Beware the ides of...well, every month around here, since that's when I make my monthly current projects post. Since it is now September 15th, it's time for me to demonstrate once again that George R.R. Martin may not be your bitch, but I just may be. (This is also the post that explains why the question "What are you working on?" sometimes causes me to burst into tears and point vaguely toward my Livejournal, as if actually saying it out loud would break the spell, wake the princess, and call down the demons.) Anyway, this is the September 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 three Toby books are currently off this list, because they have been finished and turned in. You can purchase Rosemary and Rue [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxies] now. A Local Habitation will be returning to the list briefly in the near future, when my page proofs arrive, but will then be disappearing again to prepare for publication. The fourth Toby book, Late Eclipses, is off the list because it has been finished, and is in the hands of The Editor, having been formally sent the hell away.

The first Mason book, Feed (formerly Newsflesh), is off the list because it has been revised and turned in to The Other Editor. Ah, progress. It smells like fear and uncontrollable twitching.

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 )

It's time for the thirty-sixth essay in my ongoing series of essays on the art, craft, and process of writing. There will eventually be fifty essays in all, all of them based around my original set of fifty thoughts on writing. No, I didn't set out to write an essay series, but I figure it's too late to object now. These fifty essays touch on a lot of different topics, and are all aimed at helping you stay sane as a writer, sometimes through process, sometimes through perspective. Here's today's thought:

Thoughts on Writing #36: Plotting Against You.

I don't actually mean that there's some sort of vast global conspiracy against you, although I can't promise that there isn't. To expand on today's thought:

You're going to get ideas from wherever it is you get ideas. There's no magic well. There's no "proper source." They'll come when they come, and you can't force them to show up if you're not ready to have them. The "what if..." moment is one of the most amazing things there is, and when it happens, you'll be the king of all creation, you'll be so fucking cool that nobody can stop you from conquering the planet...but you can't make it come. Just expose yourself to the world, and wait, and see what happens.

The question "where do you get your ideas?" is one that haunts writers, from the high school creative writing prodigy to the grizzled old lion who's published seventy novels, all of them still in print. People always want to know where the ideas come from, like there's some secret well or magical wardrobe that we're just not willing to share. I wish this were true, but it's not. So how to do we handle the fact that we're working with a resource that is at once limitless and severely limited, and how do we keep from bludgeoning our friends? Let's take a look at ideas, where they come from, how to attract them, and why we'll never be able to schedule their arrival. 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 ideas, and where they come from.Collapse )

Several people have asked me if, now that I'm past my official launch weekend, I'm planning to take a nap. I have done my best not to point and laugh, because it's an honest question (and also because I would probably just dissolve into hysterical giggles if I did so). So...

Before the end of September, I'll be receiving my page proofs for A Local Habitation (the sequel to Rosemary and Rue, and the second Toby Daye book). I'll also be preparing for the rest of the fall, since things will be hectic for a while before they settle down. See, in October, I'm traveling to Ohio for the Ohio Valley Filk Festival, and will be going straight from there into November and the World Fantasy Convention in San Jose. After that, I'm flying to New York to hang out with my publishers and be underfoot for a little while. (I also have a short story, "Inspirations," appearing at The Edge of Propinquity in November. So that'll be fun.)

In December, I'm going to Seattle to spend the holidays with my Pacific Northwest family, and to pull my now-traditional "work on a Mason book at Tony's kitchen table for eleven hours straight" holiday stunt. I'll probably also be doing my best to arrange some book events, possibly including Powell's. January will see me sleeping (a lot), as well as returning to Seattle for Conflikt, before heading to England, Germany, and the UK filk convention in February.

And then it will be March, and A Local Habitation will be hitting shelves, along with Chicks Dig Time Lords. I don't currently have anything scheduled for April—I don't trust this to last—but in May, Feed comes out. So sleep? No, not so much.

It's just one big kitchen party over here.

Well, I survived the weekend, with the assistance of the Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling Show that descended upon my house and made my book release parties extra awesome. I'll be posting detailed recaps of the parties later, after I've finished catching up on all the sleep I didn't get over the course of the weekend. (Seriously, right now, my idea of a recap is something like "and then I ate candy corn, and then I signed some books, and look, a bunny," which leaves out rather a lot of important details.)

My cats also survived the weekend, which was rather more in question, since Lilly doesn't like having large crowds between her and me, and Alice is still young enough to get impressively over-stimulated. Lilly spent the first night of the invasion (when we had Betsy in my room, Mia and Ryan in the spare room, and Amy, Brooke, and I in the back room) sleeping on my chest and growling in the back of her throat, Just In Case someone decided to try slitting my throat in the night. When no one attacked me, she moved on to pissy Siamese stage two, Shunning The Human, and provided a great deal of amusement, since she shuns about as well as I drive (and I don't drive). Alice did me the immense favor of being well-behaved and fluffy in front of Betsy, who bred her, and who needed to see her being happy, healthy, and fluffy.

Today has been pretty cool so far. Everybody seems to be getting home safely (always a concern, if you happen to be me), and my house is gradually returning to normal. Since it's Tuesday, I'll be going to Kate's tonight, to eat tasty Indian food, sleep in the basement, and resume my normal existence. I'm very excited by this fact. I like things that are normal (normal to me, anyway). I'm also going to be swinging through the Other Change of Hobbit to see whether they need any additional stock signed, and to confirm the dates for the rescheduled book release party. More information as it becomes available.

Chicks Dig Time Lords is now available for pre-order! Here's a link to the Amazon page. The brain-child of the lovely taraoshea, Chicks Dig Time Lords is a book of essays about being female in Doctor Who fandom, and what the show has meant to more than a few generations of Gallifrey Girls. It was co-edited by rarelylynne. I really loved being a part of this project, and I'm super-excited about it. Doctor Who has been one of my favorite shows since I was three years old. You can get your own copy of Chicks Dig Time Lords on March 15th, 2010—two weeks after you can get your own copy of A Local Habitation!

I'm exhausted, but I seem to be over the horrible plague that hit me just before book release, which is a wonderful thing (as yes, I did fear a relapse). This weekend, I get to hang out with a huge, merry crew over at the Bohnhoff place, and then head into Berkeley to do the Solano Stroll. And oh, right, it's time to get to work on finishing Blackout.

Welcome to fall. Now the work begins.

Dear Great Pumpkin;

With Halloween fast approaching, I felt it important to write and let you know that I have continued to be a very good girl. I have offered advice to people who asked for it, and not offered advice to people who didn't want it. I have allowed others to sample my candy corn without removing their fingers. I have hugged my friends and told my loved ones that I love them. I have not invoked any ancient evils to rise from their graves in the great corn maze and destroy an unsuspecting populace. I have made all my deadlines, even the ones I wanted to miss. And the swine flu still isn't my fault. So you see, I have been a very good girl, especially by my standards.

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

* Wonderful, easy, successful book release parties during which no one sets anybody else on fire. Please, Great Pumpkin, grant me two glorious nights, filled with wonder and joy and lots and lots and lots of book sales, because it turns out that I'm very nervous about this whole thing. Please let me be a Halloweentown Cinderella at the October Ball, only without the glass slippers, and let it all be wonderful. Also, please let there be lots of cookies. I'm a big fan of cookies.

* An easy, or at least not insanely painful, editing process on The Brightest Fell, which is definitely going to need a lot of editing before I hand it over to The Agent, much less The Editor. My first drafts are always excitingly messy, so I'm not particularly worried—the fact that it's book five, and book one just came out, means I have some breathing room—but I really would like breeze through the rewrites, just this once, so that I can get on to Ashes of Honor, preferably before A Local Habitation hits shelves. I will find it much easier to sleep once books four through six are put safely down, and when I sleep, I'm not destroying the world. You like the world, don't you, Great Pumpkin?

* Once again, I must request continued health for my cats, without whom the entire universe would be at risk from my unstoppable wrath. Alice is growing up gloriously beautiful, Great Pumpkin, although I continue to suspect that you may be her actual father (it's either you or an otter, and I oddly find you substantially more plausible). Lilly is continuing to do well with her new "sibling," and seeing the two of them rampaging through my house, destroying things at random, fills my heart with joy.

* Clean, timely page proofs for A Local Habitation and Feed, since right now, I am a blonde without deadlines. I do remember that I promised you three short stories with the Fighting Pumpkins cheerleading squad, as well as the origin stories for Hailey and Scaredy, in exchange for the trilogy sale. I keep my promises. Watch this space for further developments, Great Pumpkin, and thank you again.

* A beautiful fall season. You like the autumn as much as I do, Great Pumpkin, because it is in the autumn that the world truly honors and appreciates your glory. So please, talk to the weather, and make sure that this autumn is one that we'll remember for years to come. And not because the entire state falls into the ocean, or catches fire, or is invaded by flesh-eating locusts from beyond the veil of time. Make this a beautiful, wonderful season, Great Pumpkin, and make it a treat without any tricks. Please.

* Please help me to finish Discount Armageddon in a satisfying, respectful, ass-kicking way, hopefully involving lots of explosions and snappy one-liners. I really want Verity and her family to find a home (and not just so Alice can finally find Thomas), and that means I need to get past the first chapter of their story. What I have so far is actually pretty solid. Please make it amazing.

I remain your faithful Halloween girl,
Seanan.

PS: You really did amazingly with the house for the Newsflesh trilogy. Thank you so much. You da squash.

Hello, and welcome to the thirty-fifth essay in my current series of essays on the art and process of writing. All fifty of the essays in the series are based around my original set of fifty thoughts on writing. These fifty essays touch on every aspect of the writing life that I could think of; some apply directly to the process, while others apply more to maintaining your sanity while being a writer. If you ask me, they're of equal importance. Here's today's thought:

Thoughts on Writing #35: Gimme a Break.

No, I'm not suggesting that you break me off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar; I'm talking about down time. To expand on today's thought a little:

There is absolutely nothing wrong with taking a break from time to time. I pretty much write every day of my life—I'm a junkie, and I admit it—but there are days where the writing takes an hour in the morning, and is then set aside completely, in favor of seeing Flogging Molly perform. Sometimes, my "writing" for the day consists of jotting notes in my planner (also known as "Seanan's second brain"). I need those pauses to reset myself, and sometimes, to find new books in the world around me. Don't hate yourself for needing to breathe.

This is one of those thoughts that seems so logical that it shouldn't need expressing—of course it's okay to take breaks! Dude, we're allowed our leisure time!—but oddly, it's also one of the things I've found personally most challenging. Writing is both a job and a leisure activity for me, and, it seems, for many of us. So how do we keep those functions of our lives split, and how do we keep from becoming so wrapped up in our work that we forget to play? Let's take a look at leisure, and how to have some without losing all our hard work. 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 taking the occasional break.Collapse )

It's the ides of August, which means it's time for my monthly current projects post, the post where I demonstrate that George R.R. Martin may not be your bitch, but I just may be. (Also the post that explains why the question "What are you working on?" sometimes causes me to burst into tears and point vaguely toward my Livejournal, as if actually saying it out loud would break the spell, wake the princess, and call down the demons.) Anyway, this is the August 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 three Toby books are currently off this list, as they have been fully turned-in to DAW. You can purchase Rosemary and Rue [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxies] on September 1st, 2009 (or pre-order it today). You can purchase A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxies] on March 2nd, 2010 (or pre-order it today). Ah, progress. It smells like fear and uncontrollable twitching.

Late Eclipses is off the list because it has been finished, and is in the hands of The Editor, having been formally sent the hell away. Feed (formerly Newsflesh) is off the list because I somehow managed to do a full revision in the space of a month, and now just need to process some technical edits before sending it off to The Other Editor.

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 )

In twenty-six days, Rosemary and Rue will be available on shelves all across the country. Anyone who's pre-ordered from Amazon will be receiving their copy. This includes, I know, a great many people outside my home country. So in twenty-six days, Toby will be on her way around the world.

I fully expect to be finished with my first editorial pass-through on Feed by the end of the weekend. The book has become tighter, faster, slicker, and yes, even better than it was when I started. I should need another week or so to get edits back from the early-reader pool and do my serious editorial rewrites (some of which have been tabled for now, to preserve momentum), and then I'll be ready to turn it in. Which is good, because that leaves me free to go crazy over Rosemary.

In six months, twenty-seven days, A Local Habitation will be following Rosemary and Rue onto store shelves. You'll be able to walk into a bookstore and say "I want Seanan McGuire's book," and the response will be "which one?"

In two and a half weeks, I'll be flying to Seattle to appear with a whole bunch of awesome authors in the official Grants Pass book launch extravaganza. I will sign books. Books that were available in stores. I will eat cake. I will not cry.

In a few minutes, I'll zip my suitcase, load it into my mother's station wagon, and take off for Canada, where I'll be attending WorldCon not as a fan, not as a convention organizer, but as an honest-to-the-Great-Pumpkin professional writer. I'm allowed to have professional opinions now! I'm going to be on panels where I get to talk about them, even, and I get to wear my pumpkin-orange LA Confidential dress again, and hug my editor, and generally be a Halloweentown Princess to the stars.

Here I go again.

See you soon.

Hello, and welcome to the thirty-fourth essay in my currently ongoing series of essays on the crazy little thing we call "writing." All fifty essays are based around my original set of fifty thoughts on writing. The fifty thoughts were written in a single sitting, and thus wander aimlessly through a wide variety of aspects of the writing life. The essays were not written in a single sitting, because I am nowhere near that crazy. Here's our thought for the day:

Thoughts on Writing #34: Obligations 'R' Us.

I tend to enjoy the process of not being hit, but it might help to have a little context to go with that summation:

The only people you owe your work to are your agent, your editor, and your publishing house. Don't let anyone pressure you.

This is one of our simpler thoughts, on the face of things, but once we start digging into it, it rapidly expands in complexity. Don't we, as writers, have an obligation to our readers? More, don't I keep saying that we need to be gracious? Well, what's so gracious about saying "I'm sorry, I don't owe you anything"? It's a difficult line to draw, and it's an even more difficult line to hold, especially now that we're here in the Internet age of instant gratification. So how do we cope with the pressure when we've been praying for that pressure all our lives? Let's discuss obligation, pressure, and why they matter. 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 your obligations as a writer.Collapse )

* Pick up Canadian currency from my bank, where hopefully, no one will say "Canadians have money?" Once was funny. Twice may well be grounds for punching somebody in the nose. I like my bank. I don't want to get thrown out for assaulting a teller.

* Revise and process the editorial notes on the next thirty pages of Feed. I'm currently on page 251 of 544 (this includes the dedication page, but does not yet include the acknowledgment page); I need to hit page 281 before I can go to bed tonight. I like sleep. Sleep is my cuddly friend. I like zombies. The fact that zombies are a prerequisite for sleep around here probably says something about my psyche.

* Attempt to unearth my dresser from beneath the epic pile of crap that accompanied me home from San Diego. This may or may not be something I can accomplish without the use of a flamethrower.

* Fish the cat toys out from under the bed.

* Attempt to integrate the epic pile of crap that accompanied me home from San Diego into my bedroom without causing some sort of avalanche or otherwise hitting critical mass and opening a black hole into another dimension. Of course, if the objects responsible for opening the black hole influence the dimension on the other side, it will be a dimension filled with flesh-eating My Little Ponies and telepathic velociraptors. So that might be a nice place to have a vacation home.

* Trade the July pages in my planner for the shiny, new, relatively unmarked September pages. Immediately start filling the September pages with to-do lists, deadlines, goals, and the other unavoidable roadmaps of being me. I actually find this process quite soothing, in a nit-picky, obsessive sort of a way. Here is my month. I have scheduled panic attacks, showers, and laundry. Go me.

* Finish chapter four of The Brightest Fell, aka "the fifth Toby book," aka "well, at least she won't be done with the entire second trilogy before the first book comes out." (The Toby books aren't really trilogies. It's just that I tend to outline them three at a time, because it's an easy number to deal with, and people are less frightened by "oh, I'm working on the second trilogy." Apparently, math and logic are not always our friends.)

* Fish the cat toys out from under the bed.

* Inform Alice that I am not going to fish the cat toys out from under the bed a third time.

* Fish the cat toys out from under the bed.

* Pull my towering stacks of trade paperbacks into one mega-stack and put the damn things away before I lose a cat beneath a pile of Hack/Slash. Since Lilly eats comic books, this would be a fitting end, but it would make me sad, and I don't have time for that right now.

* Update three entries in the Toby continuity wiki. I'm getting close to being done with the data-entry from the original continuity guide, and that means soon, I'll be able to start updating things to match current continuity, as well as adding extra information on characters whose profiles are still just skeletons. If there's ever a fan wiki, we can have a race.

* Ignore the Maine Coon telling me that her toys have disappeared under the bed.

* Go to Dairy Queen.

* Sleep.

I have become deeply grateful for my current projects posts. They may be an example of just how Type-A I really am, but they're incredibly easy to point people toward when they ask what I've been doing with myself, and they allow me to keep convincing myself that yes, in fact, I am making progress. Progress tastes like flailing. Flailing, and candy corn. Anyway, this is the July edition of my monthly 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 three Toby books are currently off this list, as they have been fully turned-in to DAW. You can purchase Rosemary and Rue [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxies] on September 1st, 2009 (or pre-order it today). You can purchase A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxies] on March 2nd, 2010 (or pre-order it today). Ah, progress. It smells like fear and uncontrollable twitching.

Late Eclipses is off the list because it has been finished, and is in the hands of The Agent, who won't give it back. Feed (formerly Newsflesh) is off the list because it is currently under review with my editor. It should be back on the list next month, now with bonus things I need to work on.

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, Seanan McGuire, am intending to be writing books, stories, and other bits of fiction for the foreseeable future. Because I am a reasonably nice person (except when I'm not) who likes not being lynched (except when I do), I have decided to make the following promises. They're sort of the other side of my personal resolutions (see also "Flowers, Chocolates, and Promises You Don't Intend to Keep"), only they're a little more geared toward stuff I won't do because I don't want to be an asshole.

I. If something is part of a series, I will say that it is part of a series. I won't stealthily trick you into picking up a book and then spring a cliffhanger on you. I won't promise that stand-alone books will never develop sequels, but I promise that as soon as I know, I'll get the information out there. (Kate will tell you I don't write stand-alone books. Kate is sadly probably right.)

II. If I discover that a book has been packaged in a way that does not clearly indicate that something is part of a series, I will make doubly sure to include series information in a prominent place on my website, because a little typing now is a lot more fun than a lot of getting yelled at later.

III. I will do my absolute best to end every book in a way which makes it perfectly okay to say "right, done now." If this isn't possible, for whatever reason, I will only end a book on a cliffhanger or unresolved note when I can provide a guaranteed publication date for the sequel.

IV. I will not change genres in the middle of an ongoing series just because I've decided that I really want to be writing steampunk horror instead of urban fantasy and don't want to go through the work of starting something new. (Actually, I always want to go through the work of starting something new. Still, it's nice to be upfront.)

V. If I get tired of a series, I will bring it to a reasonable and satisfying conclusion, rather than continuing to beat the dead horse for another eighteen volumes out of inertia.

VI. I will keep my FAQs up-to-date and accessible, thus making it a little less annoying when I become completely overwhelmed and answer ninety percent of the questions I receive with "it's in the FAQs." (This should also give me time to answer the remaining ten percent in English, not Typo. Typo is a strange and difficult language, and I've never really mastered it.)

VII. I will continue to put myself through rigorous and vicious editorial, because the editing process is fun. Also because if I stop allowing myself to be edited, Vixy and Brooke will come for me in the night. They will come for me in the night with very sharp sticks, and they will edit me.

VIII. I will not answer fair and reasoned critique with "oh yeah? Why don't you come over here and say it to my face, punk?" For one thing, some people might, and those are usually the people that are bigger than I am.

IX. I will not rewrite my work to meet unfair and unreasoned critique. Not everyone is going to like me. I will attempt to be at peace with that. When I am not at peace with that, I will attempt to do something other than "hide under the bed and hope they go away."

X. I will not answer "you killed my favorite character" with "it sucks to be you, doesn't it?" I also won't resurrect anybody whose resurrection was not already planned. No, not even if you cry.

XI. If you say "Bob is my favorite character," and then we have a big fight, I will not take it out on Bob. That isn't fair to Bob. It isn't fair to my plot, either. But damn, I'll probably be tempted.

XII. I will not write a book just for the purpose of "creating real literature" and "finally being taken seriously as an author." I take horror movies, My Little Ponies, and street pennies seriously. I thus must assume that some people will take me seriously no matter what I do, and since they don't require me to wear a powder blue pantsuit and go on Oprah, they're the ones that matter.

XIII. I will remember that I am Christopher Walken, and enjoy every minute of it.

Words: 4,937.
Total words: 44,959.
Reason for stopping: end of chapter eight finally accomplished.
Music: random shuffle and the book-specific playlist.
Lilly and Alice: on the bed, lazing about at an Olympic level.

Well, after another unplanned hiatus (this time sponsored entirely by the fourth Toby Daye book), a series sale (the Masons are coming to a bookstore near you!), and a name change (welcome to Blackout, formerly known as The Mourning Edition), I've managed to pass two fairly serious, fairly scary milestones.

Milestone #1: Chapter eight is finished, which means that things are about to start getting a lot more hectic and unsettling for my poor protagonists. Also, if this book follows the pattern set by the first one, this means I am close to a quarter of the way through the book. That's a pretty big deal.

Milestone #2: According to the SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) Nebula rules, something is a novella right up until it hits 40,000 words and becomes a novel. By that definition, Blackout has ticked fully over into "novel" territory. Oh, it's a really short novel at the moment, and it doesn't actually have a complete plot...but it's a novel, not a novella, and it's just gaining steam from here. This is a book that's going places. Dark, scary, unsettling places. Luckily, the book has a chainsaw.

I am so excited, I can't even say.

A year ago, I posted my fifty thoughts on writing, which has since managed to turn into an essay series (don't ask me how that keeps happening to me). Naturally, my thinking about writing didn't stop with those initial fifty thoughts, and working on the essays has just made me think about writing even more. It's a little disturbing. I've spent the last year a) writing at a pace that makes me wonder what the hell I've been doing with myself for most of my life (oh, yeah—having a life), b) revising at a similar pace, and c) thinking about writing enough that it's a miracle that I haven't managed to set myself on fire. Just give me a little more time.

I've also spent the past year really digging myself into the reality of what it means to be a professional writer, even if I am not yet full-time. So today, because I still believe firmly in the art of over-sharing, I've decided to write down some more of my conclusions about writing...and my conclusions about what it means to be a working writer, which means that some of these may be less universally applicable, but may still be helpful for relating to the writers in your life. You may look at my list and go "wow, she's totally out of her tiny little blonde mind." You may look at this list and go "wow, I never thought of it that way." And either way is totally fine. My method of writing is not yours. Your method of writing is not mine. And we should all be very grateful for that, because if we cloned my muse, the world would rapidly run out of absinthe and cherry pie.

( Click here to be subjected to a variety of disconnected thoughts on the wonderful world of writing. Fifty new thoughts for 2009! You must be at least this tall to ride this ride.Collapse )

Stolen from a variety of sources, many of which didn't explain the meme; I had to backtrack to confirm that yes, what it wants is the first line of any and all of your works in progress.

Oh, you poor fools.

Long-form works.

"The downtown San Francisco Safeway was almost deserted."—Late Eclipses, Toby Daye book four.

"The sword swung for my face in a hard, fast arc."—The Brightest Fell, Toby Daye book five.

"Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-seven years: with an idiot—in this case, Rebecca Atherton, the head of the After the End Times Irwins, three-time winner of the Golden Steve-o Award for valor in the face of the undead—deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens."—Blackout.

"Boys get weirder when they hit puberty."—Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues.

"The whole concept of 'conservation of mass' is dependent on the belief that matter is somehow stable."—Sit, Stay, I Hate You.

"Verity danced circles around the living room, amateurish pirouettes and half-practiced leaps accompanied by cheers and exultations from the horde of Aeslin mice clustered on the back of the couch."—Discount Armageddon.

"There was nothing unique about the little house on Cherrybrook Way."—Babylon Archer and the Unmarked Path.

"I know that I swore I’d never use my special birthday journal with the real gold leaf on the cover and the glitter in the paper until I landed a recurring role on a daytime soap opera or married one of the Jonas Brothers, but I can’t find my regular journal anywhere, and this is an emergency."—Upon A Star.

"Beyond the edge of the world that men understand—the world that men believe in—there is another world, half-forgotten and slowly fading away, worn down by the passage of years and weakened by enemies from both without and within."—Babylon Archer and the Forgotten Kingdom.

"My face is presently being displayed on every television set and billboard in North America, my iguana ate half my toast because it had raspberry jam on it, and I still have unexplained traumatic amnesia, which makes me a) the likely suspect of a Lifetime Movie of the Week, assuming anyone is ever insane enough to dare a major movie studio’s battalion of bloodthirsty attack lawyers, and b) very, very happy, as my blissful inability to remember the past two years of my life means that I am probably not going to succumb to the siren-song of the Dark Side of the Force any time soon."—Shining Star.

"If you have found this journal, please mail it to the address above, which I’ve included to keep this journal from going the way of the last six."—Chasing St. Margaret.

"Jonathan Healy died screaming."—untitled InCryptid project.

Short fiction.

"Anthony was nine years old the first time he saw the vampire."—Anthony's Vampire.

"Please be aware that we here at Polytechnic Engineering and Research practice non-discrimination in our hiring policies."—Office Memos.

"Everyone’s got something that they’re just plain good at."—Applejack Tucker Learns to Play the Banjo.

"Maybe Mama raised a few fools—I can’t speak for my father, never having met the man—but I’m not proud."—Pixie Season.

...according to this list, I need to write more short stories. Okay!

Okay, so here's the thing:

At my DucKon reading, I was making jokes about "the thirty-five dollar retirement plan"—IE, "if everyone I know bought that many copies of my books, I'd be a lot closer to no longer needing a day job." While this really was a joke—I intend to be working in an office environment for a while yet, since I like having health insurance and paying for cable—there was also an aspect of seriousness to it. The midlist is in trouble, and has been in trouble for quite some time.

What's the midlist?

Well, to quote Wikipedia (source of all knowledge): "Midlist is a term in the publishing industry which refers to books which are not bestsellers but are strong enough to economically justify their publication (and likely, further purchases of future books from the same author). The vast majority of total titles published are midlist titles, though they represent a much smaller fraction of total book sales, which are dominated by bestsellers and other very popular titles."

Most genre authors are publishing "in the midlist." This has always been the case, and it's not a bad thing—my favorite author may be considered a blockbuster sort of a guy (Stephen King), but the majority of the authors I adore are solidly midlist, and have been for the length of their careers. I am honored to know that my books will be in the midlist, at least until my mother gets her way and convinces the entire West Coast to buy them. (If I don't type that, she'll hit me.)

So why is the midlist in trouble? A lot of reasons. Some of them have to do with marketing, some have to do with the business models of the larger chain bookstores, some have to do with the fact that people are reading less, and some have to do with the big books becoming bigger than they've ever been before. When most people only read one book a year, if that book was written by Nora Roberts instead of Jeri Smith-Ready, it matters.

Where's the math?

This will seem like a tangent, but bear with me: I was asked recently whether I had a problem with used bookstores and libraries, since the author only gets paid once. I do not have a problem with either of these things. I'd be a hypocrit if I had a problem with used bookstores, since every used bookstore owner in the East Bay knows me by name, and libraries are proof that humanity is worthy of existence. Plus, libraries do provide reporting, and they track what's popular, stocking additional copies of the things that people really want to read. Used bookstores are a form of recycling. I've always seen them as running on a sort of karma, since you only get what you really want if you're dedicated, lucky, and persistent. I have good used bookstore karma. I work very hard to maintain it.

That being said, especially with the authors in the midlist, numbers really matter. Let's say I got a ten dollar advance for Rosemary and Rue (for the sake of keeping the numbers simple). Now, I get 6% of the cover price of the first 150,000 units sold, and 8% of anything after that, since presumably once my publisher has sold that many, they really want to keep me happy. I think we figured out that this was roughly forty-eight cents a book, at current mass-market cover price. Let's call it fifty cents, because again, math is hard. It's like a word problem:

Seanan is paid a ten dollar advance for her new book. Her publisher credits her fifty cents for every copy they sell. After they have made more money than the amount of her advance, they will start paying her that money as royalties. How many copies must Seanan's book sell before she can pay the grocery bill? How many copies must Seanan's book sell before her publisher will buy the next one?

With these highly simplified numbers, the answer is easy: clearly, I need to sell twenty books to earn out my advance, and when the twenty-first book sells, woo-hoo, I can buy a can of generic soda! (Well, not really. Remember that my agent gets seven cents out of that fifty, to pay her commission. So really, there will be no celebratory soda until the twenty-second book flies off the shelf.) The trouble is that real advances, even small ones, tend to be larger than ten dollars, which means I need to sell a lot more copies before my publisher will be a happy camper.

How many copies need to sell before they want to keep publishing me? That math is truly beyond my ken, for which I am glad, as I like to sleep at night. But that is why I keep telling people where they can buy my books, and why, my passionate love of used bookstores aside, I recommend buying the books of currently-publishing midlist authors new whenever you can manage to swing it. Those little fifty-cent-per-book transactions add up, and it's the final number that really matters.

Math is hard. Where's my damn strawberry ice cream?

Welcome to the thirty-second essay in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing. All these essays are based around my original fifty thoughts on writing, and are working their way in a disorganized manner through a variety of aspects of the art, craft, and excuse for antisocial behavior that is the life of the writer. Not necessarily the professional writer; just the writer, period. Here's our thought for the day:

Thoughts on Writing #32: Deadlines.

That's even less helpful than our normal short-form thoughts, so here's our expanded thought for the day:

Deadlines are your friends. Learn how to work to them. If you ever start publishing, you're going to be getting a lot of deadlines, and you won't necessarily have any real say in the matter. It's best if it's not a shock to the system.

Love 'em or hate 'em, the world is full of deadlines, and the world of the writer is doubly full of deadlines. There are deadlines dictating when you need to get the words onto the page, when you need to finish processing editorial changes, when you need to correct any typos, and when you turn in your manuscript. So how do you maintain your sanity in the face of a seemingly endless list due dates? How do you meet your deadlines, how do you handle it when you miss a deadline, and how do you cope? Let's talk setting deadlines, meeting deadlines, and living with deadlines. 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 deadlines.Collapse )

Do you want to know how tired I am? I am so tired that I wrote a paragraph apologizing for not making this post on the fifteenth, like I normally do...before I checked the date and realized that it was the fifteenth of June right now. Isn't jet-lag awesome? In that way which is completely, totally, and utterly not even a tiny little bit? Anyway, this is the June edition of my monthly list of current projects, because I am your cat toy.

To quote myself, being too tired 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 three Toby books are currently off this list, as they have been fully turned-in to DAW. You can purchase Rosemary and Rue [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxies]on September 1st, 2009 (or pre-order it today). Ah, progress. It smells like fear and uncontrollable twitching. Newsflesh is off the list because it's being shopped, and that means I essentially can't have any contact with it until the process is done and editorial revisions begin. I miss you, baby!

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 dinosaurs and zombies to keep me company.

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

Hello! We're glad to hear that you've been enjoying your time in Writerland, the native country of the written word. You've seen the writers frolic in the Fields of Verb, boldly venture into the Adjective Woods, and sink like stones in the infamous Editorial Swamp (home of the deadly White-Out Anaconda, capable of swallowing both man and manuscript in a single gulp). Because you have already covered the basic phrasebook of our fair land, we here at the Writerland Tourist Bureau have decided to present you with the advanced course. Thanks to all our contributers.

You Say: "How much did you pay to have that published?"
We Hear: "I know you're not as good as you think you are."

You Say: "Will you introduce me to your agent?"
We Hear: "I am worth more than your professional reputation."

You Say: "I have this really great idea. How about you write it up, and we'll split the profits?"
We Hear: "I would like two orders of radioactive scorpions, one for me, and one for my lawyer."

You Say: "Why do you look so tired? It's not like you have a real job."
We Hear: "I have always wondered what it's like to go for a ride in a wood chipper."

You Say: "You have so much talent. You should be published!"
We Hear: "So stop screwing around already, you little slacker."

You Say: "I promise I won't bother you while you work."
We Hear: "I am the human incarnation of Chinese water-torture, come to punish you for your sins."

You Say: "Which one of these characters is you?"
We Hear: "Either you're an egotist or you need therapy. Which is it?"

You Say: "Which one of these characters is me?"
We Hear: "This question has no right answer. Run for your life."

You Say: "When did this happen to you?"
We Hear: "No matter how much of it I read, deep down, I still believe 'fiction' is just fancy gossip."

You Say: "I got your new book yesterday. When is the next one coming out?"
We Hear: "I do not believe that authors eat, sleep, or socialize. Would you like to hit me with a fire axe?"

You Say: "Didn't they do this plot on an episode of The Twilight Zone?"
We Hear: "Nothing you say will convince me that you didn't steal this, so just admit it."

You Say: "Why did you do that thing in chapter eight? You ruined the series!"
We Hear: "I have more right to my opinions than you have to your art."

You Say: "Did you see that review where they said you murder the English language and eat kittens?"
We Hear: "Since you're already evil, would you like to amputate my arms and legs with your fire axe?"

You Say: "Don't worry about your numbers. You can always get a real job."
We Hear: "No matter what you say, everyone knows you've been goofing off for years."

Please submit any further suggestions for our phrasebook to the Bureau, and have a nice day!

It's time for the thirty-first essay in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing. Thirty-one essays, and I still haven't run out of things to say. All these essays are based around my original fifty thoughts on writing, and are touching on just about every aspect of the art, craft, and marginal insanity that is this particular profession. Here's our thought for the day:

Thoughts on Writing #31: This Is Not A Race.

As always, and because it's good to explain yourself, here's our expanded thought for the day:

Measuring your output against someone else's output is a game with no winners at all. Maybe you write fast. Maybe you write slow. Maybe you're somewhere in the middle. I can write an obscene number of pages on a good day, and finish it off with a song and maybe a sonnet or two. Another friend of mine considers herself to be doing amazingly well if she finishes three pages in eight hours. Neither of us is doing anything wrong. Some of the best books ever written took years to finish; so did some of the worst. Write at your own pace, and know what that pace is.

Everyone naturally moves at their own speed. Some of us are fast, some of us are slow. Some of us are somewhere in the middle. Our quality will often be determined by our natural comfort zone. Is it something we can push out of? Is it something we should push out of? Let's talk speed, why it matters, and why yours is no better than mine. 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 output.Collapse )

I, Seanan McGuire, am a first-time novelist. (I refuse to say "first-time author," because that wouldn't be just disingenuous, it would be silly, and nobody wants to see what people would dredge out of their closets if dared to do so by such foolish comments.) My first book comes out on September 1st of this year. Naturally, I'm petrified. And so, in an effort to save some sanity—not mine, as that's basically a lost cause—I am making the following promises. To myself, if to no one else.

I. I will not read Amazon reviews. I keep saying this, and reminding myself that Kate will beat me if I so much as twitch toward the page, but that doesn't matter, because obviously, I need the reminder. I. Will not. Read. Amazon. Reviews.

II. If people insist on forwarding me Amazon reviews, notifications that my book is on eBay, or other things that are either guaranteed to upset me, things I've promised not to look at, or both, I will give one warning, and then I will start deleting their mail. Because dude, I don't need an extra dose of crazy pie to go with the crazy pie I already have over here.

III. I will not call my publisher unless I have a reason to call my publisher.

IV. Wanting to talk about the new season of Supernatural does not count as a reason to call my publisher. Neither does that cute thing my cat just did.

V. My agent probably doesn't want to hear about the cute thing my cat just did either, and even if she does, I should maybe not call to tell her about it after midnight.

VI. No matter how much I think the populace is going to march on the house with torches because they don't like my book, the odds are very low, and I probably don't need to triple the fire insurance protection. I will not call the fire department every time I think I smell smoke.

VII. I will not allow my mother to post reviews without clearly identifying herself as my mother. Actually, if at all possible, I will not allow my mother to post reviews, as this rarely ends well.

VIII. I will continue to breathe. Holding my breath has been clinically proven not to make my publication date come faster.

IX. I will not spend the entire month of September hiding under my bed. For one thing, there are probably spiders down there. For another, the cats would insist on hiding under the bed with me, and the bed isn't big enough for that to be even remotely comfortable. Also, as there is no television in my bedroom, I would probably go into withdrawal or something.

X. I will not start a new series in an effort to distract myself.

XI. Okay, so maybe I will. But I won't start anything more than three books long.

XII. While I am aware that no amount of saying "I will not take negative reviews personally" will change a damn thing, I will discuss negative reviews with people I trust, remember that nothing is universally adored, and refrain from eating more than three bags of candy corn. Sugar doesn't fix everything. It just makes me care less.

XIII. I will occasionally stop running.

So recently, Neil Gaiman made a post about entitlement, which has been circulating widely under the assumed title of "George R. R. Martin is not your bitch." Good title. Interesting entry. Lots of people are saying lots of things about it, most of which boil down to "here, here" and "you go, girl." Er, "you go, British guy." Whatever. Anyway, as is my natural inclination when presented with such things, I've been thinking. (And she's been crying, and I am the Rain King.)

See, the core premise of the original post is one that I agree with: an author doesn't owe their work to anyone except, perhaps, their agent and their publisher. Buying Rosemary and Rue doesn't somehow create a contract between us wherein I swear on penalty of death to do nothing but work on Toby books, all day, every day, until the series comes to a satisfying conclusion. For one thing, Kate would kill me. For another, if I worked only on Toby, with no pauses for other books, I'd go crazy, and the quality of the Toby books would decrease dramatically. And then The Agent would kill me (if Kate didn't get there first).

At the same time, the email which inspired the post contained a very different question. Is it wrong, the writer asked, to be annoyed when I read the blog of a favorite author and see nothing to tell me what the status of the next book is? And to that I have to say, quite honestly...

...no.

Look: there is no formal "deliver or die" contract between writer and reader, and there's a reason, as jimhines so helpfully pointed out, that very few publishers actually punish authors for missing their deadlines once in a while. Quality matters, and sometimes getting something done right takes longer than originally expected. I finished Late Eclipses in December of 2008, dammit! It was done! It was...nowhere near as good as it honestly needed to be, both to live up to the standards set by the first three books, and to live up to the standards I set for myself. I gave it to The Agent. She promptly gave it back, with a command to fix it. If I'd been working to a January deadline, I'm afraid my release date would have slipped more than a little as I took the book and ripped it apart to resolve its structural issues. Quality is always going to come first for me. Hopefully, it'll be a long time before that makes me miss a deadline, but even I and my OCD work habits can't guarantee that slippage will never occur.

At the same time, I do believe that there's a certain "social contract" which exists between writers and readers when those writers hang out their proverbial shingles out for the world to see. Once I've opened a professional blog and announced that hi, this is the professional blog of Seanan McGuire, come on in, I do owe you updates, even if those updates are things like "didn't work on Toby this week because I was busy following the Counting Crows around the Pacific Northwest" or "didn't finish the new chapter of Discount Armageddon because Alice got into the watercolors again." I have said, on some level, that I will keep you posted. The social contract demands that I uphold my end of the bargain, and if I don't, you have every right to get annoyed with me.

(This is similar to a scenario that plays out frequently with web comics, who have been dealing with their audiences online for longer than nigh anyone else. New guy hits the web comic scene, updating regularly. Sets an update schedule. Basks in the love. Starts missing updates. People start to complain. Snaps "I do this for free, and you should be grateful." Well...yes and no. I don't have the right to demand you work for me, but I do feel that, once you've entered into a social contract which says I'll get updates on days one, three, and five, I should get an update on those days, or, failing that, I should get information on why that update isn't there. That was the deal. If you tell me why the update is missing, you take away my license to bitch.)

In conclusion, no, George R. R. Martin is not your bitch, and no, you shouldn't view delays as personal attacks. Often, delays are there because the book is being made better. But yes, I do believe that once an author says "come hang out in my virtual office and play with my virtual fidget toys," you have a right to expect to be told what's going on, and a right to ask "why is the eighth book in this series not out yet?"

It's all a matter of where you stand.

Hello, and welcome to the thirtieth essay in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing. Thirty! That's a pretty big number, and it's just set to get bigger, since all these essays are based around my original fifty thoughts on writing. (On the plus side, this also means we're sixty percent of the way there.) Here's our thought for today:

Thoughts on Writing #30: Continuity Trapper Keeper.

This is definitely one of those that needs a little expansion before it starts making sense. Here you go:

If you're writing any sort of series, whether it be a series of short stories or a series of novels, you need a continuity guide. The format is up to you. The level of detail is up to you. But believe me, even if you somehow manage to forget that your hero has green eyes and turn them hazel, your readers won't, and they will eat your soul.

When I was a kid, I found continuity errors unbelievably offensive. If I could always remember your main character's favorite sandwich, childhood pet, and preferred route to the spooky old house on the top of the hill, why couldn't you, the author, remember the same things? You created them!

Ah, the innocence of youth. Let's talk continuity, why it matters, and how to maintain it. 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 continuity tracking.Collapse )

Hooray, hooray, the month of May—a month which has, thus far, seen me dash across the country to Michigan, finish a book, start revising two more, knock out a bunch of short fiction, and eat more tomatoes than anyone wants to believe. And now it's time for the May edition of my monthly list of current projects, because I like to make it obvious what I'm doing. 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 three Toby books are currently off this list, as they have been fully turned-in to DAW; more, the page proofs for Rosemary and Rue have been reviewed and returned, and I will never be allowed to change it again. You can purchase Rosemary and Rue [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxies]on September 1st, 2009 (or pre-order it today). Ah, progress. It smells like fear and uncontrollable twitching. Late Eclipses is off the list because it's under review with my agent. Newsflesh is off the list because it's being shopped, and that means I essentially can't have any contact with it until the process is done. I miss you, baby!

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 dinosaurs and zombies to keep me company.

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

Welcome to the twenty-ninth essay in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing, all of which are based around my original fifty thoughts on writing. We're starting to get into somewhat more specialized concepts; surprisingly, I still find that I have things to say, which is good. Here's our thought for today:

Thoughts on Writing #29: Outlines.

Since every outline needs a bit more than a single word, here's today's expanded topic:

Outline as much as you need to. I have books where I've written incredibly detailed outlines, including locations and characters involved in every scene. I have books where I pretty much just plunged in blind and started hacking around with my machete, praying that nothing in my new-found jungle was going to give me Ebola. Even those books eventually got "event chains" written on Post-It notes and stuck to my computer, because I needed to keep track of who was where. Neither style is superior to the other.

Outlines are scary, I think because most people's experience with them is limited to academic papers and the idea that there's some secret "ideal outline" that will turn the simplest of ideas into a New York Times best-selling novel. If that ideal is out there, shouldn't it be pursued? Yes. And also no, because the truth behind the ideal is that the ideal is different not only from person to person, but from project to project.

Now that we've established that outlines exist to confuse us, are you 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 outlines.Collapse )

Today brings us to the twenty-eighth essay in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing, all of which are based around my fifty thoughts on writing. We're not quite on what I'd call "the home stretch" yet, but we're definitely more than halfway there. That's nice to think about. Anyway, here's our other thought for today:

Thoughts on Writing #28: For the Critics.

In case that's too boiled-down to make sense, here's today's expanded topic:

Kevin Smith said "this isn't for the critics" when he was talking about Jersey Girl, and the critics savaged it anyway. There's a lesson here. You can't write to some imagined critical ideal, but if all eleven of the people you trust to review your first drafts say "wow, this makes no sense at all, what the hell is going on here?", you should maybe consider taking another look. Pandering is bad. Being accessible is not.

"Not for the critics" is an interesting concept to me, because it implies that anyone who's going to be in the least critical of a thing doesn't have the right to enjoy it—and more, that I don't get to have an opinion about a thing I love if it isn't entirely positive. Slither is possibly my favorite movie in the world, but the zombie deer looks damn fake. Hairspray would have been even more fun if they'd kept "Cooties," since taking it out renders Amber toothless. Stephen King has written some stuff I didn't like. Does that mean these things weren't for me?

Pandering and accessibility are two different things, and none of us are ever above critique. Honestly, that's a good thing. With me so far? 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 what it means to be for the critics.Collapse )

1. The Rosemary and Rue ARC giveaway is still running, from now through Whenever I Happen To Get Up Tomorrow Morning. So assume that I'll be announcing the winner sometime between five and eight AM PST (which is when I'll be coherent enough to deal with complex things like "the random number generator" and "counting").

2. Because I'm doing the drawing so early in the day, if you win, and you're able to get me your mailing address with reasonable alacrity, your ARC may actually go out in tomorrow's mail. I'm just saying.

3. Late Eclipses continues to be finished, which has me rather at lost ends. I figure I'll finish this zombie short story that I'm working on, and then crack open Discount Armageddon, see what Verity and the gang have been up to while I was away. Nothing says "relaxation" like "getting straight to work on a different book."

4. I am officially sick. Thank you, coughing people on my plane and annoying small child whose parents refused to make you stop kicking the back of my seat. Thank you so much.

5. My play list consisting of nothing but versions of the song "Rain King" by the Counting Crows is now two hours long, and incredibly soothing. If you've ever wondered why that song was my current music so much of the time, well...this is why.

6. Zombies are still love.

Okay, follow the timeline with me here for a moment. On July 2nd, 2008, I started a major revision of Late Eclipses of the Sun, aka, "Toby Daye, book four." On December 15th, 2008, I gave it to my agent for review...and on January 15th of this year I started a second major revision, because the book had some issues, and those issues could only be solved through the application of more machete. Much, much more machete.

Last night, on the plane somewhere between Michigan and California, I typed "the end" once more, closed the file, and called it good. The current book stats:

Pages, 389.
Words, 107,089.
Chapters, thirty-five.
Cans of DDP, beyond counting.

Please compare these to the book stats before I started my revision:

Pages, 417.
Words, 115,310.
Chapters, thirty-six.

Oh, and did I mention that—at one point during the revision process—the book managed to swell to a high-water mark of approximately 118k? Yeah. This was a book in need of some serious surgery, and now that the surgery has been performed, I can look at the manuscript and not feel like a match would improve it immensely. (I have a real love/hate relationship with my work. I love it while I'm creating it. I love it six months after it's finished. Immediately after it's finished, I would really love to set it on fire.) At some point during the revision, even the book's name got tighter, becoming Late Eclipses and skipping that whole "sun" thing entirely.

So now I'm tossing my innocent manuscript into the wolverine pit with my hungrily slavering initial readers, who will gut it and play hackysack with its kidneys for a little while; then I'll send it off to The Agent, and resume prodding at The Brightest Fell, aka, "Toby Daye, book five," aka, "Seanan, honey, can we please wait for Rosemary and Rue to come out before you finish the second set of three?"

In conclusion...

...DINO DANCE PARTY!

Because understanding what a thing is makes that thing less arcane and mysterious, and I like people understanding what the hell I'm talking about, I'm providing a handy guide to the stages a book goes through as it trudges its way towards publication. (I said this to a friend of mine, who replied with, "Like the life cycle of a butterfly?" After some thought, I have decided that this metaphor doesn't work. It's more like the life cycle of a fricken—half-frog, half-chicken, all abomination of nature. Tadpoles with feathers are just sort of sad.)

You can thank me, beat me, or march on my castle with an army of angry peasants, later.

***

THE LIFE STAGES OF A BOOK: FROM PAGE TO PUBLICATION.

***

Stage I: The Larva (IE, "The Manuscript.")
We're picking up with the assumption that the book has already been written, approved by your agent/primary beta reader, and sold to a publishing house (or, if you prefer, your frickens have already done the nasty in the romantic swamp setting of their choosing, and have laid the fertilized eggs in a suitable pool of semi-stagnant water). Now, your manuscript gets to go into something called "editorial review." Different houses and different editors will have different names for this process; when I'm doing it to myself, I tend to call it things like "why God why" and "getting blood on the ceiling." This is the stage where you'll actually have some input, and can even argue.

Some manuscripts sail the waters of editorial review with nary a ripple. Others will be shredded and stapled back together several times before they're allowed to take the next step forward. Whatever the case happens to be with your manuscript, assume that it's going to take some time, and just keep breathing.

Stage II: The Hatchling (IE, "Copy-editing.")
So you've made all the changes your editor requested and returned an approved manuscript to your publishing house. Awesome. Your beloved baby book has emerged from its gooey amphibian egg and is now thrashing around the puddle, downy feathers all plastered down and making it swim more slowly, thus becoming an easier target for predators. In this case, the predator is someone with a red pen and an eye for typos. Your manuscript will take some time to review, because they're trying to be thorough; a book pushed out of the puddle before it has time to mature is probably going to get punctuation all over the floor.

You may or may not ever see your copy-edited manuscript. I have a clause in my contract that lets me see mine, because I'm neurotic that way. Lilly appreciates this clause, because she likes to sleep on manuscripts. I, also, appreciate it, because every typo that slips past me is a dagger in my soul, and I try to remain as un-stabbed as possible.

Stage III: Adolescence (IE, "Page Proofs and ARCs.")
Once your copy-edits have been made, two things will happen at basically the same time. Think of them as your weird little tadpole starting to sprout legs and flight feathers at the same time. The poor guy is all over the place, and both flying and swimming are out of the question until he figures out which direction is "up."

Your page proofs are basically a bunch of loose pages comprising your entire copy-edited book. As the author, you will generally get the opportunity to go through them and catch any little things that might have been missed earlier in the process. Note the stress on "little." The idea is not to rip out that chapter you've always hated; it's to catch that three-word continuity error on page seventeen, and that slightly out-of-synch tense on page eighty-four. By the time a book reaches proofs, it should be essentially ready to go. The ARCs, on the other hand, are your Advance Review/Reader Copies. These will be bound editions of the manuscript, potentially with covers, probably with any blurbs you've managed to collect, sent out to reviewers, trade publications, and major genre bookstores about four to six months before publication.

Stage IV: Frog (IE, "Publication.")
After your page proofs have been returned and your ARCs have been sent out, your book will go to press, and your weird-ass feathered frog will hop free of the puddle it was born in for the first time. Printing and shipping will take however long your publisher thinks it should; you can make sure there are no delays on your end by turning in your proofs by the deadline. You should have a publication date. Cling to it as best you can.

Watch your feathery amphibian creation fly.

Look! I made a word!

I love anthologies and short story collections, and have loved them for as long as I can remember. I mean that very literally; some of the earliest books that I have a strong memory of reading are the Colored Fairy Books, Grimm's Fairy Tales, Asimov's Young Monsters series of anthologies, and the Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark books. (This list probably says a lot about the formation of my psyche.) I spent most of middle school tracking down the largely out-of-print Noun! series of anthologies—Dogs! and Mermaids! and Unicorns! and the whole super-excited bunch. There were some awesome stories in those things. Awesome, awesome stories.

I was in high school before I realized that some anthologies were write-to-request—it wasn't that twenty people just randomly decided to write stories about magic-using hyper-evolved insects, they were asked. This struck me as the absolute height of human achievement. Imagine being asked to write stories about magic-using hyper-evolved insects. Somebody comes up to you and says "hey, write me a story about a fireball-flinging butterfly," and you do, and then, if it's any good, it gets published.

Ladies and gentlemen, the holy grail.

I always said I'd know I'd made it as a writer when I started getting invited to anthologies. I got an agent. Shrieked a lot. Sold a trilogy. Shrieked even more (as well as crying, hyperventilating, and calling Vixy and making hysterical dolphin noises at her while she tried to work out whether the sounds I was making meant "we sold Toby" or "I have just been bitten by one of those nasty parasite things from Cloverfield and am about to swell up and explode"). And then I got invited to an anthology, and I just sat there and cried.

And then I got invited to another one, and I sat there and cried even more.

I love anthologies. I love the toybox fabulousness of them, the way you don't know what you're going to get, just—vaguely—what it's going to be about. I finished reading Pandora's Closet [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxies] yesterday. I picked it up on a lark. I found stories that made me laugh, stories that made me giggle, and a distinct lack of stories that made me want to throw the book across the room. And I thought, "wow." And I thought, "I get to do this now."

I've been smiling for three days.

Welcome to the twenty-seventh essay in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing, all of which are based around my fifty thoughts on writing. I was asked recently why this paragraph goes on every essay, since it's essentially filler, and beyond the innate "because I can," the answer is simple: people are still coming in shiny and new with each essay in the series, and I like to make sure everyone understands the premise. Remember that the thoughts are being addressed in order, and that I respond well to bribery with candy corn and pumpkin products.

Thoughts on Writing #27: A Matter of Perspective.

Everyone in the world has their own point of view, on just about everything. I sleep in a room that's painted to look like the inside of a big pumpkin, and my pillowcases glow in the dark; I find it soothing, while other people complain that they'd be able to see the walls even after they closed their eyes. Neither of us is wrong. We just have a different perspective on things. Here's today's expanded topic:

People are going to act like writing is easy, because that's all they know; they're not writers. People are going to say you're being a snob when you say "I'm sorry, I have to work," because they can't understand why you'd choose reworking chapter three over going to the roller derby. Try not to take it personally. I'm sure they do shit that seems crazy to you, too.

Things that make sense to us are baffling to others; things that make sense to others are baffling to us. That's human nature. That's the way we're basically programmed, as a species, to operate. I don't get you, you don't get me, and neither of us quite gets that guy sitting over there. The trouble arises when one of us has a trait or tendency—like, say, the desire to work a second job in your free time, for which it is unlikely you will ever receive above minimum wage—that the majority just doesn't understand.

What's the answer? Well, unfortunately, if there were an easy answer, I'd be making millions as an advice columnist, and I wouldn't have time to write this essay. But there may be some coping strategies. 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 tolerance...on both sides of the equation.Collapse )

The ides of the month are upon us once again, and that means it's time for the April edition of my monthly current projects listing. At least this time I haven't just staggered home after a whirlwind tour of New York, New Jersey, and the New Jersey Pine Barrens, which makes me marginally more linear. Marginally. Again, these posts are labeled with the month and year, just in case somebody wants to find a specific entry later on. Anyway, this is the post where I make it cheerfully apparent that I do not actually ever sleep.

Please note that the first three Toby books are currently off this list, as they have been fully turned-in to DAW; depending on the timing of the proofs, they may or may not ever appear here again, since my window for any further revisions on my part will be very, very narrow. You can buy Rosemary and Rue [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxies]on September 1st, 2009 (or pre-order it today). Ah, progress. It smells like fear and uncontrollable twitching. Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues is off the list because it's under review with my agent, and is thus not being actively worked on. Newsflesh is off the list because it's being shopped, and that means I essentially can't have any contact with it until the process is done. I miss you, baby!

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 dinosaurs and zombies to keep me company.

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

I have spent my week being very, very productive, especially when you consider the fact that a) I just got a new kitten, b) Lilly didn't allow me to sleep for over a month during her "kitty go crazy" period, and c) the lack of sleep, followed by sleep's sudden return, has left me slightly sick and very definitely jet-lagged in my own body. It's exciting! But this week, I have...

...turned in an essay for one of those exciting "smart people try to sound smart while talking about television" essay books. I'm excited! This is the first time I've been asked to participate in something like this, but I've always been a little envious of authors who get to go and sound smart while they talk about, say, Supernatural or Buffy. Hopefully I've managed to sound super-smart, because I'd love to do this again. I have a list of shows I'm just dying to sound totally smart about. Like Fringe and Cupid. Oh, and if there's ever a "smart people try to sound smart while talking about shows that were canceled before their time" book, I can corner the market on Freakylinks.

...revised nine chapters of Late Eclipses, only to discover that one of those chapters needed to be combined with another to form a sort of, I don't know, "super-chapter," while another chapter needed to be cut entirely. On the positive side, I made these discoveries entirely on my own, without any outside assistance. Also on the positive side, this will help with my goal of getting the book down between 105,000 and 110,000 words. On the negative side, dammit, I already revised this part of the book. Damn plot. It's getting complications and fingerprints all over my stuff.

...set up the landing page for the Velveteen vs. series, including a brief description of what the series is about, a listing for the stories in order-as-written, and a listing for the stories in chronological order (which will matter more as the JSP-era stuff starts getting posted). All the Vel stories are being cleaned up and revised before they're posted, which slows it down a bit, but also lets me take care of all those pesky typos and logic problems that people have been so very kindly pointing out to me. Behold! For now I wear the continuity pants!

...submitted all my receipts, agreed to an estimate on my taxes, and confirmed that I'm ready to receive my extension forms, hence to turn my taxes in. Self-employment tax blows. The next time someone asks why I haven't quit my day job yet, I may pull out my tax receipts and a conveniently labeled graph. SCREWING A WRITER IN FIVE EASY STEPS. Step one: self-employment tax.

...introduced Lilly and Alice to one another without bloodshed (either feline or human), and without any major emergencies, unless you want to count Lilly forcing her way into the bedroom during what was technically the isolation period. I rarely, if ever, close my bedroom door all the way -- the cats like to be able to come and go, and the litter box in my room is a relatively recent development -- so I had totally forgotten that Lilly knows how to work the latch, and will work the latch if given sufficient motivation. Like, say, being locked out of the room. But all's well that ends well, and this has ended well.

What's everybody else's productive looking like?

Me: I believe I shall revise this chapter.
LE: I believe I shall kick your ass.
Me: I'm the author, I get to win.
LE: *chuckles evilly*

(Eighty pages and a lot of profane language later, there's blood on the ceiling, and slaughtered adjectives litter the carpet like, um, thingy.)

Me: I HATE YOU SO HARD.
LE: I'm better now.
Me: ...what?
LE: I'm a better book now.
Me: ...why the hell couldn't you cooperate if this was the end result?
LE: Because it's more fun this way.

(Cue more insensate swearing. Fade to black.)

In other news, work on the fourth Toby book continues apace -- yes, I'm aware that the first book doesn't come out until September; remember, my life goals include "turn in the second trilogy by the end of 2010," because that's just the way I roll -- and is only causing me small amounts of severe physical, mental, and emotional trauma. I'm busting ass now, while I can, before the promo for Rosemary and Rue kicks into such high gear that I don't have brain anymore.

Late Eclipses has lost three words from its title, four thousand words from its text, and two chapters from its numbering system, and it's better for these subtractions. It is gradually becoming a lean, mean, causing-me-pain machine.

Now, television, tuna sandwiches, art card inking, and the eventual sleep of the just. Good night, y'all. Don't burn down the internet.

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

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

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

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

6. Zombies are still love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's time for the twenty-sixth essay in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing. We're more than halfway to the end of the series now, since all these essays are based around my fifty thoughts on writing. Thanks to everyone who's been reading, discussing, and generally making this a fascinating process. I've learned a great deal, both from sitting here scratching my head as I look for things to say and from reading the things that people say to me in return. The remaining essays will be touching on a great many more aspects of the art of writing, and will probably double back on themselves more than a few times. That's the business.

Thoughts on Writing #26: Hermitage.

It sounds like a simple notion, doesn't it? But the fact of the matter is, hermitage is a big, complicated thing that we often fail to give sufficient attention or consideration. Bearing that in mind, here's today's expanded topic:

Learn to be a hermit. Learn to say 'I'm sorry, but I can't come to your party, I booked that night for revisions and I don't have any other time to do it this week.' Learn to tell people no. Learn to treat writing as a job -- one that may well be both unpaid and in addition to whatever job pays the bills for a long, long time. If you make excuses to let yourself skip writing, if you choose a social life over that second job, you're not addicted enough. If you want to get better, you'll learn.

As anyone who's ever tried to sit down for a block of scheduled writing -- from the wealthiest novelist to the kid who just needs to finish that book report -- can tell you, most people don't view 'writing' as being the same as 'real work.' Even the people who've heard me explain exactly how many hours I need to complete a novel frequently have trouble understanding that those necessary hours will sometimes conflict with their proposed dinner plans. And here's the thing: nobody tells a doctor not to practice medicine, or tries to talk him out of reading that book on brain surgery because they'd rather be playing checkers. But as a writer, you'll get it all the time.

So how do you cope? How do you strike a balance, and how do you do it without losing all your friends? 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 writers and the need to sometimes crawl into your cave.Collapse )

Hello, and welcome to the twenty-fifth essay in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing. This particular essay is something of a milestone, because it means that we are now officially halfway through the original set of fifty thoughts on writing. Given that I didn't exactly set out to write a set of fifty essays -- it was an accident, I swear -- the fact that I've finished half of the damn things is a bit unnerving. Anyway, these essays will eventually touch on as many aspects of the art of writing as I can think of, and may occasionally seem to be self-contradictory. Writing is like that.

Here's our thought for the day:

Thoughts on Writing #25: Bibliophile Heroin.

That's a bit of a brick to the head, isn't it? It probably makes a bit more sense in context -- at least I hope it makes a bit more sense in context, or this week's essay is going to be a lot like Seanan Does Hunter S. Thompson. Here's today's expanded topic:

If you're going to be a writer, you'll be a writer, because if you're going to be a writer, you'll write. This is not a glamorous profession. This is not something people do because they want to be rich and famous and sleep with Hollywood stars. This is something people do because, at the end of the day, they can't not do it. People decide to be writers for a lot of reasons. People continue to be writers because they can't figure out how the hell to quit. Writing is bibliophile heroin, and we're all addicts over here.

What I find a bit interesting about today's thought is that it's the first thought where I've actually had someone argue with me. Not in a bad way, just in a way that made me stop and go 'huh.' Paul -- who frequently plays guitar for me, and is one of the most tolerant, reasonable men I know -- said that I don't get to claim that writing isn't a glamorous profession, because everyone thinks of writing as glamorous. The children of writers are second only to the children of firemen and policemen when it comes to looking cool on Career Day. Teenagers dream of growing up to write. Some of us even manage it. We don't get paparazzi and cereal endorsements, but we're seen as glamorous all the same.

That disconnect between vision and reality is a lot of why this thought exists. Ready to ponder? Fantastic. 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 writers and the addiction that we all share.Collapse )

Last night -- following our regular Thursday dinner of Tasty Indian Food (tm) and the ceremonial watching of the season premiere of cycle twelve of America's Next Top Model -- Kate and I began discussing the current state of Late Eclipses of the Sun, which is to say, spread out across my laptop like a patient etherized upon a table. I'm doing heavy, heavy surgery on this book, which is making it steadily better, smoother, and more compelling, but is still getting blood all over everything.

(If you're wondering, and don't feel like going digging, Late Eclipses of the Sun is the fourth Toby book. The first, Rosemary and Rue, is the one that's coming out September first [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxies]. The second is A Local Habitation, and the third is An Artificial Night; they've both been turned in to my editor at DAW. The second trilogy starts with Late Eclipses, and then runs The Brightest Fell and Ashes of Honor. What, me plan ahead?)

In an effort to explain what was happening in Late Eclipses, I basically ran down what had already changed, what was planned to change, and what needed to happen in book five, since book four sort of sets a lot of that up. This wound up turning into a review of the events planned for books four through six, with notes on what had changed. It was sort of fascinating, in an abstract sort of a way, because a lot of what I do in terms of series outlining is best defined as pebbles in ponds. I create ponds -- these are the overall stories, the things I want to have happen when everything is said and done. I get a pile of pebbles -- the characters, specific situations, and little complications. And then I stand on the shore, throwing rocks at the water, and watching where the ripples go. Thing is, the pebbles keep getting bigger, and the patterns of the water are very rarely what I would have initially expected. Plus, sometimes I change my mind. It's all very quantum.

To be quite clear, I really do know where I'm going, and I always know where the ending is, what's happening, and why. It's just that the details of the journey change, and that makes me very, very happy. I like to be surprised by my characters! I like to know that the things they do have a purpose, and seeing the moments where everything shifts really keeps me engaged. Sure, I could try to yank everything back on-track to get so some pre-determined 'perfect scene,' but what would be the fun in that?

Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out across the sky...

I am currently engaged in a truly fascinating dance of projects. I'm writing The Mourning Edition (sequel to Newsflesh) and Discount Armageddon (first of the Incryptid books). I'm doing a full revamp and revision of Late Eclipses of the Sun (October Daye, book four) at the same time, preparatory to getting back to work on The Brightest Fell (October Daye, book five). Each of these projects is filling an important niche in my mental ecosystem, since they're different enough that I don't get them confused, and they refresh me in different ways.

Right now, my writing regiment looks like this:

* Day one, revise/rewrite a chapter of Late Eclipses.
* Day two, start a chapter of The Mourning Edition.
* Day three, finish the chapter of The Mourning Edition, process edits on Late Eclipses.
* Day four, revise/rewrite a chapter of Late Eclipses.
* Day five, start a chapter of Discount Armageddon, process edits on The Mourning Edition.
* Day six, finish the chapter of Discount Armageddon, process edits on Late Eclipses.
* Day seven, revise/rewrite a chapter of Late Eclipses...

...and I bet you can catch the pattern from there. In amidst all this madness, I'm answering email, writing blog entries, finishing essays, doing book reviews, working on my website, detailing art cards, finishing comic strips, doing random pieces of promotional art, and, of course, sleeping. I've also been watching an average of twenty hours of television per week.

Yes, we think I steal time from a parallel dimension.

Writing something new is always exciting, but right now, it's the revision of Late Eclipses that really fascinates me. I have the shape of things entirely in place; I know who's where, when they get there, and what they need to do. Now I'm patching the logic problems, fixing the bits that seem out of character or don't make sense, and generally having a lovely time wading through my own world. (If it seems odd that I'd be having logic problems, consider the fact that by book four, I have roughly twelve hundred pages of continuity that needs to be acknowledged and worked with in order for things to make sense. It's both freeing and confining. Much like a really good corset, which gives you excellent support, but makes eating a big lunch a bad idea.)

A lot of things are coming clear to me as I work on this book, and I'm really starting to think that my second trilogy is going to be made of awesome. Which is good. I sort of lose the ability to gauge the quality of my own work after a certain number of revisions -- I don't see the clever, I just see the commas -- so I really enjoy these moments where I stop, and blink, and go 'hey, wait, this is good!'

Busy blonde is busy, but busy blonde is happy, and that helps a lot.

It's the fifteenth of February, which means it's both the Feast of St. Markdown's, and time for the February edition of my monthly current projects listing. I've decided to actually start labeling these with the month and year, just in case somebody wants to find a specific post later on. Anyway, this is the post where I make it cheerfully apparent that I do not actually ever sleep.

Please note that the first three Toby books are currently off this list, as they have been fully turned-in to DAW; the next input I'm gonna have will come with the ARCs. Ah, progress. It smells like fear and uncontrollable twitching. Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues is also off the list; it's under review with my agent, and is thus not being actively worked on. Newsflesh is off the list because it's being shopped, and that means I essentially can't have any contact with it until the process is done. I miss you, baby!

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 dinosaurs and zombies to keep me company.

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

Welcome back! It's time to call class back into session for the twenty-third essay in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing. (Really, it's all just an excuse for me to eat a lot of apples and claim to be spelunking for worms, but don't mind me.) We are now almost halfway through what will eventually be a series of fifty essays, all of them based on my fifty thoughts on writing. If you missed an earlier essay, never fear; they're all linked from the 'fifty thoughts' post as they're finished.

Here's our thought for the day:

Thoughts on Writing #23: Embrace Revision.

I think we've all been tempted to say 'the first draft is good enough' and move on to something new, rather than going through the often-painful process of trying to edit our way down to the heart of the matter. Many of us may have managed to get away with it a time or two...or even twenty, in the case of high school and college-level creative writing classes. Which brings us to today's expanded topic:

For the sweet love of all that is holy, edit, proofread, revise, and practice the art of self-critique. I mean it. There is no one on this planet so good at this game that they can just throw a fistful of words at the page and declare it brilliant. Needing to revise does not make you a failure, and becoming a better writer isn't going to take that need away. Embrace the revision process as a chance to dig down into the heart of your text and make it everything that it deserves to be.

Revision is a huge and tangled topic, as is revision's sister, editing. Some people will argue that a really good writer doesn't actually need to edit or revise; a really good writer will always get it right the very first time. While it's true that writers will get better with practice -- writing is a skill like any other, and even those who start out with more raw talent than others will improve or decline according to how much they work at it -- you're never going to meet a writer who has improved to the point that they no longer need to review their work.

So there it is; that's what we're going to be talking about today. Ready? Excellent. Now 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 the art of revision.Collapse )

* Item: according to the latest issue of one of the totally random-ass gossip magazines that I like to read while I'm waiting for my groceries to be rung up, Miley Cyrus is in talks to play Snow White in the adaptation of The Stepsister Scheme. Now, Jim keeps insisting he knows nothing about this rumored movie project, but I see how it really is. He just doesn't want everyone he knows with nieces under the age of sixteen to mob him demanding Hannah Montana tickets. YOU CAN'T FOOL ME, JIM. I'll be expecting tickets for Gracie and Alanna stat. And me, of course. I'll, uh, need to keep them company. That's it.

* Item: I sometimes wish we had a gossip-column for the urban fantasy circuit, not because I actually want to get stalked, but because I want an excuse to write sentences like 'Is the author of Dead to Me a secret serial killer?' or 'Has David Wellington managed to wake the Great Old Ones in Central Park? WE HAVE PICTURES.' And then I remember that I don't actually need an excuse, and my life becomes awesome once more.

* I'm doing my editorial revisions on An Artificial Night, sort of hand-in-hand with my second rewrite of Late Eclipses of the Sun. I'm really not sure which is more painful, although right now, I'm inclined to vote editorial revisions. It's incredibly difficult to keep my inner perfectionist from kicking in when I'm just supposed to be making small changes, and I'm pretty sure I'd get in trouble if I let myself get sucked into a full revision. (As for who I'd get into trouble with, well...trust me, there'd be a line. It would form remarkably quickly, and many of them would have access to sticks. Sharp, pokey, pointy sticks.)

* Anyone who thinks it's strange that I'm editing book three when book one (Rosemary and Rue, mass market paperback, DAW Books) isn't coming out until September needs to have a long chat with Kate about the sort of lead time I prefer to build into my projects. There may be flow charts involved. Wear comfortable shoes.

What's up with all of you?

So I haven't been posting many word counts recently -- not, as one person jokingly asked, because I've given up writing in favor of playing Kingdom Hearts for the fifteenth time, but because I've entered one of those phases where the word counts are somewhat less quantifiable. If I start out with a file containing 50,000 words, and finish with a file containing 51,000 words, I've clearly written 1,000 words, right? Well, what if, in the process of working that day, I deleted an entire chapter, replaced it with a new chapter, and rewrote three fight sequences? I actually wrote 11,000 words. My net gain, however, is 1,000. And how do you measure revisions? Sometimes I'll spend six hours of quality time with a manuscript and a machete, and come away bleeding, grinning, and down a couple of thousand words. Negative word counts seem a little silly in that situation. I wind up just waving my hands around in the air and saying, blankly, 'lots.'

I've actually been busting ass around here lately. Discount Armageddon got a whole new first chapter, as did Late Eclipses of the Sun; in the case of Discount Armageddon, the original first chapter stayed on as the new second chapter, but in the case of Late Eclipses, well...kill your darlings. I've said it often enough that I really do need to learn how to live by it. I've also done some serious restructuring on the rest of Discount Armageddon, making it tighter, leaner, and much more prepared to dance the samba all over whatever happens to get in its way.

Late Eclipses is going through a similar, but much more dramatic, series of restructurings; several large swaths of the book are being tossed out the window and completely rewritten, including, so far, the original chapters one and two. (One of the other things I say way too often to plead ignorance: the author can be wrong, and that's what rewrites are for.) The story is still essentially the same, it's just getting tighter and more directed in the things that it's saying. That, and I'm slaughtering a lot of wishy-washy modifiers. They're like kittens -- one is awesome, thirty is a crazy cat lady.

I'm just about finished working on Discount Armageddon for a little while, since it's a busy book with places to go and people to see. This is going to mean the return of the word counts for The Mourning Edition, as I get back to work on my favorite zombie universe, and probably the beginning of the editorial revisions on An Artificial Night.

In short, even when it looks like I'm goofing off and having fun with art supplies, I'm working too much to sleep.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeee.

10. I appear to have started doing art cards. (Because, as Brooke said, I need something to do with all that spare time that I had just lying around.) For those of you who are unfamiliar with the art card 'concept,' they're little pieces of original artwork, done on 2.5"x3.5" cards. Mine are Micron and Prismacolor on bristol paper. I've done three so far, one to go with Grants Pass, one to go with Ravens in the Library, and one of Velveteen and Sparkle Bright during their first year with the JSP. I figure I'll use them as book giveaways. Right now, they're just being colorful and soothing; two things that I need more of in my life.

9. My reboot on Late Eclipses of the Sun appears to have done exactly what I was hoping it would do; the new first chapter is about ten times stronger, faster, better, and generally bionic in all possible regards. Now I'm working on the revisions to chapter two, just to really lock down the changes to the continuity, and once that's done, I can start processing my editor's notes on An Artificial Night. I'm spending so much time with Toby these days that we should really start charging her rent, I swear.

8. I write more poetry than is strictly healthy, sometimes in batches of two to five hundred poems at a time. (These batches are called 'Iron Poet' rounds, and are a variation on a standard writer's workshop exercise. They make me happy. I may be crazy.) I managed to write five poems yesterday, including a counted devan (although I skipped the internal rhymes on the zipper, because I didn't feel like giving myself a migraine) and a counted technical terza rima. Take that, everyone who said there was no use for structured poetry in the modern world!

7. My story in Ravens In the Library is getting an accompanying illustration. This is...this is amazing. Not just because the illustration itself is amazing -- I saw the sketch, and it is -- but because I didn't expect an illustration at all. It made me cry. More and more, I begin to believe that 2009 is the universe giving me one big incredible birthday present.

6. It's not entirely visible to the naked eye, but my website continues to creep closer and closer to being entirely done. We should be getting the first few essays up there soon, and Chris is working on the functionality that will allow me to update and edit the front page all on my lonesome. Meanwhile, Tara works secretly behind the scenes on Wonderful Surprises that only a golden graphics girl could possibly provide. Prepare to be amazed.

5. I get to spend the weekend working on Discount Armageddon! (Quoth Dan: "I don't know anybody who gets as excited about being told what to work on as you do.") I love deadlines, I love directions, and I love Verity. She's so happy to see you. And so happy to kick you in the head. Pleasantly, I just put together my Verity playlist last night, consisting almost entirely of dance music and things with a BPM of over 120. Because Verity just looooooves the beat, yo.

4. It's new comic book day! Always the most wonderful day of the week. At least in theory -- other days are sometimes surprisingly awesome.

3. All my television is coming back on the air. I'm a huge TV freak. It's what lets me decompress after a hard day of working and writing and worrying about working and writing; it's also what I do with the other half of my concentration when I'm inking. (Most of the shows I watch are more verbal than visual, and have clear cues when I actually need to be paying attention to the screen.) I really appreciate the fact that the things I watch are staggered enough to make sure I almost always have something new.

2. This time next week, I will be heading for the airport, heading for the sky, and heading for Seattle, baby.

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

1. Oasis just called me, and THE CDS ARE DONE!!!!! They're mailing them out from the Oasis warehouse today, and they should supposedly hit my doorstep on Friday. This gives me time to actually arrange for CDs to reach Seattle, prep the first batch of pre-orders to mail out (probably the first twenty or so, more if I can possibly swing it), and generally get my hysteria out of the way. It also gives me time to use the CD boxes to build myself a little fort and crawl inside it to hide from the universe.

What's new and awesome in the world of you?

Because we like progress around here, it's time to take a step forward and present the twenty-second essay in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing. Here's the precis, in case you're new around here: there will eventually be fifty essays, all of them based on my fifty thoughts on writing. (Past essays are linked from the list of thoughts as they're finished, thus allowing people to tell me when I contradict myself.) The essays are being written in the order of the original thoughts, to keep me from becoming completely lost in the twists of my own logic. It works. Mostly.

Here's our thought for the day:

Thoughts on Writing #22: Changing Time, Tone, and Type.

People will talk about 'authorial voice' and 'developing your own way of writing,' but the truth of the matter is that each of us will develop multiple styles of writing. They're going to be very different, and they're all going to be uniquely ours. The trouble is finding a way to force them all to get along with one another. That takes us to today's expanded topic:

Your writing style will actually change over the course of a single day, not just over the course of your lifetime. I write very crisp, sharp prose in the morning, and very purple, rambling prose at midnight. My sentences start turning into spaghetti around ten o'clock at night. A finished work is going to need to stick to one of these styles of prose, and I need to be aware of that when I'm editing, because otherwise, the transition can be so organic that it isn't visible until someone else gets a look and starts screaming at me for blinding them with adjectives.

A lot of people fail to account for what state of mind can do for their writing styles. They also fail to account for what state of exhaustion can do for their writing styles. This is, I believe, a mistake, because if you don't understand your own quirks, you're not going to know how to compensate for them. (As one of the quirkiest people on the planet, I get a lot of practice compensating.) So how do you identify your cycles? How do you compensate for the changes in tone -- and how do you learn to catch them?

That's today's topic. Ready? Excellent. Now 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 what it means to learn the cycles in your own writing.Collapse )

And now it's time for the very first 2009 installment of my monthly current projects listing, the post where I make it cheerfully apparent that I do not actually ever sleep. Please note that the first three Toby books are currently off this list, as they have been fully turned-in to DAW; the next input I'm gonna have will come with the ARCs. Ah, progress. It smells like fear and uncontrollable twitching. Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues is also off the list; it's under review with my agent, and is thus not being actively worked on. Newsflesh is off the list because it's being shopped, and that means I essentially can't have any contact with it until the process is done. I miss you, baby!

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 dinosaurs and zombies to keep me company.

( What's Seanan working on now? Click to find out!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, 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 reposted roughly every two months, to let new people know how we roll around here. (I will make no more Clueless references in this post, I promise.) 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 )

* Review the proofs for my new album, Red Roses and Dead Things. Decide that they are, yes, sufficiently steeped in mad science, horror, and awesome sauce. Return them to the printer. I should be receiving my albums on January 26th, which is what we call 'cutting it very, very close,' but will still allow me to do a formal album release at Conflikt II.

* Announce the awesomeness that is Ravens in the Library, a benefit anthology for SJ Tucker. Announce this to, among other people, my mother, who responds with an hour-long rant about the state of American medicine. I could charge admission to my mom when she's worked up about something, I swear.

* Receive edits for my Ravens in the Library story. Review the edits, and determine that yes, they're pretty much all accurate. (This is why I have people who read for me. It's a vital part of not looking like a total idiot every time I turn something in.) Life is good.

* Approach the cage where the supine form of Late Eclipses of the Sun lurks, waiting to strike. Poke a stick through the bars. The book does not respond. Rattle the stick around. The book does not respond. Unlock the cage. Suddenly get attacked by five hundred pages of snarling, possibly rabid manuscript. Decide to start work on Saturday, when I have access to a bone saw.

* Turn in some website corrections to my long-suffering, utterly fabulous web dude, Chris. (Mysteriously, Chris is setting up the new interface so that I can make certain small text changes on my own. I think, perhaps, working with the world's most obsessive editor is getting to him.) (I love you, Chris.)

* Do a lot of inking to make the items listed above less aneurysm-inducing. Because nothing says 'soothing' like three panels of cross-hatching.

What's new with you?

It's time to return to the modern day for the twenty-first essay in my ongoing series of essays on the art and craft of writing. Just in case you're new to the party, there will eventually be fifty essays, all of them based on my fifty thoughts on writing. (Past essays are linked from the list of thoughts as they're finished, thus allowing people to tell me when I contradict myself.) The essays tend to focus on a single aspect of the writing life, whether personal or professional, and then beat it into the ground until it shatters. Fun for the whole family!

Here's our thought for the day:

Thoughts on Writing #21: Magpie Moments.

Look around the room you're in. If you're at work, look around your desk. If you're reading this on the road, look in your purse or backpack. First thing you're going to see is 'my stuff.' That's often what we see when we look around us. 'Well, yes; that's my stuff.' But where did that stuff come from? Where did you acquire the fondness for this, that, and the other thing? We magpie our way through the world -- and yes, I'm aware that verbing weirds language, but I think this is legitimate -- and that leads us to today's expanded topic:

We are all magpies. We are all going to pick up bits of flotsam and jetsam from the cultural void around us. Part of the value of having people edit you is the outside perspective they provide. If I tried to write a book that was a climactic clash of good versus evil following a slatewiper pandemic, there are people who would point out its similarity to The Stand before I managed to hurt myself, and that's gooooooooooood.

The human race -- the portion that I know, anyway; I can't speak for the entire human race, and that's actually a good thing -- is made up entirely of magpies. Some fascinating psychological studies have been done on the matter, but most of them don't apply today. We're going to be looking at influences vs. homage vs. plagiarism, and we're going to start from the position of 'everyone's a magpie.' Because that's what's important here.

Ready? Excellent. Now 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 what it means to be a magpie.Collapse )

Yesterday, I...

...did a lot of fussing about, did a lot of reasonably important (if not entirely time-sensitive) email inbox cleanup, did some work on The Brightest Fell, and finally, attended a multi-hour rehearsal to get ready for my Guest of Honor concert at Conflikt II, as well as the house concert that I'm going to be performing in tomorrow night. If you're even remotely local, and have been considering attending either event, I highly recommend it. If you've never seen me live before, here's a nice quote from one of the conventions I've been featured at:

"Seanan wraps together deep, poetic lyrics and complex melodies, a soaring voice, and an exhilarating hold-nothing-back performance style."

See? Isn't that sweet? The house concert is actually a Vixy & Tony gig to which I have kindly been invited, and we're going to be doing some awesome stuff. We finally hit 'Tanglewood Tree' (a Dave Carter cover) at exactly the right angle last night. When I have tears in my eyes at the end of a rehearsal, that's when you know that you're doin' it right. And the convention, of course, is going to be one of my usual 'but what if we threw a concert and everybody came extravaganzas. I'm even packing the prom dress. Just in case.

Today, I...

...got out of bed, sat down, and wrote the first song of 2009 ('My Story Is Not Done'). To quote the lyrics:

I was born into a fairy tale,
Cinderella's dust-bin daughter.
Seemed like I was meant to fail,
Turning wine back into water,

Mama's slippers shattered when
She turned around to run,
But I never thought that mattered and
My story is not done.

My brain, ladies and gentlemen. Studies are even now underway. That done, I wrote three poems, updated my 'Velveteen vs.' continuity guide, and processed some edits to The Brightest Fell, which I'll get back to just as soon as I finish this entry. Once Fishy wakes up (allowing me access to my suitcase), I'll be getting dressed and going out for lunch with the wonderful folks from Team Seattle. And tonight, of course, we're rehearsing one more time for tomorrow's concert, in a setting which I have been promised will provide both ice cream and kittens. My life, so hard.

Tomorrow, I...

...will be appearing in the house concert I've been nattering on about so much above. Because love means never having to listen to me talk about one thing for all that long.

Hope everything is awesome in the worlds of you -- what's going on?