people whether you're working in a style or genre that they enjoy ("If you like Warren Ellis, try..."). But don't let comparisons turn into a prison. You are always allowed to bust out with something new and amazing and blow the roof right off the goddamn nightclub.

It's common to hear a new author described as "the next (insert latest hot thing here)." The next Stephanie Meyer. The next J.K. Rowling. The next Tom Clancy. Even our fictional characters get it. They're the next Harry Potter, the next Harry Dresden, the next Harry Houdini if he were secretly a teenage werewolf with telekinetic super-powers, the next new versions of the last big thing. So how do you deal with the pressure having everyone tell you that you're the next somebody else? Is that even possible?

I don't think anybody is the next anybody, and it's time to look at that in detail. Ready? Good. Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on updating familiar themes and stories.Collapse )

Ah, Spring in California. When the grass is green, the sky is blue, the birds sing outside your bedroom window at five o'clock in the morning like little feathered assholes, and a young author's mind turns to thoughts of copyedits. And rewrites. And word counts. And deadlines. And did I mention that I'm mildly insane, like, all the time right now?

Right now, I have open on my desktop two short stories ("Through This House," starring Toby and the gang, and "Build A Better..." starring Alice and Thomas and the mice), the current manuscript for Deadline, and the sixth of the Sparrow Hill Road stories ("Last Dance With Mary Jane"). I don't have The Brightest Fell open, but that's because this is a Deadline day. The two alternate, to try to preserve the last thin slivers of my sanity. In addition, I'm working on essays, interviews, other short pieces...

Someone asked me recently why I'm obsessing about Internet cage matches and art cards and bad zombie movies. The answer is simple: because they're silly and harmless and don't actually care whether I have pants on. And I need the break.

I'm about three days out from going into overdrive on Feed, which will consume my life until the page proofs for An Artificial Night arrive. Those will consume my life for a while, and then go away just in time for my editorial revisions on Deadline. And so it goes, and so it goes. So if you're wondering why I seem a little bit, well, shallow right now, it's because the deep end of the pool is filled with sea serpents and other toothy things, and I am enjoying the remainder of my toes.

Actually, it's currently "Sunday morning, sort of off-gray sky filled with occasional clouds and colder than it ought to be this time of yeah, ha ha, little California girl, ha ha." But I like the original phrase just a little bit better.

Yesterday was my "goof off" day for March, and today, I buckle back down to work, with several short stories and a bunch of novel revisions on the docket (Deadline and The Brightest Fell, for the curious). I won't be turning off my Internet, because I keep too much information there, but I won't be my normal rapid-response self, either. Tomorrow, I'll finally select the winners of the icon contest (assisted by a panel of impartial judges without entries of their own) and figure out how we're handling judging for the SURPRISINGLY POPULAR "Mira Grant is..." contest. Other than by staring in awe.

If you haven't voted in the Fourth Annual BSC Review Tournament, please consider stopping by. This brutal tourney pits a year's-worth of book releases against one another in bloody single combat, and only one can emerge victorious. Toby rallied for a little bit, but the tide has turned. Her latest match is against Juliet Marillier's Heart's Blood, and she's getting the smackdown. Rally! Help Toby progress! Especially since catvalente's Palimpsest is still swinging (currently against The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert V. S. Redick), and there's a wacky bonus comic strip in it for you if we wind up facing off in the final round.

Pretty please?

The world is full of things, and the things are full of stuff, and the stuff is all time-sensitive for me, so I'm going to get back to work now. I'll check in later. Please don't set anything on fire.

So currently, I am...

...working on The Agent's revisions to Deadline, all of which have been totally awesome, erudite, and coherent (at least so far; for all I know, I'm going to hit page 200 and suddenly she'll be demanding I insert evil clowns and flying monkeys). I'm addressing the manuscript 10% (IE, fifty pages) at a time, so that I can imagine a little progress bar guiding me sweetly toward the conclusion of draft two. Currently, the status bar stands at 20%. Since I started work yesterday, I am not yet freaking out over this.

...hammering away on The Brightest Fell (Toby Daye, book five), which, like, woke up one morning and just decided that it wasn't going to suck anymore. Seriously. This book has been a petulant brat for ages, and then bam, all of a sudden, it was all "La la la, I am ready to play nicely with the other children." So now I'm burning pages, the stakes are getting higher, the action's getting tighter, and Toby's having one of her Worst Weeks Ever. I'm always happy when Toby is having one of her Worst Weeks Ever. This is why Toby will eventually find a way to kill me in my sleep.

...getting content up on MiraGrant.com. If you go there right now, you'll still get the splash page, but I promise you, Behind The Scenes, Things Are Brewing. We'll be ready to launch super-soon, and when we do, look out world! Tara has done an incredible job with the site design, and Chris has done an equally incredible job with the coding. And of course, there's things afoot over on the Orbit side of things, and soon the whole world will be asking the question that's been gnawing at me for a while now: When will you rise?

...writing two short stories for the same anthology, since that's the only way to have a proper cage match between the two (thus letting me determine which one works better). In this corner, Toby, Danny, and Quentin do stuff involving poking things with sticks and following the basic rules of horror movie survival (IE, "When the house tells you to get out, you leave"). In this corner, Alice, Thomas, and the mice go wandering around the woods looking for fricken nests, and face the usual dangers inherent in doing what a tribe of talking pantheistic mice tells you to do. Fun!

...finishing the sixth Sparrow Hill Road story, "Last Dance With Mary Jane," in which we finally find out what actually happened on the night Rose Marshall died. This is sort of where the series turns, and where everything else that happens becomes inevitable. I'm really excited.

...really in need of a nap.

I will have a silly, silly contest starting later today, and remember, the various cage matches are still going on. Help Toby deliver the ULTIMATE SMACKDOWN, thus earning her a pretty tiara that she won't wear and a Starbucks gift card that she will use up in an afternoon.

As it is March 15th, marking the middle of the month and the defeat of my sanity, it's time for me to make my monthly current projects post. This is the post wherein I prove to the curious that I either don't sleep or have access to some mechanism for stopping time (don't I wish). There's a reason I start to giggle and twitch whenever someone asks me "What are you working on?", and this post provides a bit of explanation. It also serves as something I can point to when the question gets asked, which it does. This is the March list of current projects, because I am the gift that keeps on giving.

To quote myself, being too harried to say something new: "These posts are labeled with the month and year, in case somebody eventually gets the crazy urge to timeline my work cycles (it'll probably be me). Behold the proof that I don't actually sleep; I just whimper and keep writing."

Please note that the first two Toby books (Rosemary and Rue and A Local Habitation) are off the list because they are now in print. Feed is off the list because it is in the process of being printed, and it's too late for me to make changes of any kind. The third and fourth Toby books (An Artificial Night and Late Eclipses) are off the list until The Editor tells me otherwise. Discount Armageddon and Deadline are off the list because they have been turned in to The Agent.

The cut-tag is here to stay, because no matter what I do, it seems like this list just keeps on getting longer. But that's okay, because at least it means I'm never actively bored. I have horror movies and terrible things from the swamp to keep me company.

( What's Seanan working on now? Click to find out!Collapse )

With A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] now on shelves, I can breathe a little easier and worry a little less about getting my Advance Reader Copies out into the world. Well...for that book, anyway, since I'm still in the midst of pre-release madness for Feed [Amazon], and there are thus still ARCs worth their weight in kittens kicking around my house. (And right about when those ARCs go away, the ARCs for An Artificial Night should be showing up. I would complain, but it's so damn awesome that it's sort of difficult.) I have been awash in ARCs for months. And, because I am me, I have been thinking a lot about them. Here are some of those thoughts.

1. ARCs have a purpose. ARCs exist for one reason, and for one reason only: To drum up advance publicity for books. They're sent to reviewers. They're sent to people who might be able to provide cover blurbs, either for the book in question or for the sequel. They're sent to authors for distribution to bloggers, people who win contests, and their moms. Note that the purpose of ARCs is not "to become collectibles" or "to be sold to people who just can't wait for the next one." This is why people are somewhat protective of them, and why their numbers decrease with each volume in a series. By book eight, odds are good that people are already as excited as they're going to get.

2. Authors are not being bad people when they refuse to give you an ARC. My friend Anton just put out a new book, Dead Matter. He did not give me an ARC, even though I love the series. Why? Because he had a limited number, and he knew that I'd both buy and talk about the book anyway. To put things, briefly, in totally mercinary terms, he had nothing to gain by spending a very limited resource on someone whose goodwill he already had. When I have infinite cake, it's cake for everybody, but when I only have three slices...

3. Yes, authors get upset when people sell ARCs. As stated up in item one, the point of the ARC is to get early reviews, early buzz, and early attention. It is not, sadly, to pay for cat food. Not for my cats, not for my publisher's cats, and not for anybody else's cats. They represent money spent, not money made. Someone who buys an ARC and doesn't buy the real book is taking money away from the publisher, and hence, money away from the author. More, if the ARCs are sold unreviewed, they didn't even accomplish their purpose before they were cast out into the cold, lost forever. Poor ARCs.

(As a footnote, and this is getting a little personal, but there you go: If I send someone an ARC, and then that ARC appears on eBay without a review having appeared first, that person is so never getting another ARC from me. Casting ARCs into the cold makes me sad.)

4. Once the book is out, concern and compassion for the ARC goes way, way down. Mia makes jewelry from my ARCs. Other people do other interesting things with ARCs. Some of them are awesome. Some of them are confusing. One way or the other, I don't care, because again, once the book is out, the ARC loses most of its mystery. I'd still rather not see them flooding the resale market, but there aren't enough of them to make a huge difference...once the book is out.

5. ARCs are delicate. Part of why I get annoyed when I see people selling ARCs for large amounts of money is that ARCs are fragile. I have one ARC of Rosemary and Rue that got turned into a continuity reference after Alice sort of chewed on it a little, and it's basically dissolving after fewer than four reads. So they make great collectables, and great review copies, but as things to keep? Well, only if you like to do your reading in loose-leaf form...

Thinking is hard. Let's have strawberry ice cream.

And now we reach the end of our countdown to the release of A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy]; it comes out tomorrow, and I don't feel like going into negative numbers. ("Reason -6 why I am getting really tired of this game...") One more day. One more day before the sky falls on my head and I suddenly have to admit that book two is actually out.

Aigh.

On the plus side, this means that as of tomorrow, I can start going crazy over different things. You know, things like "do people like the book?", "will people like book three?", and "will I be the top-selling paperback at Borderlands for the month of March?" (Hint on that last one: they do mail order, they'll have signed copies, and I would really appreciate it if you could order from them if you wanted a signed and personalized book but can't get to any of my signing events.) I can also resume going crazy over the process of writing book five, The Brightest Fell, which is kicking my ass in the most delightful of ways. Seriously, this book is like "no, you don't know what's going on, now shut up and sit down." If I don't wear my seat belt, I may go through the front windshield of the book the next time it hits the brakes. It's very odd, but sort of awesome.

Amy the Fiddler arrives tonight, fresh from the wilds of Alabama, where she's been staying with my Halloween Family for a week. I envy her immensely, but I'll forgive her instantly, because it means I get an Amy, and I really need an Amy right now.

In other news, I have uploaded a bunch of new strips to the "With Friends Like These..." strip gallery, and will continue updating it as I get them re-sized for easy viewing. We're actually moving into the ones where the art isn't quite so primitive. Yay!

And now we must rinse.

Just three days remain before the official North American release of A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy], which has been cropping up in stores around the US as we get closer and closer to release day. It's been fun, in that way of things that are both glorious and flat-out terrifying. Whee!

In honor of day three, and because I am a predictable creature, I give you today's entry in the countdown. Enjoy.

3 Myths About Writing.

3. Writing is easy. After all, we all have ideas, and we're all smart people, so we should all be able to write books, right? Sadly, this is not the case. Writing may be easy, but writing well is damn hard, and even with as much practice as I've had, I'm constantly aware of how much more practice I need if I want to get really good. Whoever first said that it was ten percent inspiration, ninety percent perspiration was very right. This does not relieve my urge to punch them in the nose.

2. All real writers are inaccessible and intellectually difficult. I periodically get people asking me when I'll stop writing to "what's hot" and start writing what's in my heart. You know what? My heart is full of fairy tales and zombies and blonde girls in high heels kicking monsters in the head. My heart is full of snappy dialog and cinematic tropes and screams in the muggy summer air. I am a real writer. It's just that what I really want to write about is occasionally the Fighting Pumpkins cheer squad, a hitchhiking ghost with a thing for cheeseburgers, and genetically engineered parasites. And that's okay.

1. Good writing will always be recognized. Sadly, this is also not true. There are a lot of books released every year, and a great many of them will be excellent, yet somehow manage to go essentially unnoticed by most of the reading public. This is a crying shame. This is the fear of every working author, at least at the beginning of their careers, because what if you do the best you can do, what if you're hailed as an amazement and a rediscovery of the written word...and you fail anyway? This is why authors are a little bit crazy. Be kind.

I am now four days out from the release of A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy]. The uncontrollable twitching hasn't started, largely, I'm assuming, because I've been too tense to twitch. I literally coughed myself into a migraine yesterday, which only went away when I went home and went to bed.

In an effort to keep myself breathing, I am now going to envision my perfect world. A world of sunshine and zombie puppies, where all I have to do is watch horror movies, take long walks, go to conventions, and write. In that world, I don't have to put things aside because there's no time.

I want to live there.

4 Things I'd Love to Write.

4. It's been on my "current projects" post for a while now, because hope springs eternal, but I really, really want to write this crazy math/language/Greek philosophy epic urban fantasy monster called The Nativity of Chance, which should probably have moved into the head of Tim Powers, but wound up with me instead. It's book one of a trilogy, and it's so deliciously messed-up that I just want to spend some serious quality time in its loving arms.

3. Lady of the Underground is the sequel to a romantic comedy I wrote a few years back, called Chasing St. Margaret. (I'm planning to revise Chasing St. Margaret this year, probably on the plane to Australia, and get it into publishable form, because I love it so.) Lady of the Underground would give me an excuse to spend more time with some characters I really adore, and that's just an awesome concept.

2. Spelunking Through Hell: A Visitor's Guide to the Underworld. It's the tenth book in the InCryptid series, and the story of Alice Price-Healy's quest for her wayward husband (who is going to be getting so punched in the face when she finds him). Don't judge my series-oriented ways. My idea of pacing is not like your Earth idea of pacing.

1. The rest of Toby. I want the world to arrange itself so I can write this series until it's finished and over and done. And then I will do a little dance, and it will be glorious.

I'm a writer. I've been a writer for as long as I've had a grasp of written language, although my earliest works were, admittedly, not all that complex. I get asked "when did you start writing?" pretty commonly in interviews, and my response is always something along the lines of "I have no idea, in the womb, maybe, I don't know." Because really, I don't.

So as we continue our countdown (five days! Sweet pumpkin pie, five days!), here's today's list:

5 Reasons I Love Writing.

5. Stephen King put it best when he said that writing is like a form of telepathy. I make things up, I write them down, and then you can see them, in your mind. You "hear" dialog that I wrote. You "meet" people that I invented. When I write, I am Emma Frost, and that is awesome.

4. Writing continually surprises me. No matter how long I do it, no matter how much time I spend working to improve, I still find myself staring at things on the page and going "whoa, where did that come from?"

3. Writing comes with a very concrete and visible reward for hard work. If I write 2,000 words, I have 2,000 words that I didn't have before. If I write a book, dude, there is now a book in the world that didn't exist before I started typing. Me! I made that! It's incredibly fulfilling. Very few things in life are this immediately fulfilling.

2. I have to work to write. It's my hobby and what I do to relax and it makes me happy, but it's also work. If I don't revise, edit, check my spelling, check my continuity, and basically do hard labor, I don't get good books. I feel like I've done something when a story is finished, and that's amazing.

1. When I'm writing, I make all the rules. I don't think there's anything better than that.

Our countdown to book release has reached lucky number seven, which means we're exactly one week out, and that it's sort of a miracle I'm sleeping at all. Ah, the glorious crazy of an author getting ready for their drop-date. How did I live before I knew this feeling?! Oh, right. With a lot less flailing. Anyway, here's today's countdown entry:

7 Things You Should Know.

7. A Local Habitation is the second book in the series, following Rosemary and Rue. You don't necessarily need to read Rosemary and Rue first, but I think that it helps. Possibly quite a lot. Remember that there's only so much recapping that can go into a book before it turns boring.

6. The word "series," not "trilogy," applies to the October Daye books. A trilogy is a closed, three-volume unit. While I am currently contracted only for the first three books in the series, there's a lot more story after that. Which means I'd really like A Local Habitation to sell super-well, so that I can get a contract for the next set of books. Take two, they're small.

5. A Local Habitation is the first of the three books I have coming out this year. The second is Feed in May (as Mira Grant), and the third is An Artificial Night, in September. I currently have only one book scheduled for 2011, Deadline, again in May (and again, as Mira Grant). This seems likely to change.

4. Remember, every time you buy a copy of Rosemary and Rue, a pixie gets its wings. (Contrarywise, every time you buy a copy of Rosemary and Rue, you can elect to have the Luidaeg part a pixie from its wings in a violent and thoroughly unpleasant fashion. She'd like that. She'd like that quite a lot.)

3. Thankfully, I finished Deadline just in time, and am now spending my evenings watching Disney Channel sitcoms, drawing comic strips, and drinking port. I appreciate this small break in my borderline-hysteria.

2. I really and truly appreciate every one of you for being here, for commenting, for participating in giveaways, for discussion, for dissension, for buying my books, for reviewing my books, for recommending your own books, and generally just for existing. It does a lot to keep me getting out of bed in the morning. Which may be faintly pathetic, but I have a book coming out in a week, I'm allowed to be faintly pathetic. It's actually in my contract.

1. I am possibly the luckiest Halloweentown Disney Princess in the world, and I know it.

Welcome to my book release countdown! With A Local Habitation available in North American stores as of March 2nd, we're ten days out, and so I give you...

10 Things About October Daye.

10. Toby developed her caffeine addiction as a result of trying to hide her fae nature from Clifford Marks, her human ex-boyfriend. Humans are diurnal, fae are not, and so she needed a lot of coffee to stay awake during what were, for her, sleepy naptimes. You can often recognize fae who've played fairy bride by their raging Starbucks addictions.

9. It wasn't until she moved Home that Toby began refusing to be called "October," since her name is really nothing even remotely weird by fae standards. After six months of being teased by the other changelings, she started demanding people call her "Toby," and was happy to support her requests with hitting.

8. Toby has a secret weakness for name-brand cereal.

7. Cagney and Lacey are the first cats Toby has actually adopted on her own. She actually hadn't spent that much time around cats before the two of them; Amandine didn't allow them in her tower, Shadowed Hills is really more a "rose goblin" kind of place, and Devin hated them.

6. Toby loves James Bond movies and old musicals. Really old ones, the ones where nothing needs to make sense as long as it can get you to the next musical number. She can't carry a tune in a bucket, but she still sings along if she's alone.

5. Toby's illusions aren't good enough to let her visibly age her mortal glamour, and has looked roughly the same age for as long as anyone in the human world has known her. She avoids her neighbors as much as possible because she wants to stay put as long as she can, and when they figure out she isn't aging, she'll have to move.

4. Despite the fact that she hates courtly settings, Toby has been thoroughly schooled in courtly behavior, and can dance multiple forms of waltz, foxtrot, and other formal forms. She can also behave herself at dinner parties. She just generally doesn't bother.

3. Toby sets her wards every morning before she goes to bed, even knowing that the sun will destroy half of them before she wakes up. It's the only way she can get to sleep.

2. If she could go anywhere in the world for dinner, and know that she wouldn't be interrupted, Toby would probably go to the Outback Steakhouse. And eat an entire cow.

1. Toby likes people. She just wishes she remembered how to trust them.

So I'm existing on a diet of Diet Dr Pepper, canned peas, and plain-baked chicken breasts with way too many mushrooms, and I'm waking up earlier every morning (new record: 5:02 AM). I thus figure it's time to give the general status updates, before I'm too fried to think straight.

Books. I have three coming out in 2010: A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] and An Artificial Night as me, and Feed [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] as Mira Grant. I have one currently due in 2010, Deadline (the sequel to Feed).

In addition to the books that are already sold/slated for publication, I have one finished October Daye book, Late Eclipses, and one finished InCryptid book, Discount Armageddon. I am currently working on The Brightest Fell (Toby five), Midnight Blue-Light Special (InCryptid two), and Sit, Stay, I Hate You (Coyote Girls two). In 2010, I'm planning to finish all three of these, start on Blackout (Newsflesh three), start on Ashes of Honor (Toby six), and start on Hunting Grounds (InCryptid three). I am not planning on a particularly large quantity of sleep.

There's currently a contest running to win an ARC of A Local Habitation. Drop by and give it a shot!

Short Stories. I'm one of the 2010 universe authors for The Edge of Propinquity, which is running my Sparrow Hill Road series for the rest of the year. The second story, "Dead Man's Party," went live earlier this week, and I'm working on the fifth story, "El Viento Del Diablo," which should be finished in a week or so. After that comes "Last Dance With Mary Jane," which will answer a lot of questions people have been asking for a very long time. This is a series heavily influenced by the mythology of the American highway, and with a very strong soundtrack accompanying every story. There will be playlists! Much fun.

I have various other short stories out on secret missions, including two Fighting Pumpkins adventures ("Dying With Her Cheer Pants On" and "Gimme a 'Z'!"), my first-ever steampunk piece ("Alchemy and Alcohol," which comes complete with cocktail recipes), and an actual Mira Grant short story ("Everglades"). I'm noticing a high level of dead stuff in my recent short story output. Somehow, this is not striking me as terribly surprising.

Non-fiction. My essay in Chicks Dig Time Lords [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] will be available later this month, along with, y'know, the rest of the book, which includes an essay from my beloved Tara O'Shea. So if you've ever wondered why I love math and have trouble with linear time, you should probably pick up a copy of this book. (You should do that anyway, because the book is awesome, but that's beside the point.)

My introduction for jennifer_brozek's In A Gilded Light will also be available with the rest of the book, sometime in mid-2010. I plan to finish the "On Writing" series by the end of 2010.

Albums. Work on Wicked Girls is proceeding apace, and beginning to pick up speed as we get deeper into the process of mixing and arranging songs. I'm scheduling my various instrumentalists to come into the studio and get their parts recorded, and some of the arrangements are just going to be incredible. I still need to confirm the covers for this album, and start thinking about graphic design, but I'm still really, really pleased. There's no confirmed release date yet, and there's not going to be one until we're a lot closer to done: as I've said a few times, as soon as there's a deadline, this ceases to be fun and relaxing, and right now, we're too far from finished for that to be a good idea.

I'm within a hundred copies of being entirely out of Stars Fall Home (my first studio album), and right now, I couldn't tell you if or when there's going to be another printing. I'm doing a little better for Pretty Little Dead Girl, but at the current rate, I'd estimate that I'll be out (or very close to out) by this time next year. Red Roses and Dead Things, being my most recent release, is also the one with the most remaining stock (paradoxically, it's also my fastest seller, since a lot of folks don't have it yet). In summary, if you're missing any of my first three albums, you may want to consider whether you're going to want them, because when they're gone, they're gone.

Cats. Alice continues to steal mass from the very center of the sun, growing at a rate usually seen only in big green dudes who have been exposed to Gamma radiation. She's pissed at Cat Valente, who keeps showing pictures of a very enticing kitten, and then not sending the kitten through the screen. Lilly, meanwhile, has taken to jangling her bell right next to my ear in the middle of the night to express her displeasure with the state of the food supply. Lilly wants to be mittens.

And that's the local weather report. Back to you, Ken.

It's difficult for me to talk about awards and such for which I qualify. Part of this is the firm conviction that I'm actually asleep (and having a really weird dream), and part of it is that I come from the filk community, where saying "Hey, I'm eligible for award X!" is considered highly tacky and inappropriate. We all have our quirks, I suppose. But still, my particular recalcitrance isn't the standard in the writing community, so I'm trying to get past it. With that in mind...

I am considered eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

To quote the site a bit:

The John W. Campbell Award uses the same nomination and voting mechanism as the Hugo, even though the Campbell Award is not a Hugo. To be able to nominate a writer for the 2010 award, you must have either been an attending member of Anticipation (the 67th World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal) or be a supporting or attending member of Aussiecon Four (the 68th World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne) before Jan. 31, 2010.

Nomination ballots can be found on the Aussiecon website. They must be received before 23:59 PST on March 13, 2010.

If you qualify to nominate, please, take a look at the site I linked above, and see who's eligible for this year's award. There were some really awesome debut authors in 2009, and it would be really bad-ass to see them make the ballot. (Mind you, if I make the ballot, I'll probably stop breathing until Kate slaps me, but...)

This has been your PSA for Thursday.

Last night when I got home from a trip to Borderlands Books (where I was roundly snuggled and nose-licked by Ripley the Sphynx), I found a box on my front porch. The box, when opened, proved to contain twenty copies of A Local Habitation. Not ARCs—actual, finished books, suitable for fondling, screaming over, and putting on bookshelves. Alice promptly started trying to eat them. Not to be outdone, Lilly promptly started trying to eat the box that they came in. I have emailed my publisher to thank them for the cat toys.

I called my mother, whose usual response to "Mom, I just got _______" is to show up at my house and refuse to leave until she's managed to acquire a copy for herself. "Mom, I got my author's copies of A Local Habitation," I said.

"Wow!"

"So are you coming over?"

"Not tonight."

You could have knocked me over with a feather. (There are plenty of feathers to be had in my house because, again, cats.) "What? Why not?"

"Idol starts in half an hour."

So now we know where I rank in my mother's eyes. Not second, as I always feared, but third, behind Jim Hines and American Idol. As I cannot swear eternal vengeance against American Idol, I'm going to have to swear it against Jim Hines. He has a lot less in the way of professionally-trained security guards and hungry lawyers. I mean, sure, he's got goblins and all, and to this I say, again, cats.

It's a little freaky to be able to look at A Local Habitation and see it all book-shaped and real, with a bar code and a price tag and an ISBN and everything. I don't think it's ever going to get less freaky. Sometimes I still wake up and wonder "did I really sell the books? If I turn on the light, will they really be sitting on the shelf?" Thus far, they always have been, but my dreams have fooled me before. Although I'd like to think that if I'd dreamt the last few years, there would have been more candy corn and semi-appropriate nudity.

Thirteen days. That's all that remains before A Local Habitation is available on store shelves, waiting to be taken down, read, and enjoyed. Hopefully, lots of people will find and adore it, and hopefully, some of them won't have read Rosemary and Rue, creating a beautiful synergy through which many, many copies of both books will be sold. (Crass commercialism? Well, yeah. But I'd like this series to last for a long, long time, so I think this desire makes perfect sense. Anyone who looks noble and says "I don't care if my book sells well, I just care if it's loved" is either independently wealthy, insane, or messing with you.)

Thirteen days. That's all that remains before the second of Toby's stories is out there for anyone to read. That may be the weirdest part of all this. I mean, I'm used to my friends reading drafts and telling me what they did or didn't like, and I'm used to my publishers (all of whom I know) reading things and telling me what to fix, but there's no possible way for me to know every single person who reads my books personally. It just isn't going to happen. So there are all these strangers out there choosing me to tell them stories, and it's just...it's amazing. There was even a four-star review in the new issue of Romantic Times, a glossy, awesome, nationally-published magazine:

"McGuire's second October Daye novel is a gripping, well-paced read. Toby continues to be an enjoyable, if complex and strong-willed protagonist who recognizes no authority but her own. The plot is solid and moves along at a not-quite-breakneck pace. McGuire has more than a few surprises up her sleeve for the reader."

This is all very real, and very wonderful, and Great Pumpkin, I just hope it goes spectacularly, and that I don't catch fire.

Thirteen days. Wow.

Hello, and welcome to the forty-first essay in my fifty-essay series about the process, art, and business of writing. This set of essays started almost as an accident, and has provided me with lots of interesting discussion and contemplation, so thanks to everyone who's been participating. I've learned a lot, and I hope you have too. All the essays have been based around my original fifty thoughts on writing, which were written in no particular order. That's why they weave around like a drunken centipede. Here's our thought for today:

Thoughts on Writing #41: Something Old, Something New.

To provide a little bit more context, here's today's expansion:

Just because somebody else did it first doesn't mean that somebody else did it better. At the same time, just because you think you're going to do it better doesn't mean you necessarily will. Be just as objective with reworkings of old stories as you'd try to be with totally new ones. You actually need to work harder when you're dealing with the familiar.

Some people say that there are no new stories under the sun, just new ways of telling old ones. To look at the books and movies that hit it big in the mainstream, well, there's reason to believe it; Alice in Wonderland gets re-imagined again and again, the same fairy tale princesses show up everywhere from Disney to DAW, and Shakespeare has now been retold in just about every format imaginable. So how do you make an old story fresh and new again, and how much can you rest on what came before? When does "too similar" become a killing blow?

There are a lot of factors at work here, but we can at least start looking at what they are. Ready? Good. Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on updating familiar themes and stories.Collapse )

It's Lupercalia, and more, it's time for me to make my monthly current projects post, wherein I prove to the curious that I either don't sleep or have access to some mechanism for stopping time (don't I wish). There's a reason I start to giggle and twitch whenever someone asks me "What are you working on?", and this post provides a bit of explanation. It also serves as something I can point to when the question gets asked, which it does. This is the February list of current projects, because I am the gift that keeps on giving.

To quote myself, being too harried to say something new: "These posts are labeled with the month and year, in case somebody eventually gets the crazy urge to timeline my work cycles (it'll probably be me). Behold the proof that I don't actually sleep; I just whimper and keep writing."

Please note that the first four Toby books are off this list, because they have been finished and turned in. You can purchase Rosemary and Rue [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] now. You can pre-order A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] now. An Artificial Night and Late Eclipses are off the list until The Editor tells me otherwise.

The first Newsflesh book, Feed, is off the list because it has been turned in to The Other Editor. Not only that, but my page proofs have been finished and returned. You'll see this bad boy again when it comes rolling off the presses! Discount Armageddon is off the list because it has been turned in to The Agent.

The cut-tag is here to stay, because no matter what I do, it seems like this list just keeps on getting longer. But that's okay, because at least it means I'm never actively bored. I have horror movies and terrible things from the swamp to keep me company.

( What's Seanan working on now? Click to find out!Collapse )

I have all these things I want to talk about. Like, my little running junk file contains about three dozen links, and a long list of blog topics (written in my customary all-caps shorthand, so the word "fuck" is pretty heavily represented—sometimes I'm a Kevin Smith movie). Instead, I spent much of my morning mastering the phrase "working for our robot overlords—did I say 'overlords'? I meant 'protectors,'" in American Sign Language. This is a highly useful phrase, and one which I am currently using quite a lot. Sure, I'm using it quite a lot because I just learned how to say it, but the theory is sound.

Other things I can say in ASL:

* The turtle couldn't/can't help you/me/us.
* I will kill you with a chainsaw now.
* I have a parasite inside my brain.
* Ninja!
* Giant metal Santa Claus.
* The salad of infinite despair.
* Moose lobotomy time. Call the moose lobotomist.
* Die in a fire.
* The Black Death.
* Octopus fellatio.
* Science/mad science.
* I want to eat your brain.
* ZOMBIE.

Naturally, I have learned these specific phrases because they are extremely useful in my daily life, and not because I enjoy signing "the salad of infinite despair" at people when they annoy me. Honest.

My current adventures in ASL are strongly fueled by the fact that I have essentially managed to freezer burn my brain as I race through Deadline like I'm being pursued by a pack of rabid weasels. The book is about 15,000 words from over, and I have a very solid idea of what all those words need to be; it's just a matter of getting them onto the page. I alternate between wanting to snarl at anything that keeps me from writing, and wanting to keep myself from writing, since soon, I won't have a book anymore. There will be other books. There will be edits and revisions on this book. But it won't be the same, and it will never be the same again, and after this, I only get to spend one more book in this universe. That's going to hurt. In the course of three volumes, I'll have essentially written four and a half Toby books-worth of story (these are big-ass books), and that makes the Masons and their companions really well-established denizens of my head. I'm going to wind up writing the parasite trilogy just to get myself through the grieving stage. This is, by the way, why I am drowning in series.

(I have friends who only write in single volumes. Bam bam bam, book book book, done. They view my addiction to series with horrified confusion, and some of them have commented that they wish they could do that. In the spirit of the seaweed always being greener in somebody else's lake, I envy the people who can write a book and be done. The closest I get to writing a book and being done is plotting to give certain characters only one POV volume in the InCryptid series. My brain is wired oddly.)

One of my "waiting in the wings" protagonists is a woman named Alice Price-Healy (Verity's grandmother), whose tastes run to camouflage pants, fabrics that can be easily treated for bloodstains, and lots and lots of weapons. She's a hopeless romantic, having spent the last thirty or so years spelunking through the various dimensions surrounding her own as she tries to find her missing husband. Who is probably getting punched in the face if and when she finally finds him, since she's been scared to death for decades now. Anyway, my darling fireriven pointed me to something on Etsy, and in browsing the seller's other items, I found a red glass heart pendant with an old-fashioned six-shooter charm dangling from it. I stared. My inner Alice announced her covetousness.

I bought the necklace. It arrived in yesterday's mail, and it is awesome. Best of all, when someone asked me where I found it and what made me buy it (since I don't buy much jewelry that isn't from chimera_fancies), I was able to honestly reply "Oh, the one of the people who lives inside my head told me to." Sowing confusion is fun!

Seriously, though, I think my brain is bruised. I'm going to go home tonight and knock out another 3,000 words or so before watching Leverage, and tomorrow night, I'll go home and knock out 5,000 to 8,000, since I have no bedtime on Fridays. And after I do this a few more times, the book will be over, and I'll need to start occupying my time with something else. Like The Brightest Fell, and starting Blackout, and petting the cats. Oh, and learning how to say "behold, for now I wear the human pants" in ASL.

You know. The important things.

Dear Great Pumpkin;

In the days since I last wrote to you, I have continued to be reasonably well-behaved, within the limits of my circumstances. I have comforted those who needed comfort, and refrained from feeding those who caused them to need comfort into any wood-chippers that happened to be sitting around. I have listened to the troubles of others. I have shared my ice cream, willingly, without being blackmailed. I have not summoned the slumbering Old Ones from their beds beneath the Pacific, or commanded them to destroy all humans. I have continued to make all my deadlines, even the ones I most wanted to avoid. I have not talked about pandemics at the dinner table. Much. So obviously, I have been quite well-behaved, especially considering my nature.

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

* A smooth and successful release for A Local Habitation, with books shipping when they're meant to ship, stores putting them out when they're supposed to put them out, and reviews that are accurate, insightful, and capable of steering people who will enjoy my book to read it. Please, Great Pumpkin, show mercy on your loving Pumpkin Princess of the West, and let it all be wonderful. I'm not asking you to make it easy, Great Pumpkin, but I'm asking you to make it good.

* Please help me finish Deadline in a satisfying, explosive, timely way, hopefully including lots of zombies and horrible perversions of medical science. I'm about twenty thousand words from the end of this book, which is both not nearly enough, and way too many for me to be happy about it. I want to bring this book to a close, so I can get back to work on the fifth Toby book and start working on the third Newsflesh book. What I have is good. Please let the rest be amazing.

* While I'm asking for miracles, please let the rest of The Brightest Fell suddenly come clear to me, so that I can begin working at my usual disturbingly rapid speed. I was hoping to have this book finished before A Local Habitation hits shelves. That's obviously not going to happen, which means I've already been punished for my hubris, and deserve to have things start moving again. Right, Great Pumpkin? The more time I have to spend stressing out over this book, the less time I spend preaching your gospel to the unenlightened, or lurking in corn mazes scaring the living crap out of tourists. You like it when I scare the crap out of tourists, don't you, Great Pumpkin?

* My cats are fantastic, Great Pumpkin, and I'm so very grateful. Alice is huge now, and has truly grown into her birthright as your spiritual, if not literal, daughter. When she runs through the house, it's like watching a burning cornfield through thick smoke. Lilly is smug and satisfied, as is only right and proper for a Siamese, and watches her sister with easy disdain. Please let them stay healthy, Great Pumpkin, and please let them stay exactly as they are. I couldn't be more appreciative of their glory.

* Well-staggered and easily-managed deadlines for my various anthology and short story projects through the next six months—and while I'm making requests, please let me keep getting anthology invitations, as they are sort of the ultimate literary trick-or-treat adventure. I have written you two of the three short stories with the Fighting Pumpkins cheerleading squad that I originally promised, and I'm planning the origin stories for Hailey and Scaredy for this Halloween. I keep my promises. Now please keep giving me reason to promise you things.

* A successful launch for Mira Grant, my evil twin, Lady of the Haunted Cornfield, Halloween Trick to my Halloween Treat. The books I will be publishing under her name are incredibly dear to me, and I hope and pray that they become equally dear to the rest of the world. I am an old-school horror girl, Great Pumpkin, and these are my offerings to the holy genre. Let others love them as I do, and let Mira be welcomed by the readers with open, eager arms. I want to conquer the world in your name, and this is a very important step.

I remain your faithful Halloween girl,
Seanan.

PS: While you're at it, can you please turn your graces on InCryptid? I really love these books. I want to be able to write more of them.

So I'm hammering away on the sequel to Feed (which is potentially going to be going through a name change before much longer; watch this space for news), and I have about 13,000 words to go before the book is over. It's a little weird to realize that I'm so close to being finished with the first draft. Feed took me the better part of two years to write...but then, Feed required me to front-load a lot of the research, reading, and world construction that this book is cheerfully benefiting from. Half the work is done for me already.

I guess this means book three will be a cake-walk, huh? Or something like that.

(I find myself planning another trilogy after this one is finished, involving genetically-engineered parasites, mind-control, symbiotic evolution, and lots of other lovely things. The books are called Parasite, Symbiont, and Predator, at least for right now. Because I really needed to be working on more books, right?)

The German editions of Rosemary and Rue showed up today, and they are absolutely gorgeous. The book is called Winterfluch in German, and wow, do they have nice standard paperbacks over there. My mother promptly stole a copy, because that's what my mother does, and I've placed one ceremonially on my expanding shelf o' Things What I Wrote. I'm sure it's semi-cheating to have multiple editions of the same book, but if it has a different cover, I really don't care. It's increasingly amazing to look at the shelf. Stunning, and amazing. I can't wait to add Feed in the US and UK editions.

I'm catching up on NCIS before I head off to bed, to dream of zombies and parasites and cupcakes and blue cats and all those other wonderful things that keep me busy through my days. Hope your week is going wonderfully, and remember, Locus says you need a copy of Rosemary and Rue.

People are talking a lot about eBooks right now. It would be impossible not to talk a lot about eBooks right now, given the recent mess with Amazon and MacMillan.* Before this, people were already talking about eBooks, for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons was what people are calling the "nuclear option": a tendency by some readers to go to Amazon.com and other review sites and post one-star reviews of products because those products are not available to them. The book you want isn't available in the country where you live? Give it a one-star review! That'll show 'em!

...except no. Not really.

People are talking a lot about book covers right now, and the fact that sometimes, the people on them don't actually look anything like the people inside the books. Sometimes they're bad. Sometimes they're terrible. And sometimes, yes, they're inaccurate enough to be insulting, presenting characters as the wrong race, gender, weight, sex, or species. (For a nice round-up on some recent cover issues, check out this excellent post by the always-charming jimhines.) This leads, periodically, to groups of people deciding that the best response is a boycott of the books in question—the classic "voting with your dollar" method that works so very well in other arenas.

...except maybe this one.

Authors have a surprisingly small amount of control over a lot of aspects of how their books are presented to the public. I say "surprisingly" because when I was a kid, I ranked "Author" as a position of power just below "Doctor Who," "The Great Pumpkin," and "God." Most people knock "God" off that list by the time they reach their teens (I did), but still, there's this innate assumption that the author has a lot of control over where their work goes and what it does.

...except no. Not really. Check out these lists for details.

Things the Author Probably Controls

* Whether the book gets written.
* Which publishing houses the book gets sent to.

Things the Author Probably Does NOT Control (unless the author is Stephen King)

* The cover.
* The title.
* The publication date.
* The format of the book.
* The cost of the book.
* Whether there's an eBook edition.
* Whether the book is published anywhere outside the US.
* Whether the book is published in more than one language.
* Whether there's an audio edition.
* Which stores, including Amazon, carry their book.
* How many copies are printed.

Who You Are Punishing If You Boycott the Book or Review It Poorly Because of Format, Not Content

* The author.

Who You Are NOT Punishing

* The publisher.

Now, I don't want my publisher punished, for anything. Both my publishers have been amazingly good to me. I love them like I love candy corn and fluffy little blue kittens, and I want everything they touch to turn to gold, because then maybe they can start paying me in remote islands and genetically-engineered dinosaurs instead of boring dollars. Plus, people take very poorly to being punished. If you hit me because I didn't bring you the sandwich you wanted, I'm not going to go and make you a fresh sandwich. If, however, you say "I'm sorry, I really wanted tuna," well, we can negotiate. The message you send when you pan a book for not being available in the format/language/region you want isn't "I really want this but you won't let me have it"; it's "this sucks." Remember, that nasty review is only going to be seen if someone takes the trouble to read it. Most people will just see what amounts to an announcement of "this is a bad book."

If there were a mass boycott of Stephen King or Tom Clancy, the odds are good that the publishing world would notice. Those are, after all, some damn big numbers. Most authors are not in that neighborhood. Most authors can't even get an invitation to that city. So for us, losing ten sales actually matters. For us. For our publisher...not so much. The message sent by a boycott is not "I am offended by this choice," it's "I am not a fan of this author." If enough sales are lost, the author won't be able to get another book contract, and will need to find another job. The publisher will keep publishing. Some of these choices don't punish the people you're trying to punish, and their side effects can be killer.

So how do you get your point across? Pick up a pen. If you're actively offended by a book's cover, try buying the book and mailing the cover back to the publisher, along with a letter saying something like "Thank you so much for publishing a book that was so well-suited to my interests and desires as a writer. Unfortunately, this cover is unsuitable, because..." Indicate that you wanted the author's work, but not the poorly-chosen cover art, and that you would love to see the book issued again with a better cover. Don't punish the author. If you wonder why a book hasn't been printed in a literary region other than the one where it was originally printed (so American books in Germany, German books in France, etc.), it's probably because the local publishers don't realize that interest exists. Write to them! Say "I am a huge fan of Author T. Author's work, and I was wondering if you planned to print their latest book." They might not know they want the work if they don't know there's a market. But don't hit the author for things that are entirely outside of their control. It's just not nice.

(*If you somehow missed the mess, here's a very quick-and-dirty summation: MacMillan said "we want to charge more for our books than you do. We also want to charge less for our books than you do." Amazon said "no." MacMillan said "but they're our books." Amazon de-listed all MacMillan titles, without telling anyone that they were going to do so. MacMillan got upset. MacMillan authors got upset, since the loss of Amazon as a retailer could potentially mean they can't afford cat food anymore. Non-MacMillan authors got upset, because dude, there but for the grace of the Great Pumpkin go we. Everyone did a lot of shouting. People who want cheap eBooks called MacMillan a bully. People who want authors to be able to sell their books called Amazon a bully. There are some very good accountings of the whole mess floating around the Internet; I recommend you go read John Scalzi's post if you want a solidly-researched starting point. This is not that starting point.)

In addition to writing more books than is strictly good for me*, I write a lot of short fiction and even a few essays. I love the act of writing, the process of editing and finishing something, and some stories want to be shorter than novel length. Some stories need to be shorter than novel length. I really love "Lost," but it would lose a lot of what makes it work (at least for me) if I tried to stretch it out much longer. "A Citizen in Childhood's Country" is the same way. I may go back to that universe, but the story itself is complete and closed.

Anyway, this year, I joined the writing staff of The Edge of Propinquity as one of their universe authors, telling the story of Rose Marshall, whose adventures began the night that she died. I'm currently committed through 2010; after that, Jennifer (the managing editor) and I will look at my time commitments, and decide whether I'll be chasing Rose down the highways of America for a second year. This is actually awesome, because it means I get to treat my twelve stories as a self-contained "season." I keep picturing it as a television show on HBO or maybe the BBC, complete with opening credits and screaming theme music. It's fun.

talkstowolves has posted a long, lovely Rose Marshall retrospective, including a review of the first Sparrow Hill Road Story, "Good Girls Go To Heaven." She says...

"In one short story thus far, Sparrow Hill Road has managed to introduce me to an area of folklore previously unconsidered and left me considering it (i.e. truck-drivers and highway diners); evoked a believable urban legend and made the central figure of that urban legend multi-faceted and sympathetic; and enchanted me and fired my imagination with the intoxicating glimpses of a myriad of Americas, clothed in daylight, twilight, midnight. The other sides. The ghostside."

Also...

"I absolutely cannot wait to see more of this series unfold and discover where Rose Marshall goes. Also, though I am always excited to investigate my best-loved field, I cannot deny that Seanan has provided me with a fresh infusion of enthusiasm for urban folklore."

Meanwhile, over in the Livejournal Doctor Who community, the author and essay list for Chicks Dig Time Lords [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] has been announced. This is my first real non-fiction sale, and I'm thrilled. Especially since Tara, my dear friend and graphic designer, is one of the book's two editors, which makes this very much a "family affair."

Chicks Dig Time Lords is small press, and won't be available in all stores, but can be ordered online, and I hugely recommend it for fans of Doctor Who. Yay!

It's gonna be a fun, fun year.

(*I have three coming out in 2010: A Local Habitation, An Artificial Night, and my debut as Mira Grant, Feed. It's a wonder I get any sleep at all.)

It's time for the fortieth essay in my ongoing series about the art, craft, business, and mild insanity known as "writing." We're in the home stretch now; ten more essays and I'm done with the series. Kate and Amy are watching me like hawks to be sure I don't start something else insane. All the essays in this series are based around my original fifty thoughts on writing, which were written in no particular order. That explains a lot. Here's today's thought:

Thoughts on Writing #40: Starting the Discussion.

As always, context is our friend, and the thought needs to be expanded on. So here's today's expansion:

Talk to other writers about what works for them. Half the things on this list may be pure crap from your perspective; that's okay, because in order to decide that they were crap, you had to think about them. You have put thought into what kind of writer you want to be, and how you want to work. That's fantastic. Listen to everyone, and decide for yourself what you want to take to heart.

The thing about writing is that it's a weird combination of "learn by doing" and "learn by discussing." You have to understand certain things before they can be done; you have to do certain things before you'll understand why the way you're trying to do them is completely wrong. I learned to write a novel by writing a novel. I learned a lot of the things I needed to be watching for by discussing writing with other writers. But how do you filter the good from the bad? How do you justify rejecting advice from someone more successful than you are, or learn to take it from someone who seems to be less successful?

The lines are different for everyone, but let's talk about where to find them, and what they really mean. Ready? Good. Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on conversation.Collapse )

Hello, and welcome to my journal! I'm pretty sure you know who I am, my name being in the URL and all, but just in case, I'm Seanan McGuire (also known as Mira Grant), and you're probably not on Candid Camera. This post exists to answer a few of the questions that I get asked on a semi-hemi-demi-regular basis. It may look familiar; that's because it gets re-posted roughly every two months, to let folks who've just wandered in know how things work around here. Also, sometimes I change the questions. Because I can.

If you've read this before, feel free to skip, although there may be interesting new things to discover and know beyond the cut.

Anyway, here you go:

( This way lies a lot of information you may or may not need about the person whose LJ you may or may not be reading right at this moment. Also, I may or may not be the King of Rain, which may or may not explain why it's drizzling right now. Essentially, this is Schrodinger's cut-tag.Collapse )

Having been politely poked to remind me that Hugo and Campbell Award nominations are now open, I wanted to let folks know what I published in 2009 that qualifies for these award categories. Specifically...

Novel-length work:

Rosemary and Rue, DAW Books, September 2009.

Short Stories:

"Lost," appearing in Ravens in the Library. It also appears in both audio and print forms at Wily Writers.
"A Citizen in Childhood's Country," appearing at The Book View Cafe.
"Indexing," appearing at The Book View Cafe.
"Knives," appearing at The Book View Cafe.
"Julie Broise and the Devil," appearing in both audio and print forms at Wily Writers.

The works are eligible for the Hugo; I, as a human, am eligible for the Campbell. To be able to nominate a writer or work for the 2010 awards, you must have either been an attending member of Anticipation (the 67th World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal) or be a supporting or attending member of Aussiecon Four (the 68th World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne) before Jan. 31, 2010.

The Hugos: http://www.thehugoawards.org/
The Campbell Award: http://www.writertopia.com/awards/campbell

If you need copies of or pointers to any of my short material for consideration purposes, please let me know.

I will now go hide under my bed.

So jimhines made a well-considered post on character death, which, naturally, got me thinking about the topic. Because I am a thoughtful blonde, this thinking took about fifteen forms, and eventually resulted in something far too long to be a comment. I think too much.

First off, I want to say that I don't have a problem with the concept of character death. Sometimes, people die. Sometimes, yes, even in fiction. And as an author, I don't think I'm allowed to have a problem with character death. There's a point in Stephen King's Misery where Annie Wilkes, the crazy nurse, is accusing Paul Sheldon of being a murderer because his main character, Misery, has died in childbirth. He protests, saying very firmly that he didn't kill her. She just died.

Sometimes characters just die.

I've had that happen to me twice now: characters I really expected were going to make it through their stories have turned around and said "no, I'm sorry, this is where I get off the train." Once that point was reached, I couldn't go back. I walked away from a book for six months once, and I still couldn't take it back. I'm not saying that fictional people have free will, but I am saying that a well-made character will do things the author doesn't expect, and that a story acquires a narrative weight that can sometimes make certain things inevitable. Sometimes the only way an author can have control is to be untrue to the story, and readers can tell when that happens. A good story is alive. Saving a character who's supposed to die can kill it. I may love zombies, but that doesn't mean I want to turn my books into zombies, y'know?

Similarly, if not the same, sometimes you just need to kill people. It's entirely unrealistic to, say, write a zombie techno-thriller in which absolutely everybody lives. So sometimes, I have characters who are just, in the immortal words of Spider Jerusalem, here to go. Not all of them actually leave! Sometimes people I created as "fire and forget" wind up sticking around, refusing to die, while characters I expected to be working with for years politely take their leave six chapters in. I try to be true to the story. I try not to fight it.

At the same time, very little pisses me off more than a bad character death. One of my favorite television shows recently killed off one of my favorite characters in a manner that was unnecessary and just plain mean. It felt like they were going "how can we make it clear that things are getting really, really serious? Hey! Let's bring back this minor character that everyone thinks we've forgotten about, and just kill the crap out of 'em! That'll make everybody sit up and take notice!" Shock and awe deaths don't do anything but upset me. I've stopped watching shows entirely for pulling that sort of stunt—after the episode of Torchwood where I spent an hour crying and saying "I am not okay with this" over and over, I took the show off my watch-list. I dropped Sanctuary over a death that felt less plot-serving and more "the focus group says..."-serving. And yes, there are books that I've thrown aside in disgust, because it all just got to be too damn mean and purposeless to take.

This is not me saying "if you kill a character I like, you, too, are dead to me." For example, one of my favorite movies is The Fly. Yes, with Jeff Goldblum. For those of you who don't know it, it's a horror movie, and things don't go well for most of the main characters. I've been known to watch it when I'm not feeling well, in the hopes that I'll fall asleep and it'll get a different ending in my dreams, Just This Once. At the same time, the ending is so right, and so justified by what came before it, that I don't mind. And that's sort of the thing. When a character's death is right and true and meant to happen, it shows, and those deaths, even when they upset me, are the way things ought to be.

Jim also makes the point—and it's a good one—that killing is contextual. If I kill someone in a Toby book, that's expected. If I kill someone in one of Mira Grant's books, that's practically a legal requirement. But if I kill someone in a Corey book, people are going to be going "Um, w-t-f, over?" and threatening me with sticks. Genre determines a lot of what you can get away with, and what I'm willing to accept as a reader or viewer. I don't like to be blindsided; I don't think anybody does. (This isn't me saying "no deaths in YA," by the way. People will die in the Clady books. Just that the genre really does determine what is and is not okay.)

I will always kill characters. I can't help it. Sometimes the story needs people I care about to die, and sometimes individual stories are just done. I will also always get upset over senseless character deaths, because there's a big, big difference between "this needed to happen" and "I'm the author, that's why."

Thoughts?

So I'm past the hangovers and sugar-crashes and travel and oddly excessive number of cookies, and it is now time to begin assessing my current status. Beyond "awake," I mean. It's 2010! It's a whole new year! Sadly, the old year did not do all the dishes before it left, but hey.

Books. I have three coming out in 2010: A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] and An Artificial Night as me, and Feed [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] as Mira Grant. I have one currently due in 2010, Blackout (the sequel to Feed).

In addition to the books that are already sold/slated for publication, I have one finished October Daye book, Late Eclipses, and one finished InCryptid book, Discount Armageddon. I am currently working on The Brightest Fell (Toby five), Midnight Blue-Light Special (InCryptid two), and Sit, Stay, I Hate You (Coyote Girls two). In 2010, I'm planning to finish all three of these, start on Deadline (Newsflesh three), start on Ashes of Honor (Toby six), and start on Hunting Grounds (InCryptid three). I am not planning on a particularly large quantity of sleep.

Short Stories. I'm one of the 2010 universe authors for The Edge of Propinquity, which will be running my Sparrow Hill Road series from January through December. The first story, "Good Girls Go To Heaven," has been turned in, and I'm about two-thirds of the way through the second story, "Dead Man's Party," which should be finished by this weekend. After that comes "Tell Laura I Love Her," which should be a lot of fun. This is a series heavily influenced by the mythology of the American highway, and with a very strong soundtrack accompanying every story. There will be playlists! Much fun.

I have various other short stories out on secret missions, including two Fighting Pumpkins adventures ("Dying With Her Cheer Pants On" and "Gimme a 'Z'!"), my first-ever steampunk piece ("Alchemy and Alcohol," which comes complete with cocktail recipes), and an actual Mira Grant short story ("Everglades"). I'm noticing a high level of dead stuff in my recent short story output. Somehow, this is not striking me as terribly surprising.

Non-fiction. My essay in Chicks Dig Time Lords [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] will be available in March, along with, y'know, the rest of the book. So if you've ever wondered why I love math and have trouble with linear time, you should probably pick up a copy of this book. (You should do that anyway, because the book is awesome, but that's beside the point.) My introduction for jennifer_brozek's In A Gilded Light will also be available with the rest of the book, sometime in mid-2010.

Albums. Work on Wicked Girls is proceeding apace, and beginning to pick up speed as we get deeper into the process of mixing and arranging songs. I'm scheduling my various instrumentalists to come into the studio and get their parts recorded, and some of the arrangements are just going to be incredible. I still need to confirm the covers for this album, and start thinking about graphic design, but I'm still really, really pleased. There's no confirmed release date yet, and there's not going to be one until we're a lot closer to done: as I've said a few times, as soon as there's a deadline, this ceases to be fun and relaxing, and right now, we're too far from finished for that to be a good idea.

I'm within a hundred copies of being entirely out of Stars Fall Home (my first studio album), and right now, I couldn't tell you if or when there's going to be another printing. I'm doing a little better for Pretty Little Dead Girl, but at the current rate, I'd estimate that I'll be out (or very close to out) by this time next year. Red Roses and Dead Things, being my most recent release, is also the one with the most remaining stock (paradoxically, it's also my fastest seller, since a lot of folks don't have it yet). In summary, if you're missing any of my first three albums, you may want to consider whether you're going to want them, because when they're gone, they're gone.

Cats. Thanks to Susan's lovely gift of triple-strength catnip mice, I have discovered Alice's response to catnip. Basically, she goes batshit moonmonkey pumpkinfuckers INSANE for about half an hour, before singing arias to the invisible bug-people for the rest of the night. Lilly, on the other hand, takes advantage of Alice's, ahem, "delicate condition," and spends several hours gently shoving her off things.

And that's the local weather report. Back to you, Ken.

My flight back from Seattle to San Francisco touched down about twenty minutes before eight last night. We were actually early, which was a trifle annoying, as it meant that all the post-landing announcements interrupted the episode of The Wizards of Waverly Place that I'd been watching (yes, I am a total dork). Oh, well. At least it was one I'd seen before. I collected my suitcase from the baggage claim, met Mom at the escalator, and was promptly toted across the Bay Area to home, where I was greeted by a stack of mail and two incredibly irritated blue cats.

People who haven't met my cats often fail to understand exactly how good they are at making their annoyance known. These people need to be shut in a room with Lilly, Alice, and an empty food dish for half an hour. At the end of this time, they will understand a) that my cats are perfectly capable of explaining, in the detail, their displeasure, and b) I should get hazard pay for entering the house without feather toys and treats.

Thankfully, my girls aren't good at being mad for long. After a night of cuddling and a morning spent watching Boa vs. Python (with the pair vying for dominion over my lap), I seem to have been essentially forgiven. They still aren't letting me out of their sight, but that isn't all that unusual.

Over the course of my time in Seattle, I ate cupcakes, baked a turkey, made insane numbers of cookies, saw Die Hard for the first time, went to several bookstores, gave a concert, embarked on a successful quest for cranberries, reached 90,000 words on Blackout, formally turned in the first Sparrow Hill Road story, watched all of season one of Glee, played with kittens, rewrote about half my website, and hugged many people I love.

It was a good holiday break. I hope yours was just as lovely.

Well, here we go: the final current projects post of 2009. When next I prove that I don't sleep, it will be 2010, the last year of the first decade of the new century. It's a little boggling to realize that, well, I just frittered away an entire year, measured out in coffee spoons and word counts. And now here we are again. This post and its kin are the reason I scream like a lingerie-clad blonde in a horror movie every time someone asks me "What are you working on?" The answer takes too long to actually deliver. Anyway, this is the December list of current projects, because I am the gift that keeps on giving.

To quote myself, being too harried to say something new: "These posts are labeled with the month and year, in case somebody eventually gets the crazy urge to timeline my work cycles (it'll probably be me). Behold the proof that I don't actually sleep; I just whimper and keep writing."

Please note that the first four Toby books are off this list, because they have been finished and turned in. You can purchase Rosemary and Rue [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] now. You can pre-order A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] now. An Artificial Night and Late Eclipses are off the list until The Editor tells me otherwise.

The first Newsflesh book, Feed, is off the list because it has been turned in to The Other Editor. Not only that, but my page proofs have been finished and returned. You'll see this bad boy again when it comes rolling off the presses! Discount Armageddon is off the list because the first draft has been finished, and it'll be a little bit before revisions start.

The cut-tag is here to stay, because no matter what I do, it seems like this list just keeps on getting longer. But that's okay, because at least it means I'm never actively bored. I have horror movies and terrible things from the swamp to keep me company.

( What's Seanan working on now? Click to find out!Collapse )

So in the last seventy-two hours, I have...

...finished "Good Girls Go To Heaven," the first Sparrow Hill Road story, and returned it to my editor for review. (I like to be early, so that there's time for me to be thoroughly edited.) I'll probably be starting "Dead Man's Party" in a day or so.

...finished "The Alchemy of Alcohol," my first-ever steampunk story (also my first story about Mina Norton, alchemist, bartender, and exceedingly cranky native of San Francisco). It was ludicrously fun to write. Mina is refreshingly annoyed.

...started "Gimme A 'Z'!"—which, as you can probably guess from the title, is the next adventure of the Fighting Pumpkins cheerleading squad. The wearing of little pleated orange and green skirts is clearly dangerous, given the trouble these girls manage to get themselves into.

...started "Slow," a much more viscerally upsetting zombie story. It's a zombie week here at Casa de Blonde.

...written way too much of Blackout, which probably explains why I have so many zombies on the brain right now. I love this series a lot. I'll love it even more when I get about another five thousand words on in the current book, since that will mean it's time to pause, consider, and process edits. (Yes, I really do schedule everything.)

...finished reviewing my page proofs for Feed. Alive or dead, the truth won't rest. Rise up while you can.

My new website will be going live real soon now, which means new material, including the Toby FAQ and the Sparrow Hill Road landing page. Watch this space for details. I am now going to go extract my Maine Coon from my purse.

1. Remember that voting is still open for the second A Local Habitation ARC giveaway, and while there are a few clear favorites, it's still anybody's game. I'll announce the third giveaway as soon as I figure out exactly what it's going to be.

2. A Local Habitation gets a little closer every day, as this page on the Penguin Group website can attest. It's still weird and wonderful and a little terrifying to look at websites and go "wait, that's my book, I wrote that, oh whoa, that's Toby." I am assured this feeling will eventually pass. I'm...not sure I want it to.

3. If you want to see me compared to an Emma Frost-esque diamond golem, click here and join the giggling. I don't object to being a golem, or being made out of diamond, and I admit it, my productivity is occasionally terrifying even to me. I am also assured that this phase in my life will eventually pass. That idea scares me.

4. Things about this weekend that I'm really excited about: the first holiday party of the season. Getting more time to work on Blackout. The premiere of the Alice miniseries on Syfy. It's by the people who did Tin Man last year, and while it doesn't star Zooey Deschanel (a definite minus if you ask me), it looks absolutely incredible. Plus it has Connor from Primeval, and he is mad hot.

5. Matt Fraction has declared that Emma Frost is the love of Scott Summers's life. Matt Fraction is my new favorite person, at least for right now.

Tonight, I'm going out with my cousins to do something mysterious which required me to buy two rolls of quarters from the bank. I am wary but interested to learn what lies in store on the misty streets of San Francisco. Here's hoping you're planning for a wonderful weekend of your own, and feel free to let me know what you have going on!

Hello, and welcome to the thirty-seventh essay in my accidental series of essays on the art, craft, and process of writing. We're almost done; the series will eventually be fifty essays long, all of them based around my original set of fifty thoughts on writing. Because the list of thoughts was written in no particular order, the essays are addressing the various components of the writing life in no particular order, and will eventually cover just about everything. Spooky. Here's today's thought:

Thoughts on Writing #38: It Isn't Good Just Because It's Bad.

You may remember that the previous essay, number thirty-seven, was all about hype, and not believing everything that you hear. Now, I'm going to contradict myself a bit, because I said in that essay that there was no such thing as bad hype. Which I still hold that to be technically correct, I'm going to use the word "hype" to describe the flip-side of the "believing too much good press" problem, because it's easier. Today's thought expands to:

At the same time, don't sit around telling yourself how horrible you are, and don't let a few bad reviews shatter your sense of self. Look at the negative feedback as critically as you can, and if everyone is saying the same things, try to figure out whether that's something you can fix—and whether it's something you're willing to fix. I'm not going to stop writing horror just because there will always be people who hate horror. At the same time, if multiple horror reviewers are going "zombies, you're doin' it wrong," I should probably reassess. Don't buy the bad hype any more unreservedly than you buy the good.

It is human nature to believe the bad more than we believe the good. It is hammered into us, practically from birth, that listening to the bad makes us "responsive to criticism" and "realistic," while listening to the good makes us "vain" and "self-absorbed." So how do we find the balance between the two without losing our minds or sinking into the mire? Where is the line between buying our own press and becoming lost in the negativity? You're going to need to remember everything you know about balance and not believing everything you hear, and the sooner you start, the better. Let's take a good look at bad press, what purpose it serves, and how to keep yourself from falling under its sway. Ready? Good. Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on negative feedback, and why it's so hard to get past.Collapse )

I love Thanksgiving. I love the excuse to gather people in a teeming locust-mass, turning life into a potluck adventure of giant birds and pumpkin pies. I love the way the house smells once the first bird gets underway, and the sound of chopping, and the random things folks do to innocent asparagus. Most of all, I love the fact that it's a day where people are expected to stop, look at their lives, and really see what they're thankful for. Not what they're supposed to be thankful for; what they are.

Two years ago today, I was still struggling to finish the book that would become Feed, and still wondering if I was being silly in my refusal to abandon my dreams of being a novelist. Now I have one book on the shelves and five more coming out. All four of the covers that I've seen so far have just been amazing. I have an agent I love (and who puts up with my crazy like a real trooper). I have two editors who make me better than I could ever be on my own. I have two publishers who support me. I have anthologies with my name on the table of contents. I am so thankful for all these things that there are barely words.

I am thankful to the unpaid coal miners who labor on the tropical island where my private reality show is filmed. They scold me when I'm heavy-handed, cut out my sloppy adjectives and wishy-washy modifiers, and generally make me strive to become a better writer. These are the people who sometimes get asked to flip around revisions on a short story six times in sixteen hours. I love them so.

I am thankful for the health and happiness of my cats. Losing Nyssa was even harder on Lilly than it was on me, because Lilly just didn't understand. The fact that she has been able to bond with Alice the way she has is just such a huge relief. Alice herself is a revelation every day, as she grows into all her puffy glory, and Lilly remains the cat I've been praying to have since I was seven years old. I'm so lucky to have them.

I am thankful for the reception that Rosemary and Rue has gotten out there in the big wide world. I had faith in my book, I loved my book, but there's nothing like getting that first positive review and realizing that your faith was at least a little justified. Thank you, thank you, to everyone who's read it, who's liked it, who's encouraged me, and who's said they're excited about the next one. It means everything to me.

Finally, I'm thankful for all of you. I don't know many of you very well, if at all, but that doesn't matter; knowing you exist, participate, read, and care? That makes all the effort worthwhile.

Thank you.

So in case you've managed to miss the news (I sometimes wish I'd managed to miss the news), Harlequin Romance has formed a new self-publishing imprint, Harlequin Horizons, and people are ticked off about it. By "people," I mean "the Romance Writers of America, the Science Fiction Writers of America, and writers here, there, and everywhere." The basic deal is this: you give Harlequin Horizons a substantial chunk of cash, and they will print your book. Oh, and if it's drop-dead awesome enough, they may allow you to sell it to them later (although they won't give you back your money at that point). In the meanwhile, you, too, can be a Harlequin author. Whee!

Watching reactions to this around the Internet has been fascinating, because there are a substantial number of people who don't understand why the community of authors is generally so upset. Unless, of course, we're just trying to keep ordinary people from discovering how easy and fun it is to write novels, and how quick you can get famous once you get past The Man who's been guarding the front gate. What they're overlooking is a set of rather nasty complexities attendant on the idea of this model.

With self-publishing, you must be able to pay to play. Being a first-time author is highly unlikely to make anyone wealthy unless they're already a celebrity. I don't know how much Stephanie Meyer got paid for Twilight, but I'll bet you she wasn't quitting her day job until the royalty statements started coming in. Under the normal model, your publisher pays you. That means that it cost me nothing but time to write Rosemary and Rue. Under the self-publishing model, it would have started off by costing me about six thousand dollars, and that doesn't include any sort of promotion, publicity, or advertising.

Writing is not an unskilled profession. Before you assume I'm saying that if you aren't published, you can't write, please hear me out. Like any creative profession, being a writer takes certain learned tools (a functional grasp of a language, for starters), combined with talent and lots and lots of practice. It's a weird cocktail, and the most intrinsically talented writers in the world still need all three components. How do you get practice? By writing, and by being forced to be critical with your own work. When I first wrote Rosemary and Rue, it was the best thing I'd ever written. By the time I finished rewriting it for publication, it was ten times better, and the first draft had become actively embarrassing. Does using publication as the gold ring work for everyone? No. There are some truly amazing authors who have never been published, either because they're writing things viewed as non-commercial, or because they just don't feel like taking the time. But for most of us, the need to improve in order to achieve publication is a lot of what actually drives our improvement. Taking that away is like saying "okay, you've read a bunch of anatomy books, now take out this woman's spleen."

It takes a village to raise a child. People involved with getting Rosemary and Rue to a bookstore near you: me. My agent. My editor. My publicist. My line-editor. My layout and graphic designers. My cover artist. The entire marketing team at Penguin. The guy who sold all of the above their coffee. People I had to pay for their help: the guy who sold us the coffee. People who knew more about what it takes to make a book successful than I do: everyone but the guy who sold us the coffee (and that's a guess; he may be a former publishing mastermind who just likes the smell of java). It takes an army of people to get a book from manuscript to market, and while you can potentially fill all those roles yourself, if you're not independently wealthy, it's going to be really, really hard. I thought I was pretty savvy about how publishing works; then I published a book. It turns out that what I knew was vague and superficial—now we're at "okay, you've watched a bunch of medical shows, now take out this woman's spleen."

We cannot be our own quality control with absolute accuracy. "But wait," you may cry, "it works in the fanfic mines." "Yes, that's true," I would reply, "but in the fanfic mines, you can edit your work for free." Once you expand to novel-length, the chance for errors expands exponentially, and once you've paid someone to put your book in print, your ability to fix them drops like a rock. Consider the number of errors in the average full-length published novel. Now consider the village that played whack-a-mole with the book before you ever saw it. Being expected to be so perfect that you don't need editing isn't just unfair; it borders on actively mean.

Now, all of these points may seem like they're anti-self-publishing, and the thing is, they both are and aren't. There are totally legitimate reasons to self-publish. Maybe you have six thousand dollars to spare, and you just don't like Disneyworld that much. Maybe you're printing a book of short stories written twenty years ago by your high school writer's group. Maybe you have a huge pre-existing Internet following (Monster Island and John Dies at the End, for example, although these were both small press, not self-published). Maybe you just want a printed edition of your grandmother's cookbook. Whatever makes you happy! Most comic books are self-published, and it works out fine for them (although most self-publishing comic creators also form their own imprints).

At the same time, taking aspiring authors and effectively telling them "you don't need to work to improve and learn, you don't have to deal with rejection and unwanted critique, you don't need to do anything but sign the check" is just...it's mean. It's preying on the vulnerability of young authors who don't want anything but to see their works in print. Sadly, most self-published books will never reach a wide audience; they aren't on the shelves in brick-and-mortar stores, they aren't in print advertising (unless you're really independently wealthy), they won't be sending advance copies out for review. They'll just appear in a catalog somewhere, and on the author's website, where the number of copies sold will depend on just how fast the author can tap-dance for the amusement of the masses. By adding the name of a big house to a self-publishing imprint, and the seductive offer of "maybe we'll buy it after all," Harlequin is effectively monetizing their slush pile, and potentially taking the opportunity to grow away from a great many of the aspiring authors involved.

If I had self-published ten years ago, I would never have improved enough as an author to write Feed, or Late Eclipses, or Discount Armageddon, or Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues. Now, your mileage may vary. But these are my concerns, and these are the reasons that I really think that this sort of "business venture" is just another way of preying on the vulnerable.

1. I have done the mailing! Specifically, I've mailed a paperback to Australia, an ARC of A Local Habitation to our first ALH ARC contest winner, and a comic book to my web designer. (Said comic book has been failing to get mailed since July, which gives you an idea of how behind I am in certain aspects of my daily maintenance.) I probably have more mailing to do—including at least two CD sets—but this is mailing to discover, not mailing to feel guilty about not doing. Victory is mine!

2. Since the first ARC has been mailed out, I'm getting ready to open the second ARC contest. I'll be taking entries for a week or so, and then opening voting for a similar length of time. This is going to be a photography challenge (much like the LOLtest for Rosemary and Rue, but without the captions). Details will be posted later this week.

3. The redesign and relaunch of my website is just about done, which is a huge relief (for my webmaster and web designer, as well as for me, since they get constantly prodded at when I get twitchy). The new look of the site is awesome. We're going from drop-down menus to side menus, the graphics are even slicker and more incredibly cool, and soon, I'll be posting the first batch of icons and wallpapers for A Local Habitation. Also, once my main site is relaunched, we'll be able to focus on getting Mira's site off the ground. Evil twins need websites, too!

4. The Rosemary and Rue pendant sale from chimera_fancies is going to be launching later this week, and these pendants really are Mia's best work yet. I mean, they're just incredible pieces of wearable artwork, and the fact that I was partially responsible for this batch being created is just amazing to me. This is transformative art. From oral tradition folklore to urban fantasy novel to jewelry. Who could ask for a more remarkable series of connections? I'll post some previews of the sale before Mia opens it to the general public, but I'm not administrating it; all questions should go to chimera_fancies.

5. I know my Current Projects posts can seem huge and daunting and a little unreal, but I really have made amazing strides in Blackout, The Brightest Fell, and Discount Armageddon over the past month, and I'm over-the-moon excited with where they're each going. Working on all three at once is like a delicious block of television consisting of Glee, Supernatural, Wonderfalls, and Veronica Mars. So good, so snarky, and so refreshing for the soul. I know I love what I do, because it makes me less tired, rather than exhausting me.

6. My schedule for 2010 is taking shape and becoming visibly more awesome by the day. At least in part because, well, the more coherent it is, the easier it becomes for me to plan around things like conventions, book releases, and fits of hysterical giggling. My planner pages are also filling up, with a combination of major events and minor, "survive the day, week, month, year, and inevitable zombie apocalypse" items. The more regimented my time appears, the more work I'll get done. According to the planner so far, 2010 is the year I conquer the planet.

7. The first promo comic for A Local Habitation is underway, and looks awesome. I'll post it as soon as it's finished.

What's new in the world of you?

First off, I apologize profusely for the lateness of this month's current projects post. While my self-imposed schedule may not matter to most, I know it matters to some, and I know that my current projects update is due on the ides of every given month. I plead jetlag and exhaustion, and will attempt to make up for it by...well, largely by demonstrating, once again, that I am not a huge fan of either free time or sleep. This post and its kin are the reason I start to twitch like a tarantula riding a record player every time someone asks me "What are you working on?" The answer takes too long to actually deliver. Anyway, this is the November list of current projects, because I am the gift that keeps on giving.

To quote myself, being too harried to say something new: "These posts are labeled with the month and year, in case somebody eventually gets the crazy urge to timeline my work cycles (it'll probably be me). Behold the proof that I don't actually sleep; I just whimper and keep writing."

Please note that the first four Toby books are off this list, because they have been finished and turned in. You can purchase Rosemary and Rue [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] now. You can pre-order A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] now. An Artificial Night and Late Eclipses are off the list until The Editor tells me otherwise.

The first Newsflesh book, Feed (formerly Newsflesh), is off the list because it has been turned in to The Other Editor. Not only that, but my page proofs have been finished and returned. You'll see this bad boy again when it comes rolling off the presses!

The cut-tag is here to stay, because no matter what I do, it seems like this list just keeps on getting longer. But that's okay, because at least it means I'm never actively bored. I have horror movies and terrible things from the swamp to keep me company.

( What's Seanan working on now? Click to find out!Collapse )

There has once again been a massive influx of people, due to the fact that Alice is adorable—welcome, massive influx of people; it's nice to meet you, although I realize half of you will leave again as you realize that this isn't the all-kitten-doing-weird-stuff, all-the-time channel, and that's fine—I have decided to once again do the abbreviated "here are ten things you might want to know" version of the periodic welcome post. So here it is. Ta-da! (As a footnote, Alice is aware of your worship, and was puffy all over my face at 2AM last night.)

***

1. My name is Seanan McGuire; I'm an author, musician, poet, cartoonist, and amiable nutcase, presently living in Northern California, planning to relocate to Washington at some point in the next few years. I am a very chatty person, whether you're talking literally "we're in the same place" chattiness, or more abstract "someone has left Seanan alone with a keyboard, run for the hills" chattiness. This does not, paradoxically, make me terribly good about keeping up with email or answering comments in anything that resembles a reasonable fashion. We all have our flaws. Luckily for my agent's sanity, I am very good about making my deadlines.

2. My name is pronounced "SHAWN-in", although a great many people elect to pronounce it "SHAWN-anne" instead. Either is fine with me. I went to an event where we all got name tags once, and the person making the name tags was a "SHAWN-anne" person, who proceeded to label me as "Shawn Anne McGuire". I choose to believe that Shawn Anne is my alter-ego from a universe where, instead of becoming an author, I chose to become a country superstar. She wears a great many rhinestones, because they're sparkly, and she can get away with it. Just don't call me "See-an-an" and we'll be fine.

3. I write: urban fantasy, horror, young adult, supernatural romance, and straight chick-lit romance. I occasionally threaten to write medical thrillers, but everyone knows that's just so I'd have an excuse to take more epidemiology courses. I love me a good plague. I believe that editing is a full-contact sport, complete with penalty boxes, illegal checking, and team pennants. My editing team is the Fighting Pumpkins. We're going all the way to the WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS this year, bay-bee!

4. I find it useful to keep a record of the status of my various projects, both because it warms the little Type-A cockles of my heart, and because it helps people who need to know what's going on know, well, what's going on. So you'll see word counts and editing updates go rolling by if you stick around, as well as more generalized complaining about the behavior of fictional people. I am told this is entertaining. I am also told that this is possibly a sign of madness. I don't know.

5. I currently publish both as myself, and as my own evil twin, Mira Grant. My first book under my own name, Rosemary and Rue [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy], came out from DAW in September 2009. The sequel, A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy], is coming out in March 2010, also from DAW. Mira's first book, Feed [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy], will be out from Orbit in May 2010. I don't get very much sleep.

6. I am a musician! More specifically, I'm a filk musician. If you know filk, this statement makes total sense. If you don't know filk, think "the folk music of the science fiction and fantasy community"—or you can check out the music FAQ on my website. I have three CDs available: Pretty Little Dead Girl, Stars Fall Home, and Red Roses and Dead Things. I'm currently recording a fourth CD, Wicked Girls, which will be out sometime in 2010. I write mostly original material, and don't spend much time in ParodyLand. It just doesn't work out for me.

7. Things I find absolutely enthralling: giant squid. Plush dinosaurs. Siamese and Maine Coon cats. Zombies. The plague. Pandemic flu. Horror movies of all quality levels. Horror television. Science Fictional Channel Original Movies. Shopping for used books. Halloween. Marvel comics. Candy corn. Carnivorous plants. Pumpkin cake. Stephen King. The Black Death. Pandemic disease of all types. Learning how to say horrifying things in American Sign Language. Diet Dr Pepper.

8. Things I find absolutely horrifying: slugs. Big spiders dropping down from the ceiling and landing on me because ew. Bell peppers. Rice. Movies that consist largely of car chases and do not contain a satisfying amount of carnage. Animal cruelty. People who go hiking on mountain trails in Northern California and freak out over a little rattlesnake. Most sitcoms. A large percentage of modern advertising. Diet Chocolate Cherry Dr Pepper.

9. I am owned by two cats: a classic bluepoint Siamese named Lillian Kane Moskowitz Munster McGuire, and a blue classic tabby and white Maine Coon named Alice Price-Healy Little Liddel Abernathy McGuire. Yes, I call them that, usually when they've been naughty. The rest of the time, they're respectively "Lilly" or "Lil," and either "Alice" or "Ally." I'm planning to get a Sphynx, eventually, when the time comes to expand to having a third cat.

10. I frequently claim to be either a Disney Halloweentown princess or Marilyn Munster. These claims are more accurate than most people realize. Although I wasn't animated in Pasadena.

***

Welcome!

[Nine nervous aspiring authors stand on a pair of low bleacher-style steps, arranged to make it very obvious that there used to be more of them. It's equally obvious that they would really rather be clustered together like chickens in a hurricane. They're dressed in their Make A Good Impression best, which means that only a few stains and patches are visible, and most of their clothes actually fit. At the front of the room stands a familiar face, sleek and well-groomed, with professionally-styled hair and makeup that wasn't purchased from Target: Gloriana Goodthrob, the best-selling romance author whose books have dominated the national charts for the last ten years. Behind her is a panel of expert judges. No, really, we swear, they're experts. Gloriana says so.]

GLORIANA: Welcome, authors. You're looking very professional today. [Nervous laughter from the authors.] You're all familiar with our prizes. The winner will be signed with one of the best agencies in the world, Elite Author Management, be featured in a six-column interview in Publisher's Weekly, and receive a book contract with a guaranteed print run of fifty thousand copies. You all know our judges. The first is the noted book cover artist, Peter Penciler.

PETER: Hello, authors.

GLORIANA: Critique artist and ghost-writer, Mister Thomas Hack.

HACK: Authors.

GLORIANA: And our guest judge for the evening, the lovely and talented Miss Ivana Cut, agent extraordinaire.

IVANA: Hello, authors.

GLORIANA: Now this week, you were asked to write a science fiction epic, featuring thrilling exploits, original characters, zippy dialog, and most of all, a heavily marketable theme. You've received your critiques, both individually and as a group. There are nine of you in front of me, but I only hold eight manuscripts in my hands. These manuscripts represent the eight who are still in the running to become America's Next Top Author. The author whose name I do not call must immediately return to the house, pack your belongings, and go home. The author whose name I call first will have their manuscript made available for free download on the Kindle (tm) for the next week, thus increasing your visibility and potential readership.

[Pause for dramatic tension.]

GLORIANA: The first name I'm going to call is...Dave.

[DAVE walks forward to take his manuscript with visible relief.]

GLORIANA: Dave, you wowed us this week with your use of adjectives, your fire, and your willingness to completely mimic the last big thing, burying your own standards to succeed. You're still in the running to become America's Next Top Author.

DAVE: Thank you. [He moves to his place against the wall.]

[GLORIANA calls the next six authors, leaving only two standing on the bleachers, both looking terrified.]

GLORIANA: Will Suzi and Damon please step forward?

[Two trembling authors approach the front of the room. DAMON needs a better haircut. SUZI needs new shoes.]

GLORIANA: Two authors stand before me, but I only have one manuscript in my hands. This manuscript represents the writer who is still in the running to become America's Next Top Author. Suzi, you've wowed us week after week with your sizzling, inappropriate sex scenes and your creativity with props. But this week, when you were given the whole galaxy as your prop, you became timid, cautious...predictable. Your titillation wasn't so titillating. And Damon, when the judges look at you, they see an author who has the whole package—looks, verve, literacy—but when we read your work, we find ourselves wondering if you'll sell to the public. Your idea of "out of this world" is just a little too "out there." So who stays? The talented seductress who may limit herself when she's nervous, or the intellectual abstract artist who leaves us feeling cold?

[Close up on DAMON and SUZI, looking terrified. GLORIANA holds out a manuscript.]

GLORIANA: Suzi. You're still in the running to become America's Next Top Author. But next week, that manuscript had better be smokin'.

[SUZI bursts into tears, takes her manuscript, and runs for the safety of the others. DAMON looks at GLORIANA, expression stoic and unwavering.]

GLORIANA: Damon, you have so much potential! There's a bestselling author inside you, just aching to break free! Learn to stop taking too many chances. Reel it in a little. Add some hot, steamy sex, and the world could be yours.

[DAMON nods, eyes filled with unshed tears as he turns, waves, and exits the room. Fade to shots of him packing his things in the cramped house shared by the contestants.]

DAMON, voiceover: Well, yeah, I did expect to go a lot further, but I'm not ashamed of myself. I'm not sorry I wrote what I wanted to write. If it doesn't have an audience, who cares? I'll keep writing. I'll always keep on writing...

1. Practically all of my books have acronyms, because that makes it a little easier for me to put book-related tasks in my planner. Most of them are easy to decode, like "R&R" for Rosemary and Rue, or "DA" for Discount Armageddon. The only book I've written so far that has no acronym is Feed (although it had one during the writing process, before the title change—the acronym for Newsflesh was, naturally, "NF.") The only book whose acronym makes no sense at all is Blackout, which I still refer to as "TME" (for The Mourning Edition) when writing notes to myself. This is because I refuse to have tasks related to "BO."

2. I tend to work out tricky bits of dialog by talking to myself. Maybe this wouldn't be so silly if I only did it at the privacy of my own keyboard, but I also like to take very long walks. The whole "hold your cellphone up to your ear and pretend that you're on a call" doesn't really work when you're actively keeping up both sides of a violent argument. I'm reasonably sure all my neighbors think I'm dangerously insane. That's actually just dandy by me, since it keeps them out of my yard.

3. Sometimes, what looks like me goofing off is actually the hardest part of the writing process. If I get really, really stuck on something, I'll generally respond by either a) stomping into the back room of my house and putting on the dumbest horror flick I can find, or b) leaving the house entirely and going to the movies. This allows me to disconnect approximately half of my brain—the half that gets in the way of seeing the story clearly—and really focus on what needs to happen next. At the end of Hellboy II, I literally responded to "What did you think of the movie?" by bursting into tears and wailing about a character's hair being the wrong color. I work very hard when I don't seem to be working at all.

4. Part of why I tend to be working on several projects at once is my tendency to get really depressed when I finish something. It's like I was on a wonderful adventure, and now it's over, and all I can do is look at the pictures I took while I was there, and maybe plan to take another trip someday (but you know it'll never be the same, because it never is). Editing and revisions are exciting in their own way, but they're really the equivalent of scrapbooking that first amazing trip. The best way to avoid the depression is to make sure I'm never left with the time to just sit on my hands and mope.

5. I draw lots and lots and lots of little scribbly maps on Post-It notes and stick them up around my computer, so as to make sure I don't lose track of where things are. In the case of large combat or action scenes, I'll frequently sweep everything off my bed and start blocking out the scene, using My Little Ponies to represent normal-sized people, and scaling up (or down) from there. Being represented by a sparkly purple unicorn does nothing to improve Toby's overall mood. Just in case you were wondering.

6. I inevitably wind up re-typing the entire book between drafts one and two. I guess it's a holdover from the days when I worked entirely via typewriter and didn't have a choice. I just find that I get a better feel for the sentences and the way they all sort of slot together on the page if I'm remaining as tightly engaged with the text as possible. Fortunately, I also type at a hundred and twenty words a minute when I'm really focused, so the continual re-typing doesn't slow me down as much as you might expect.

7. I have an irritating tendency to hide big plot twists from everyone, including myself, to prevent accidental spoilers. Seriously! I'll spend two hundred pages setting something up, and then consciously realize it's about to happen roughly two sentences before it actually does. Reviewing the text makes it clear that whatever it was, it was totally inevitable and the gun's been on the wall since page six. I still won't see it coming until it gets there, even though my notes will read like I was totally playing with everybody's heads on purpose. This is sort of awesome, since it means the stories stay surprising even to me. This is sort of crazy-making, for the same reason.

8. Years ago, I named my muse. My muse's name is Jane. Jane is a flaky alcoholic who doesn't believe in deadlines. I'm a Type-A neurotic who doesn't believe in being late. We're like the Odd Couple, only she doesn't exist and I'm always the one cleaning up after her. Sometimes I think that if I got three wishes, one of them would be the delicious opportunity to punch my own muse in the face.

9. When books start to lag or I start to lose interest in them, I often motivate myself to keep going by starting to get excited about the next book in the series. In fact, that's usually the sign that I'm really ready to engage with the text and just power on through. When I start wanting to talk about the awesome thing that happens in the third chapter of the sixth Toby book, that's when you know I'm about to find that final burst of creative wind and slam through the remainder of book five.

10. I really do write constantly. Even when I don't have a piece of paper in front of me, the odds are good that I'm thinking about what I'm going to write the next time that paper is available. Weekends, holidays, sick days, birthdays, trips to Disneyworld, it doesn't matter; I'm thinking about writing. This used to get me into trouble with a few of my boyfriends, who had a nasty habit of asking me what I was thinking about, and then getting annoyed when I gave them honest answers.

Hello, and welcome to the thirty-seventh essay in my accidental series of essays on the art, craft, and process of writing. We're almost done; the series will eventually be fifty essays long, all of them based around my original set of fifty thoughts on writing. Because the list of thoughts was written in no particular order, the essays are addressing the various components of the writing life in no particular order, and will eventually cover just about everything. Spooky. Here's today's thought:

Thoughts on Writing #37: Hype.

We live in a world of hype. We swim in hype, we breathe hype, we eat and drink and sweat hype. But what does it mean? To expand on today's thought:

Don't buy into your own hype. There will always be people ready to tell you that you're so awesome you should be elected President on the basis of sheer badass. There will always be people ready to tell you that you're brilliant, that your books are the best things ever written, that they can't imagine why you aren't winning every award in the industry. That's okay. Those are not bad people. They're good for your career, and frankly, they're probably telling the truth; everybody has the one author that can do (almost) no wrong, or the one book that's absolutely perfect as it is. Still, those six, or sixty, or six hundred people? Are just six, or sixty, or six hundred people. If you let yourself believe them, you're going to hurt yourself in ways that I can't even begin to describe.

Hype is natural, normal, and entirely unavoidable. Some of us react to it positively—"Wow, everybody loves this, it must be awesome!" Some of us react to it negatively—"Wow, everybody loves this, it must be horrible!" Some of us just learn to ignore it, and trust our own judgment about the things we do or do not enjoy. No matter what our reactions to hype, at the end of the day, it's going to exist, and it's going to be a part of your writing life. You're going to need to deal with the good parts, the bad parts, and most importantly of all, with the parts that involve not believing everything you hear. Let's take a good look at hype, what it means, and how to keep yourself from falling under its sway. Ready? Good. Let's begin.

( My thoughts are not your thoughts; my process is not your process; my ideas are not your ideas; my method is not your method. All these things are totally right for me, and may be just as totally wrong for you. So please don't stress if the things I'm saying don't apply to you -- I promise, there is no One True Way. This way for my thoughts on hype, and why it's not always good for you.Collapse )

So I've been chatting with various people—now that the first rush of book release crazy is blessedly behind us—about Rosemary and Rue as a book, Toby as a character, and where I think the series is going. This has led to several of my friends confessing, usually while looking slightly sheepish, that Rosemary and Rue is Not A Perfect Book. It is, tragically, Not Without Flaw. And to this I say...

Thank the Great Pumpkin.

You see—bear with me, I swear this is relevant—I'm a Counting Crows fan. Their first album, August and Everything After, was perfect. Maybe not every song, maybe not every lyric, but as an album? Perfect. The sort of album you can listen to over and over again, finding new things, making new discoveries about the way the songs fit together, the stories that the lyrics are telling...perfect. So naturally, when their second album was released (Recovering the Satellites), they got basically panned. Why? Because Recovering the Satellites was a bad album? But it wasn't. It was actually a really good album, with a lot of really good songs. So what was the problem?

The problem was that it wasn't perfect. And once you've been perfect, people are going to start expecting perfection every single time. It's the dilemma of the student who manages straight As on a report card—once may be amazing, but when you bring home that B+ next quarter, there are going to be some pointed questions directed your way.

Now, I do think that a few of the things some people view as flaws will become less flaw-like as the series goes on. At the end of the first episode of Veronica Mars, you don't know who killed Lilly Kane, who raped Veronica, or what happened to her mother, now, do you? I'm absolutely working to make sure every Toby book has a satisfying conclusion all its own, but there are going to be some narrative threads that take a long, long time to be resolved. I'm actually crazy-careful with my timelines, and with making sure that all my guns are on the mantelpiece as soon as they need to be, just so there's no "but wait, there was no six-fingered man in the plot last season."

Yes, I will tell you who killed Lilly Kane.

Yes, I will tell you who raped Veronica.

Yes, I will tell you why every little piece of importance is important. But it's going to take a while. And I will, thankfully, probably never be perfectly perfect in an individual volume...although I, like the Counting Crows, really hope that my album (or series, as the case may be) is close enough to perfect when it's done that the flaws are forgiven.

So here's the thing: the Toby Daye books are not a trilogy. According to Wikipedia, a trilogy is "a set of three works of art—usually literature, film, or video games, less commonly visual art like paintings or musical works—that are connected, and that can be seen either as a single work or as three individual works." So, for example, the original three Star Wars movies are a trilogy, but three randomly selected episodes of Veronica Mars are not. The Evil Dead movies are a trilogy; any three given Nightmare on Elm Street installments are not, and so on. Having three of something gives you a trio, but it doesn't necessarily give you an actual trilogy.

Why does this matter? It matters because the word "trilogy" comes with a certain degree of expectation. People say "the Toby Daye trilogy," and they're creating the idea that, come the end of An Artificial Night, everything will be finished, wrapped up nice and neat and ready to move on. They're also creating the idea that—or at least the option for—A Local Habitation to end on an unfinished note, a literary device that's become increasingly common in trilogies over the past few years. (I actually find myself getting angry at books that don't announce themselves as part of a trilogy, and then release a "middle book" with no real ending. Tell me up-front that you're writing a trilogy, and I'll be braced for the mid-trilogy cliffhanger. Tell me you're a series and leave me hanging, and you may have just lost yourself a reader.)

Rosemary and Rue has an ending. A Local Habitation has an ending. An Artificial Night has an ending. Just so you know.

It's true that currently, only the first three Toby books have been purchased by my publisher. This is because three is a very good number for proving a series has legs and can manage on its own. The sales on your first book will be first book sales—they'll be made on the strength of your cover, your back cover text, and your pre-existing fanbase, if any. The sales on your second book will hopefully exceed the sales of your first, and be accompanied by a bump in first book sales, because some people like to wait for proof that a series is actually going to, y'know, continue before they invest their time and dollars. By book three, your publisher will have a pretty good idea of whether the series is a success, and will be able to market and support you a lot better as a consequence. Three book chunks help series succeed. But they still aren't trilogies.

I have nothing against trilogies. The Newsflesh books (Feed, Blackout, and Deadline) are a trilogy. They follow the standards for trilogy pacing, construction, and narrative arc. But the Toby books are very much not a trilogy. Great Pumpkin willing and the creek don't rise, the Toby books will continue for quite some time, and range very, very far away from that initial set of three. The fact that I'm currently neck-deep in book five should definitely tell you that there's a lot more story to tell.