So remember when I said that I would answer ten questions about the InCryptid universe? I'm still taking questions, but here's your eighth answer!

vixyish asks...

"What is bogeyman society like? So far on paper we've only met them singly. Are there bogeyman communities, do they live in family groups, that kind of thing, or do they prefer to live alone, each with their own territory? And how do they find mates?"

Bogeymen! Now, remember, that "bogeyman" and "bogeymen" is considered gender-neutral as a species term, much like "human." So while all bogeymen are people, there is no such thing as a "bogeywoman," and you will in fact be gutted stem to stern if you try to use the term. "Bogeyboy" and "bogeygirl" are likewise incorrect, unless you're talking to a bunch of teenage bogeymen who want to piss off their parents. It's a phase. They generally grow out of it. "Bogeydude" is never correct. "Bogeybabe," sometimes correct during courtship, because it's just wrong and naughty enough to be attractive. I do not recommend you try it unless you're dating a bogeyman who has already shown herself to enjoy dirty language. Now, onward to the actual question:

Bogeymen live in a culture of commerce. Everything is based on purchase value and exchange rate, even though much of their commerce is done via barter. Maybe especially because most of their commerce is done via barter. When getting a cookie requires an hour's labor, or two dead rats for the dinner menu, you know the value of a cookie a lot more than you would if it only cost you a dollar. Bogeyman parents begin teaching their children about commerce by the age of two, to prepare them for exiting the family unit and entering society. Note that there is no "hard and fast" line for leaving said family unit: a bogeyman who proves to have no nose for commerce may be kept permanently at home, considered a functional child but protected from the realities of the world, or else sold as a servant to a larger family unit (assuming said bogeyman is a skilled enough laborer to do the work, and is just lacking the skill set necessary to be a free-living, independent member of society).

Family units will generally consist of a "head of household," IE, "whoever put down the most collateral toward purchasing and furnishing the living space," his or her spouse or spouses, and any unmarried siblings with no interest in having children or households of their own. All adults are expected to work for their keep, but this work can include maintaining the house and caring for the children. Anyone who chooses those jobs will be paid by the rest of the household, fairly for their labor, and is thus considered to be contributing fully. Despite being a primarly barter-based economy, bogeymen do covet money, which they will put aside to sustain them in case of illness. Should an adult member of the household fall ill, they will pay their family to care for them. This may seem cruel, from a human perspective, but the bogeymen have spent a long time being hunted, hated, and hurt: they want to know that they are never a burden, and that any time lost caring for someone who should have been able to care for themselves will be repaid. It's a matter of pride. Note that, should someone run out of money, they will go into debt; they will not be turned away. Bogeyman funerals often involve the symbolic laying of debt upon the coffin, releasing any descendants from the burden, and it is considered the height of ill manners to try to enforce minor debts incurred by the dead, unless those debts were incurred in bad faith.

Bogeyman communities can be quite large, and almost entirely subterranean, due to the nocturnal nature of bogeymen as a species and the "kill it with fire" reactions that many humans tend to have. The bogeyman community in Manhattan is numbered in the thousands, as are the communities in Seattle and Chicago. Smaller cities will usually have smaller bogeyman communities, and they will sometimes resort to buying apartment buildings, turning them into "special communities for graveyard shift employees," and then colonizing the individual units. This can result in someone being the only human in a building full of bogeymen, which rarely ends well.

When a bogeyman comes of age to marry, they will sit down with their parents and fairly and logically assess themselves. Skills, appearance, medical history, it all goes into setting their price. Everyone has a price. It's not men buying women; it's couples buying each other. Sometimes parents will make a wedding gift to the couple by making up the difference if one of them can't afford the other. ("But Mom! Daniel costs twice what I do and I really love him!" "Okay, okay, instead of a cake, we'll buy you a husband.") If there's no one local that somebody wants to buy, they may take their assessed value and go traveling, working their way through the local communities while they search for a spouse. Offers of purchase can be refused; some couples are committed but apart for years while they earn the necessary money to start their lives together. It's customary for the parents on both sides to gift the young couple with part or all of their mutual purchase price at the wedding, allowing them to buy a home and begin establishing themselves. In this case, the head of household will almost always be the one with the higher initial cost.

Bogeymen love their children, and will do virtually anything for them. They're very human, in that regard. This does mean that same-sex couples will buy and sell their favors to each other—essentially, "if you get me pregnant, and forswear the child, you can also get my wife pregnant, and keep the child." Bogeymen who don't want children are not treated poorly, as they can add value to other households by providing additional adults to help keep things running smoothly. The population is high enough at this point that some loss of genetic diversity can be endured.

I like bogeymen. They're dishonest with outsiders and very honest with each other, and they take care of their own.

So remember when I said that I would answer ten questions about the InCryptid universe? I'm still taking questions, and actively need questions that follow the "big, about the world" model as described in the original post, but here's your seventh answer!

acelightning asks...

"The Price family's history suggests that there might be some sort of "paranormal" ability that helps a person detect cryptids, and that this ability is at least partially genetic. On the other pseudopod, it could all be nothing more than empirical knowledge, handed down from one generation to the next with a bit more intensity than Great-Grandmother's kugelhupf recipe."

I'm sort of cheating with this one, because it's not really a question. At the same time, a lot of the questions I've received have been very narrow ("What's Istas's favorite kind of pie?"), and hence qualify as both a) spoilers and b) not very interesting to take apart in detail. So please, submit more questions, and I'll take a moment to ramble about the Price family. For funsies.

There is no paranormal ability that allows people to detect cryptids. Well, that's maybe not entirely true: Sarah, who is a telepath, can probably find other cryptids by reading their minds, and Artie, who is an empath, can point out people who are unduly nervous or unhappy, and Istas can smell the difference between many species (but does not consider having a bloodhound-level sense of smell to be a "paranormal ability," as she was born that way). But for the most part, it's observation, education, and knowing what to look for. The Prices are raised on a steady diet of "And how do we spot a bogeyman?" They take field trips to the local gorgon and harpy communities. They learn early how to spot the "probably not a human" signs, and also how to trick people into identifying their species, even if they can't quite tell what it is. It's science. Behavioral science, field biology, and deduction.

There's also an element of luck, which is where the rumors come in, at least in certain circles. "Healy luck: sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, but it's always interesting" used to be a fairly common saying within the family. No one knows for sure what kind of stock Fran came from, and it's possible that she has jink or leprechaun in her family tree, somewhere. Ditto for the Davies family, which joined the Covenant in the 1700s, a period when many "close enough to pass" cryptids made a bid at hiding in plain sight by signing up with their dearest enemy. So it's entirely possible that luck-manipulator genes have entered the family tree at one or more points. (Whether this has actually happened is something that I'm not saying.) But this is only luck: even if it's a factor, all it's going to do is put people who have it in the path of more cryptids, giving them more opportunities to exercise the deductive skills listed above.

Field biology is a matter of knowing what to look for, knowing where to look, and not giving up. The Prices have these qualities in spades.

It's Oz day! It's Oz day! Oz Reimagined is available now from a bookstore or online retailer near you. I am over the moon, because Oz is the fairyland of my childhood, Oz is where I always wanted to wake up (when I didn't want to go to Gallifrey; my real ideal would have been a pair of silver slippers and a trip to the University of Gallifrey to become the first rainbow-riding Time Lady), and now I am a part of Oz. And that's genuinely amazing.

There are fifteen stories in this book; all are available to buy as Kindle singles, which is an interesting experiment that I've never been involved with before. According to Amazon's webpage for my story, "Emeralds to Emeralds, Dust to Dust," some of them may also be available for Amazon Prime members to borrow for free. I haven't read the full anthology yet, but I trust a lot of these authors, and I have faith that it will pass my "must contain three stories worth keeping on my shelves" benchmark.

Now I just want to address something that I've seen crop up in several reviews, because I seriously and genuinely do not want anyone buying this book under false pretenses: this is not an Oz sequel. This is not an homage filled with loving continuations of the canonical Oz. These are stories reimagining Oz, much like Syfy's Tin Man, or the fantastical ongoing comic, Namesake. They are not for children. The book even says so on the cover. Picking this up because you want a children's book will do you a disservice, and may cause you to have Vegemite issues with some otherwise fine pieces of writing.

My story is an urban fantasy. Dorothy has grown up and is living with Polychrome, in a committed lesbian relationship. Is this because I wanted to stain someone else's childhood? No. It's because when I was a little girl, I genuinely believed that Dorothy and Ozma were going to be married someday, and could support that claim with examples from the text. Maybe I was projecting, but that was the memory I went back to when it came time to write my story: my earnest belief that Dorothy was, well, a "friend of Dorothy," and would never marry a man, whether she grew up or no. People get hurt in my story. People die. And I am not the only one who approached the kind of themes in my Oz story that I approach in my day-to-day writing.

Please, pick up this book if it sounds interesting. I'm incredibly excited about it, and I hope you'll love it, just like I hope that the general "you" will love everything I write. But don't pick it up for your ten-year-old and then look astonished when they ask you to explain something you'd been hoping to put off until later.

Oz!

I love the SyFy Channel Saturday night movies. The goofy effects, the giant monsters, the sometimes wooden acting, it's all a delicious cheese sandwich to help me relax into the one night of the week where I don't feel rushed to accomplish ALL THE THINGS before I go to bed. I try to judge them by what they are, and not by what I want them to be: silly, shitty movies that accomplish what they set out to accomplish, no more, and no less. Sometimes they're even pretty good.

This past week, the Saturday night movie was The End of the World. It was about a group of geeks who owned/worked at a video store specializing in disaster movies, the judgmental SO of the geek who actually owned the store, the faintly evil cousin of the geek who actually owned the store, the disapproving parent of one of the geeks who worked at the store, the disaster guru idol of all the geeks, and a bunch of extras. The extras fell into three categories: evil looters who wanted to take stuff from our heroic geeks, assholes at the mental hospital where the disaster guru had been committed, and people at the military base.

Now. Looking only at what I've written above, how many of these characters were female? If you guessed "judgmental SO" and "disapproving parent," then ding ding ding! We have a winner!

None of the geeks were women. The SO even knowing what the Death Star was called was treated as a virtual miracle, and something so hot as to make the alpha geek temporarily forget about saving the planet, because she was speaking Forbidden Knowledge, yo. She was saying things that implied girls could be geeks too, and man, that was so impossible it was like she was demonstrating super powers! The mother figure was literally introduced calling one of the secondary geeks at work and asking him how the job search was going, because it was time for him to get a real job, in the real world, amirite girls? (The SO had a similar speech.) That's how we should interact with geeks! We should drag them kicking and screaming into respectability, because no one can ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever be happy and fulfilled just being a professional fan of things. And women can't even start being fans of things. It's not allowed.

None of the extras were female. None of the secondary characters, apart from the two listed above, were female. One of the female characters was there to nag and be a burden; the other was there to be a prize and to be enlightened about how Geek Things = Man Things and Man Things = Awesome.

And here's the thing. None of these characters—not a single fucking one—had such a gendered role that their character could not have been played by a member of the opposite sex. Testosterone did not unlock the key to saving the world. Estrogen did not cause the cataclysm. You could have literally flipped a fucking coin for every single role, and cast accordingly. "Whoops, female lead, male antagonist, female love interest..." Better yet, make it a d10, and if you roll a ten, roll again for assigned birth gender, and then go from there. "Female lead, male antagonist, ftm love interest..." It would have been the same damn movie.

But they didn't do that. They went with boys and boys and boys, and an exclusionist narrative that had me saying sadly "I like disaster movies. I exist, too."

I wound up stopping the movie halfway through because the lack of female voices had become so alienating to me that I needed to wait a while before I came back and finished watching. It was an okay movie. I won't be watching it again. There's no one for me there.

Men can identify with women, and should. Women can identify with men, and should. But there's a big difference between saying "Seanan, you should have been able to identify with the struggles of the protagonist, regardless of gender," and saying "Seanan, you should have been able to accept a world that cast your gender into the role of harpy and martinet, and not felt objectified or rejected by this setting." I did identify with Owen. I did care about his story.

It was everything around him that lost me. And honestly, I'm still lost, and I've been lost too many times.

Sometimes it would be nice to be found.

Title: Velveteen vs. Everyone, Part II.
Summary: The time for patience is over. Now is the time for war. Not everyone is going to walk away, but a point comes when it is no longer safe to care.

( The fall of Dead Ringer was initially unremarked...Collapse )

So remember when I said that I would answer ten questions about the InCryptid universe? I'm still taking questions, and actively need questions that follow the "big, about the world" model as described in the original post, but here's your sixth answer!

rianax asks...

"If they can't interbreed with humanity, how to these different species met up and have children in the modern world? Is there a cryptid Cupid.com?"

Yay, cryptid breeding! We're going to restrict ourselves to a very anthrocentric approach, for the sake of answering the question as posed: we're only looking at cryptids that can, for one reason or another, live in human settlements. The ones who can "pass," in other words. They're both the ones who are most likely to have issues with humans seeming attractive, and the ones who will have the most "I need to know your species before we can hook up" problems.

Some of these cryptids get around the "accidentally dating humans" issue by not being mammals. For the most part, humans smell "wrong" to them, and are hence not attractive. You do get occasional perverts who like mammal boys or insect girls instead of sticking with good, honest reptile people like their siblings, but for the most part, people are attracted to things they have half a chance of being biologically compatible with. (Science supports me on this.)

A few species of cryptid are cross-fertile with humans. A very few species, and most of them will still choose not to crossbreed, because there's a very good chance their offspring will be infertile, which doesn't help keep the family line going. Lilu, which includes both incubi and succubi, are cross-fertile, and their offspring have a fifty percent chance of being infertile. Fertile crossbreeds will usually have children that are indistinguishable from the species of their mate. So if Elsie, who is half-succubus, were to visit a sperm bank and get some human sperm, she would have a baby who was effectively a very sexy human, rather than a succubus crossbreed. Jinks and leprechauns are similar, and many family links have a little jink or leprechaun blood.

Tanuki are the only known species of therianthrope to be cross-fertile outside of other therianthropes, and they manage this partially by having lots and lots of tanuki babies. As with certain types of frog (no, seriously, science again), they have evolved extremely dominant DNA. If Ryan were to mate with Istas, you wouldn't get half-waheela babies, you'd get unusually colored tanuki. Even when there were more of them, they would often seek out-species mates to get hybrid vigor back into the community. Sorry about what that does for your family line, dearest.

There are dating services for some species of cryptid, ranging from the very communal "let me introduce you, he's a nice boy" social dances of the bogeymen to the more formal courting rituals of the gorgons. There are very few true solitaries, and almost everyone knows where everyone else is. And yes, some of this happens on the internet, although it has to be very carefully masked and monitored; the Covenant can log on, too.

Greetings, people of Earth.

I will be appearing today at Borderlands Books in San Francisco at three p.m., where I, along with John Joseph Adams, will be explaining the world domination plans as described in The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination. (We do not believe in confusing titles here in the lab. Confusing titles mean melted minions, and that's a waste of resources.)

I understand that you may have other things to do, but I implore you to attend the event, or to contact the bookstore to order signed books, as we will look kindly upon those who support the anthology, and given the size of my vegetable hybrid army, "looking kindly" may save your city from being used as an incubation hive.

From my heart and from my hands, why don't people understand that I just need to subjugate them all to my will?

Still waiting for her shiny new Australia,
Seanan.

So remember when I said that I would answer ten questions about the InCryptid universe? Well, I'm still taking questions, but here's your fifth answer!

ladymurmur asks...

"I'm not asking for calendar of holidays, but instead have a logistical ponderment - For how many generations to the Aeslin keep their holidays? when the colonies branch off, and begin creating their own new holidays, do the new holidays begin overwriting or supplanting the old holidays so that there is only one or just a few on any given day? Or do they stack, becoming almost an "on this day in history" sort of situation? If there are multiple celebrations on one day, are the celebrated concurrently? consecutively? Do colonies ever rejoin each other, or cross-pollinate in some fashion (an Aeslin exchange program?) and thus share holidays? or are the new colonies more like religious schisms, and ne'er the twain shall meet?"

I decided that I would answer one question about the Aeslin mice this round, because while I love them, they're sort of like bacon: a little bit can go a very long way, and we're way too early in the series to be risking mouse burn-out. This one offered the most opportunities to stick knives into people, so...you're welcome, I guess.

First off, there's a major underlying assumption buried in this question: the assumption that colonies branch off. They used to, but that doesn't happen anymore, because branching really happens only when the population gets too large for the space and resources available. The colony of Aeslin mice currently living with the Price family is the last known Aeslin colony in the world. The elders control birth rates and expansion very carefully, and pray for the younger generation of Prices and Price-Harringtons to marry and settle in homes of their own, because they're trying to avoid an actual schism; they know very well that any groups that leave the family home are extremely unlikely to survive. At the same time, if a schism becomes unavoidable before a new attic or basement or guest bedroom becomes available to them, the schisming mice will no longer exist from the perspective of the colony. Reject the colony, you reject the colony's gods. Reject the colony's gods, reject the colony's way of life. Reject the colony's way of life, you are no longer my child.

Aeslin mice are pathologically religious. They can't fight the urge to worship. It's tied to their survival instincts; while a colony that worships a cat is likely to be eaten, a colony that worships a tree will have a stronger tendency to stay together and stay safe, because they need to be healthy to properly tend to the needs of their god. They're capable of teamwork and very complicated thought, but they're still mice. Talking mice. The Covenant wiped them out easily as sports of nature and demonic imps. People who found them in their homes captured them and sold them to circuses or traveling shows. Cats, dogs, foxes, snakes...it's a big, scary world for an Aeslin mouse, and it's entirely possible that the colony found by Caroline Davies, mother of Enid Davies (later Enid Healy), was the last one there was. She saved them. She gave them something to believe in.

She gave them her family.

Now, on to the more time-based questions. "For how many generations do the Aeslin keep their holidays?" For as many as they keep their faith. If they worship a tree, then hundreds of generations could pass before their god withers and dies. If they worship a mayfly, they'll need a new god by the end of the summer. The Price family Aeslin still celebrate the Sacred Ritual of I Don't Care What You Say, They're Harmless Little Things and They Need a Home, They're Not Monsters, They're Mice, better known to the family as "the day Great-Great-Great-Grandma Caroline found the mice in the barnyard." Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever forgotten. To forget anything would be to shame the gods, and to be less than Aeslin.

The Aeslin calendar does not exactly match the human calendar; it has more months, for one thing, and the number seems to increase periodically, although no one human understands how or why that happens. While the feast days and celebrations will always match up to their original places on the human calendar, how often they are observed is determined by a number of factors, including their place on the Aeslin calendar, how resource-intensive the observation is, and how much they like the festival. (The Festival of Giving a Mouse a Cookie, way more popular than The Remembrance of the Violent Priestess, Who Never Learned to Be Careful.) They can, and will, perform any liturgical rite on request, but when they come around naturally doesn't follow a human logic pattern.

The mice who travel with Verity, Alex, and the others aren't considered new colonies; they're still part of the central colony, and will remain so for as long as they share gods. The mice very much enjoy coming back together to consolidate their observances of the family, share rituals, and remind themselves that they are still united.

As long as there are Prices, there will be Aeslin.

The same is not quite as certain in reverse.

Title: Velveteen vs. Everyone, Part I.
Summary: The time for patience is over. Now is the time for war. Not everyone is going to walk away, but a point comes when it is no longer safe to care.

( The appearance of the Phantom Doll in the evening sky caught the world's attention in an instant...Collapse )

This is one of those days that calls to mind the opening line of Clive Barker's classic The Thief of Time: "The great gray beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive." February is a monster, and we're all being digested. In an effort to slow the process, here are a few interesting things from my link file.

Susan, who is splendid, and who makes amazing hand-crafted leather goods, is making leather wrist straps with the Ashes of Honor ding bat on them (with my permission, naturally). That's not all she has to offer (my cats love her catnip toys, for example). Check her out!

Here are some rejected warning signs for you. I basically want to put these all around my house, especially "Annnnnnnnd...you're infected." That, and "We Apologize For What is About to Occur," which may eventually be the title of one of my books.

Publishers Weekly did a profile on me and it's pretty much amazing. I'm just saying.

Also I went on the SF Signal Podcast and spent like, an hour talking about television and how the Syfy Channel Saturday night movies have lost their integrity. You can listen to the whole thing here. Warning: It turns out I swear a lot. Who knew?

In other news, I really need to do a couple of mega review round-ups; my link file is currently threatening to eat my soul in the night, and that would be bad.

Happy Wednesday!

So remember when I said that I would answer ten questions about the InCryptid universe? Well, I'm still taking questions, but here's your fourth answer!

geekhyena asks...

"A clarification of my earlier comment (since I realized I didn't word it as clearly as I had intended): Why do some cryptids from very reclusive/rural-oriented and/or endangered species (such Waheela/Gorgons/etc) choose to live in cities, as opposed to others of their species? Herd immunity (so to speak)? Cultural reasons? Genuinely curious here. (As to how Istas got involved with the Goth and/or Lolita subculture(s) )"

Well, first off, I'm not going to tell you how Istas got involved with the Goth and/or Lolita subcultures. If you look at the original post (which I'd like you all to do, since I need to do six more of these Q&A posts before the book comes out), you'll see the bit where I said "no spoilers." That applies to "how did character X wind up in situation Y" questions, since hey, I may want to write that someday. You'll like it better if I'm allowed to think about it longer, I promise.

Which brings me to the core question of "why do some cryptids who aren't considered specifically urban, like bogeymen (who hate living in the country), sometimes choose to live in cities?" Well!

First off, we have to remember that sapient cryptids, while not human, are still people, and every person is different. Istas is a serious social butterfly, for a waheela. Ryan is considered a little stand-offish, for a tanuki. Sarah is remarkably pleasant and non-destructive, for a cuckoo. And so on, and so on. You can make blanket statements about a species, like "waheela are generally territorial" and "tanuki generally live in family groups," but those will never be universal, any more than "humans are often suspicious and aggressive" applies to every single member of the human race. For someone like Istas, who actually likes things like fashion, cooked food, shoes, and having conversations with people she's not about to eat, living in the frozen Canadian tundra is just this side of hell. For a normal waheela, living in Manhattan would be just as bad.

Secondly, we have to remember that cities offer some opportunities that country living just doesn't, especially now that the world doesn't really believe in barter economies. If you belong to a species that can "pass" for human during part or all of your life, spending a few years in Orlando working at Disney World and sending money home to the rest of the family is just the sensible, responsible thing to do. Think of it as the cryptid equivalent of the popular interpretation of the Amish rumspringa: go to the city, live and work among the humans, figure out how dangerous and frightening they are, come home where no one's going to skin you and wear you as a fashionable coat.

It's surprisingly easy to be reclusive in the big city. In a small town where everybody knows your name and notices if you don't show up to check your PO Box on Wednesday afternoon, you're going to have a lot of trouble explaining where you went for those two months when you were hibernating. In San Francisco or Chicago, as long as your bills are paid, you can probably get away with it. Also, just like some humans don't like people but do like tigers/alligators/gorillas/whatever, some cryptids don't like their own species, but do like humans, regarding us as adorable and bizarre at the same time, and hence enjoy spending time with us, while still considering themselves "isolated" and "alone."

Finally...where else are they supposed to go? It's increasingly hard to live in a little house in the middle of a deep, dark forest without worrying that you're going to have a Wreck-It Ralph eminent domain situation on your hands. Much like most humans can't imagine going back to living with outhouses and no electricity and shoes only on special occasions, most sapient cryptids aren't overly excited by the "go live in a cave already" concept. There are rural cryptids, and cryptids who survive quite happily in places that humans still regard as uninhabitable, but for all the ones who evolved and adapted to climates similar to the humans around them, it's cities or suckage. So they choose cities. It's not their favorite option; thanks to us, it's the one that they have.

WEIRD SCIENCE!

(Duh dum bum bum da dum.)

Or, really, MAD SCIENCE, because that is where my heart of hearts makes its forever home. The new anthology, The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination, is hitting shelves now, and includes my short story, "Laughter at the Academy: A Study in the Development of Schizotypal Creative Genius Personality Disorder (SCGPD)." Fans of my music will recognize the basic plot of the story as matching that of my Pegasus Award-winning song, "What A Woman's For." Yes. It is a story based on a song about using womanly wiles to cause perfectly reasonable researchers to embrace grave-robbing and storm-chasing as a means of advancing their careers. My mother is so proud.

Anyway, it's a fantastic book that I'm going to talk about a bit more in a little while, and I'm happy as hell to be a part of it. And if you're in the Bay Area, this weekend will bring you the opportunity to see the editor, John Joseph Adams, appearing with yours truly at San Francisco's own Borderlands Books. The event begins at 3:00 pm, and will undoubtedly be a rocking good time. It's always a rocking good time when John and I get together.

The Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination is available now at a bookstore or internet retailer near you. Published by Tor Books, you can get it in either hardcover ($25.99) or trade paperback ($14.99), and honestly, it's worth it at either price point.

Hope to see you Saturday!

So remember when I said that I would answer ten questions about the InCryptid universe? Well, I'm still taking questions, but here's your third answer!

professor asks...

"Given that the Covenant is a centuries-old organization that worships tradition and conformity, how do gender and racial identity politics within the Covenant work?"

I find it interesting that when we hear the phrase "hide-bound" or "traditional" in reference to an organization like the Covenant, whose stated mission is killing monsters, we immediately assume that they must be an organization completely dominated by white cisdudes. And I'm including myself in that "we": when I first started working on the organizational structure of what would become the Covenant of St. George, it was extremely old white cisdude-centric.

At one time, that was probably an accurate view of the organizational makeup. While they are no longer particularly religious in nature, or sanctioned by any major church, they did start out with strong church ties, and the church in the Middle Ages was pretty firm on its whole "gotta be a dude with a penis to come to the party." Add in the fact that large portions of the Covenant's leadership settled in Italy, France, and the United Kingdom, and you'd get a very white cisdude party. But here's the thing: the Covenant was good at their job. They still are, as much as they can be; remember that today's cryptids are the descendents of the ones who learned to hide from the raids and the cleansings. One by one, the big flashy monsters were killed off or driven into the shadows, and it got harder to be picky.

There was a time when any village in Europe would have been proud to have a son chosen to work with the Covenant of St. George. By the late 1500s, most of those same villages considered the Covenant a fairy tale, and would never have dreamed of giving away their sons. The Covenant began doing their recruiting from people who had actually encountered cryptids, who could actually see the value in fighting against them. This meant dropping virtually all restrictions against girls serving active roles, because sometimes, it was the girls who survived.

Most of the Covenant's early female recruits provided backup and support for the field teams, having not been trained to fight before they came to the Covenant. At the time, it was not standard within the Covenant for all recruits to receive field training. This changed in the mid-1600s, following the last successful attack on a Covenant stronghold. Half the support staff were killed, as were most of the children currently being housed in that location. After that, it became a prerequisite that all recruits learn to fight, even if they were not constitutionally equipped for field positions.

Resistance to women in the field continued for quite some time, although it had less to do with "women can't handle it," and more to do with "we're not really a powerful political or religious force anymore, and we don't want our male operatives arrested for traveling with women they're neither related to nor married to." Field team marriages became very common, because it was a way for women to get "out of the office" and out doing what they did best. Killing stuff. By the mid-1800s, women had a completely equal voice in Covenant activities.

If this seems like it took a really long time, please compare it to real-world history. The Covenant was surprisingly enlightened, largely out of necessity.

But that only addresses female equality, not race or gender identity. Race was actually addressed somewhat earlier, when the Covenant followed the various explorations, Crusades, and invasions of the rest of the world, either forming or making contact with similar groups around the world. Most local groups were sadly largely absorbed into the Covenant, because the Covenant had the resources and the manpower to make joining forces seem appealing. Those who weren't absorbed are still considered part of the Covenant today, and are not spoken of much outside the regions where their methods dominate. And here's the thing: since the Covenant, and its sister organizations, focused so strongly on "humans first," they didn't bother as much with racial divides. There would be time for those later, when the monsters were all gone. To be fair, if the Covenant had successfully wiped out the monsters in the 1600s, they would probably have turned around and started ethnic cleansing. But they didn't, and they didn't, and they wound up a fully integrated organization by the mid-1800s. They understand racism, and will use it to their advantage when possible, but the Covenant as an institution does not tolerate racial discrimination. Humans gotta stick together.

Sexuality and gender identity are harder, in part because the Covenant relies on "legacy children" for so much of its membership. You're really expected to have kids if you possibly can. While this isn't a law or anything, you'll get a lot of the "Have you tried not being a ________?" routine, especially if you were already slated for inclusion in the breeding program. But at the end of the day, again, they need trained members more than they need to be prejudiced, and have been QUILTBAG inclusive since the early 1900s.

Seriously, there was a time—a long time—where if you were a strong-willed woman who wanted to make your own choices, a gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transsexual teen, or of any race that didn't match the locally dominant racial type, the Covenant was your best route out of that life. If you heard about them, if you heard that they could save you, you took that chance. And the people who took that chance tended to become very loyal, because they were given lives that they could otherwise have only dreamt of.

The modern Covenant is very enlightened, except for the part where anything that isn't human is a monster. There's no room for discussion on that front. And really, that's the problem.

Having been sick even unto death on January 15th, this is the first current projects post of the new year. Whoops. I'd say I was sorry, but again, sick even unto death; the coughing and throwing up and passing out sort of obviate my natural desire to apologize for everything under the sun.

Anyway, this is the post in which I tell you what I'm working on, and you finally understand why I don't have time for tea. 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 all books currently in print are off the list, as are those that have been turned in but not yet printed (Midnight Blue-Light Special, Parasite). 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.

Not everything on this list has been sold. I will not discuss the sale status of anything which has not been publicly announced. If you can't remember whether I've announced something, check the relevant tag. Please don't ask why project X is no longer on the list.

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

This has been coming up a lot lately, and in the interests of my not snapping inappropriately at anyone, I figured it was time to make this post again. So...

Please. Please, I am begging you, please don't ask "when can we read X" or "does this mean you'll be writing more about Y." If I haven't told you, I can't tell you.

My schedule for the next six months is tight enough that I've been cancelling dinner dates and social outings left and right, and I didn't have that many of them to start with. And that doesn't include more Velveteen, more Rose, or more anything else that I haven't already announced publicly, on this blog.

I love having an involved, active community here that I can talk to, learn from, and listen to. And I do appreciate knowing what you want to see more of. But if something is happening, confirmed, and at a point where I can say "this is happening," then I will say it without prompting. Asking about it over and over again in comments and email just makes me tired and sad and grumpy, and unfortunately, I'm only human: the 200th time I'm asked something, I will snap, which especially sucks if this was your first entry into the conversation.

So please. Don't ask me these questions. I can't answer them, so you won't get any satisfaction, but you will make me sad.

And that sucks.

So remember when I said that I would answer ten questions about the InCryptid universe? Well, I'm still taking questions, but here's your second answer!

ashnistrike says...

"I'm going to deviate from all the Aeslin obsession above and admit to a cuckoo obsession (much less healthy). When I see something like this—a species that has almost all gone mad around their basic biological set-up—my assumption is that at one point they were more sane and adaptive, and something changed in their environment so that once-adaptive characteristics led to problems. And yes, I realize that they are still adaptive in the purely biological sense in spite of being sociopaths. But it still seems likely that they haven't always been that way. So, question—what's the original environment in which their parasitic telepathy evolved? What changed? Were they ever less completely destructive to their hosts? Symbiotic? Have they ended up, as parasites often do, in biological/telepathic arms races with other cryptid species?"

YAY I GET TO TALK ABOUT JOHRLAR YOU'RE ALL GOING TO BE SORRY!!!!

...ahem.

So the cuckoos are more properly called "Johrlac" (species name Johrlac psychidolos), and they are not from around here. I would call this a spoiler, since it hasn't come out in the series proper yet, but it's something that I talk about on panels, and it's something that anyone who's performed any sort of physiological examination of a cuckoo has probably guessed. Still, your personal perspective on spoilers may make this sensitive information, so I'm going to cut-tag.

( Here be dragons. Worse yet, here be cuckoos. Proceed at your own risk.Collapse )

Title: Velveteen vs. Jolly Roger.
Summary: The time for patience is over. Now is the time for war. The first step? Finding allies powerful enough to make the war winnable...

( Celia Morgan, Governor of Oregon, shook her head...Collapse )

There are twenty-five days remaining before the release of Midnight Blue-Light Special, the second book in the InCryptid series. I am...I'm still not quite sure that I believe it, honestly. This is such a difficult series to explain to people, because it's so silly and so serious at the same time, and I'm still a little bit in awe of the fact that I'm allowed to write it.

Thank you, thank you, to everyone who's taken a chance on this series. Thank you for looking at my pink, pink cover and my silly, silly cover blurb, and going "Sure, this is worth my time and/or dollars." Thank you for reading and reviewing and spreading the word. I honestly couldn't be here without you.

Thank you also to my agent, and to everyone at DAW Books, because let's face it, I can be a little odd sometimes, and when an author who's doing pretty well with a dark urban fantasy series says "I wanna write something with talking mice," you'd be forgiven for being a little, well, hesitant. But they didn't hesitate. They said "Seanan has done good things with strange concepts before, and they let me have my weird little world full of cryptids and blood feuds and secrets.

There are not enough thanks in the world for what I'm feeling right now.

Thank you all.

...the cock's gonna crow in the morning, baby.

It's February. How did that happen? Like, seriously, how is this year already into month two? I did not authorize the passage of time, and I would very much like it to stop. Stop, cat. Cat, stop. STOP CAT.

Cat does not stop.

This is the current shape of my 2013, with travel dates and everything. Beautiful travel dates. Hope to see you sometime in the months to come. I'll start adding 2014 around the end of the month, once I've settled into the new year and confirmed a bit more of my travel.

Publications

"Laughter at the Academy: A Study in the Development of Schizotypal Creative Genius Personality Disorder (SCGPD)," February 2013.
"Emeralds to Emeralds, Dust to Dust," February 2013.
Midnight Blue-Light Special, March 2013.
"Daughter of the Midway, the Mermaid, and the Open, Lonely Sea," July 2013.
Velveteen vs. The Multi-verse, August 2013.
Chimes at Midnight, September 2013.
"Train Yard Blues," October 2013.

Parasite, unknown.
"Homecoming," unknown.
"Bad Dream Girl," potential, contingent on Kickstarter.

Conventions/Appearances/Travel

Conflikt, January 25-27, Seattle WA.
Borderlands Books, the Mad Science Tour, February 23, San Francisco CA.
Emerald City Comic Con, the Mad Science Tour, March 1-3, Seattle WA.
Disneyland, March 16-18, Anaheim CA.
Vericon, March 22-24, Boston MA.
JordanCon, April 19-21, Roswell GA.
Disney World, May 17-23, Orlando FL.
OASIS, May 24-26, Orlando FL.
San Diego Comic Con, July 17-21, San Diego CA.
Musecon, August 2-4, Itasca IL.
Lone Star Con (Worldcon 2013), August 28-September 2, San Antonio, TX.
SFContario, November 29-December 1, Toronto Canada.

No fixed deadline/being written/unsold:

"Fiber"
"Carry Me Home"
"These Antique Fables"
"Pixie Season"
"Frontier ABCs: The Life and Times of Charity Smith, Schoolteacher"
"The Fixed Stars"
"Attractive Narcolepsy"
"Musical Patchwork"
"Honey Do"
"Loch and Key"
Half-Off Ragnarok
Echo
"How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea"
"Blended Family"
"Triple Threat" (formerly "Rhythm and Bruise")
Unnamed critical essay

...just looking at that makes me tired.

I need a nap.

My beloved Chuck Wendig (he upon whose shoulder I ride always, invisible, intangible, and whispering horrible profanity into the jellyfish-like ridges of his ear) made a post about book piracy yesterday, declaring today, February 6th, International Please Don't Pirate My Book Day. He asked people to post about their experiences with piracy. And as I am an amiable blonde, I am posting.

I've talked about book piracy before, and at the end of the day, it really does come down to a pretty simple statement for me: I don't like it. It makes me uncomfortable, and it makes me sad, and it makes me feel like the hours I spend working hard to write good stories would be better spent doing something else, like say, watching Criminal Minds. I do recognize that piracy is a huge, complicated issue, and that no one is innocent, because everyone who exists in the modern media world has committed some act of digital piracy, whether intentionally or accidentally.

Books are a luxury item. When I was a kid below the poverty line, if I'd had access to book torrent sites and an e-reader, I can guarantee you that I'd have been one of the biggest pirates around, making me the biggest hypocrit around. And those authors would not have been losing sales, because my money was never on the table to begin with; I didn't have any money. Instead, they would have been gaining my undying loyalty, and I grew up into an adult with a passion for owning things. I love owning things. I want to own all the books I love, so that I can stroke them and loan them to people and yes sometimes, give them away when somebody loves them more than me. (No, Bill, this does not apply to any of my folklore collections.) But I am not the norm. My housemate hates owning things, and if he hadn't been conditioned that free books come from the library, not the internet, I think we would have a very different set of things to fight about.

But you know what? "I'm sorry I downloaded your book, I couldn't afford it" sounds very different coming from the teenager in tatty jeans than it does coming from the thirty-something fan with a Starbucks in their hand (and I have heard this statement from both these people). There's a point at which we have to make choices about our luxury items, and sadly, those choices sometimes involve going without. My book or your fancy coffee: please choose, and don't tell me you chose "ENJOY ALL THE THINGS" when it meant that your choice didn't help me feed my cats.

It's funny, but for a culture that's obsessed with wealth and fame, we view money as somehow crass. I love money. I am terrified of slipping back into poverty; terrified enough that I sometimes have trouble remembering that I can afford to buy brand-name cereal. I didn't become a writer for the love of money, but it's the need for security that's kept me working two jobs. I write four books a year. I write a lot of short fiction. I put in, easily, forty hours a week at my keyboard, and that's after I spend forty hours a week at my day job. I pray to the Great Pumpkin that my books will sell, because I want to get out of that day job, I want to spent sixty hours a week at my keyboard and have twenty hours to do stupid shit, like sleeping. And no, it's no one's responsibility to pay my bills but me; I have to do that. I have to make my budget and live within it, and while the things I'm most likely to share with the internet (dolls! Disneyland!) can seem financially silly, I assure you, they happen after I pay the power bill.

If I wanted to write for free, I would have stuck with fanfic, where I was paid in a loose publishing schedule (I.E., "whenever I wanted to post") and with immediate, unrelentingly positive comments, because no one wants to stomp on a fanfic author. I became a professional author to get a wider audience, to share my work with more people, to be someone else's Stephen King (the way Stephen King was mine), and yes, to get paid. I do a job, I really, really enjoy getting paid for it. And yet I see more outrage over someone not tipping their waitress than I do over someone not wanting to pay an author.

(It's horrifying that we pay restaurant staff under minimum wage because "they'll make it up with tips." When you add up the time it takes to write, revise, edit, polish, and promote a book, many authors also make below minimum wage.)

So please, don't pirate my books. When you buy them, you feed my cats and you pay my bills and you let me sleep a little easier and you keep me sitting down at the keyboard, ready to slam out another story. And if you really feel you have to pirate my books, if your situation is such that you can't buy things and this is the only joy you have, please buy them later, when you can, even if you're not normally a re-reader. Please make it possible for me to keep doing this job. I am a human too, and I could really use the help.

I will close with a quote from Chuck:

"If you find that some component of the books doesn’t work for you—some kind of DRM or issues of access, I might suggest pirating the book but then paying for a physical copy. And then taking that copy and either using it to shore up a crooked table or, even better, donating it or passing it along to a friend. Don’t donate directly to me; my publisher helped make my books exist. Publishers catch a lot of shit for a lot of shit. Some of it is deserved. But the truth is, my books—and most of the books you’ve loved in your life—are due to the publishers getting to do what they do. They’re an easy target but they deserve some back-scratchings once in a while."

Thank you.

So remember when I said that I would answer ten questions about the InCryptid universe? Well, I'm still taking questions, but here's your first answer!

ebartley asks...

"Why hasn't the Covenant squashed the Prices? They aren't that well-hidden."

Normally, this is the type of question that would get a raised eyebrow and a somewhat disappointed cry of "Spoilers!" But in this case, the answer ties so closely into the family history that I've been unpacking for you, one short story at a time, that it seems like a reasonable place to start.

Understanding the Covenant of St. George requires taking an almost denialist viewpoint on the universe. Absolute truth: Humans are the best thing. Like, no matter what else there is in the universe, no matter what wonders we may eventually come to discover, humans are the best thing. Conclusion: anything humans think is cool is pretty much guaranteed to be totally cool, because humans—remember, the best thing—thought that it was cool. Anyone or anything trying to tell you that this line of reasoning is flawed and contains several internal logical fallacies is lying, and a stupid-head, and probably an enemy of the human race. You do not need to feel bad about hating them. And if you don't need to feel bad about hating them, you don't need to feel bad about anything your hatred eventually leads you to do.

Second absolute truth: anything that harms humans is bad. It doesn't matter what the thing is, or why it's harming humans. It doesn't matter if the humans who are being harmed brought it upon their own heads. If something is harming humans, it is bad. It is evil. The world is black and white, and you are on the side of white, because humans are the best thing, and all you're doing is stopping things that would hurt humans.

Third absolute truth: you are always right. Because if you were wrong, if it were possible for you to be wrong...well, then, maybe all those "monsters" that you chased down and slaughtered in cold blood were actually people who just didn't look the way that you had arbitrarily decided that people were supposed to look. Maybe you've done bad things. Maybe you're a murderer. And if you're a murderer, well. That sort of calls your whole "humans are the best thing" philosophy into question.

That's the starting point for the Covenant: they are a bunch of arrogant absolutists who have, over the course of centuries, locked themselves into a pattern of thought that allows for absolutely no deviation. To deviate, even in the slightest degree, is to no longer be truly Covenant. Once you start questioning things, there's every chance that the entire house of cards will come crumbling down.

(This isn't to say that all members of the Covenant are idiots: they're not. They're just trained and drilled and schooled very firmly on one specific method of thought, and it's one that happens to come with a clear and easy "us vs. them" that can be demonstrated using flash cards. There are a lot of very smart people in the Covenant. That's what makes them dangerous.)

Now we must travel back three generations in the family history, to a time when there were only three Prices standing: Thomas Price, who had defected from the Covenant when his personal house of cards got knocked over, rather decisively, by his own experiences, as well as through extended contact with the Healys; Alice Price-Healy, who may well be the single most bloody-minded scion of the Healy line, which is saying something if you've met anyone with Healy blood in them; and Kevin Price, who was too young to be a factor in the actual fight, but whose presence spurred his parents to win by any means necessary.

The Covenant numbered in the thousands. The Prices numbered in the threes. There was no way for them to win a fair fight.

"Fuck a fair fight." —Alice Price-Healy

Without going into excessive detail (because I really do intend to write this one day, and a girl has to keep some secrets), the Prices basically pulled a con on the Covenant, and left them firmly convinced that yes, they had killed three people on that day, and yes, there was no possible chance that anyone could have survived. Now, remember our third absolute truth: the Covenant is always right. The Covenant rode into righteous battle, the Covenant killed three people, the Covenant won, and the Covenant is always right.

The current Price family is still recovering from that specific instance of the Covenant always being right. Alice and Thomas would have one more child before Thomas himself disappeared; both Kevin and Jane were largely raised by friends of the family, because Alice, the only remaining recognizable member of the Price-Healy clan, was off trying to find her husband. Two small children being shuttled around the country didn't attract much attention, and it was only the intervention of more friends of the family that Kevin and Jane didn't wind up growing up completely unaware of the complicated network of blood feuds and favors their ancestors had constructed to protect them.

The Covenant, which is always right, did not go looking for these children. Those children could not possibly exist.

Kevin and Jane grew up, got married, and had children, always holding to their new guiding law: Do Not Get Found. Because now, their existence would be an insult to the Covenant, as great a deviation from the laws of nature as any cryptid that had ever existed. Yes, they stayed in the family business, but they did it in ways that the Covenant wasn't looking for. The Covenant, by nature, is overt. The Price family, in their current incarnation, is covert, and they use whatever means necessary to keep themselves that way.

Why hasn't the Covenant squashed the Prices?

Because the Prices don't exist. It doesn't matter how well-hidden a thing is or isn't; when you refuse to let yourself admit that it could possibly be real, you're not going to find it.

Heaven help us all if the Covenant ever stops lying to itself.

Title: Velveteen Presents Jackie Frost vs. Four Conversations and a Funeral
Summary: And now for something completely different. Velveteen’s health is failing. Jackie Frost knows why. But can she take the necessary steps to end it?

( The surface of the mirror was cold enough that Jackie actually felt it, a short, sharp burst of almost painful chill before she emerged into the warm, peppermint-scented snow of the North Pole...Collapse )

With Midnight Blue-Light Special approaching fast (and Half-Off Ragnarok just put to bed), I am naturally spending a lot of time thinking about InCryptid, and blogging about InCryptid, since I want everyone to be as excited as I am. So here is your invitation:

Ask me a question. Ask me a big question. Like when I posted about the rules governing fae marriage. The ones that require serious thought, and a genuine desire to know.

What can cuckoos really do? What was the straw that broke the camel's back for Alexander and Enid? How do cryptid communities conceal themselves in human cities? Questions too big, and too complicated, to answer in the FAQ. Now, because I apparently wasn't clear enough the first time, I WILL NOT GIVE SPOILERS. Please don't ask me where someone is, or whether someone else is coming back, or whether I'll post a full calendar of Aeslin holidays (because I never, ever will). Ask me about laws and rules and universe, about etiquette and speciation and trends in fashion.

The ten best questions will get full blog posts about them, explaining whatever facet or facets of the InCryptid world they touch on. I get to determine "best," although you're all welcome to weigh in or ask secondary questions.

I have comment amnesty for any questions I do not choose to answer during this particular publication lead-in, because I want my brain to not dribble out of my ears.

Game on!

Total words: 102,828.
Chapters: Twenty-three, plus prologue and epilogue.
Pages: 354.

Reason for stopping: draft one is finished.
Music: my interview on SF Signal.
The cats: Lilly, floor; Alice, floor; Thomas, bed.

Did somebody get the number of that truck?

And once again: there you go. Draft one is done, and sent off to the Machete Squad for attack. I'm going to have edits. I'm going to have structural revisions. I think I may need to swap the epilogue out for something a little tighter (although wow am I close to the text right now, so hell if I know). I'm going to be working on this book for months to come. You know what? I'm feeling pretty good about that. Because the first Alex Price adventure is finished, and he pretty much rules.

I am exhausted and I feel sort of beaten, but the draft is done. Tonight, I will drink deep from the keg of victory. BRING ME THE FINEST MUFFINS AND BAGELS IN THE LAND!

Draft!

I have been asked to create an open thread for discussion of "Rat-Catcher." So here you go: here is an open thread.

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

Seriously. If anyone comments here at all, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. So please don't read and then yell at me because you encountered spoilers. You were warned. (I will not reply to every comment; I call partial comment amnesty. But I may well join some of the discussion, or answer questions or whatnot.) I will be DELETING all comments containing spoilers which have been left on other posts. No one gets to spoil people here without a label.

You can also start a discussion at my website forums, with less need to be concerned that I will see everything you say! In case you wanted, you know, discussion free of authorial influence, since I always wind up getting involved in these things.

Have fun, and try not to bleed on the carpet.

Title: Velveteen vs. Legal.
Summary: When The Super Patriots Inc. finally go too far in their ongoing war against Velveteen and her friends, will she be able to take it lying down? Or will this finally be the straw that breaks the plush camel’s back?

( Celia Morgan was accustomed, as Governor of Oregon, to dealing with people whose concept of 'patience' had been left behind somewhere between their homes and her office door...Collapse )

Many of you probably know that I've been having severe issues with my left foot right now, which make it difficult for me to walk normally. Sometimes I can't walk at all. It turns out that this is because I've developed an internal bone spur. So I'm going to the podiatrist, who's going to refer me to a surgeon, who's going to cut me open and make things better. "Better" is a word that lives on the other side of surgical recovery and more pain, but at least there's a clear road from here to there.

I keep joking that I'm a mermaid now, since I get to walk on knives everywhere I go. Damn, do I feel bad for Ariel.

It's not fun, being basically in good physical form and ready to resume my normal exercise regime (now that my back injury has finally recovered enough to allow me to do so), only to have my foot decide that I don't need to be independently mobile. It's been making me snarly and a little more short-tempered than usual, because constant pain does not a happy blonde make, and for this I apologize. Hopefully, surgery will resolve things neatly, I'll spend a few weeks sitting around hating everything while I recover enough to start physical therapy, and then I'll be better.

I am excited to be better.

Comment amnesty on this post: I really appreciate your support, silent or vocal, but I have a massive comment backlog, so I can't promise to answer everything.

And the winners are...

bookwyrm86
professor

Please provide your mailing information via my website contact form within the next twenty-four hours, so that I can get your books into the mail.

As a footnote, I am not always able to draw winners at exactly when the drawing is officially closed, but anyone submitting their name after that time is ineligible to win. If you're on the wire, feel free to put your name in—I try to be generous with my interpretation of the deadline—but if it's six hours after the fact, all you do is confuse the RNG. You can't win if you didn't follow the rules as written, and that includes time of submission.

Thanks for playing, and we'll have another giveaway soon.

Title: Velveteen Presents Victory Anna vs. The Difficulties With Pan-Dimensional Courtship.
Summary: And now for something completely different, as a young science heroine strives to find True Love despite the many obstacles intended by the world to Thwart her.

( After two months of sharing her home, off and on, with the woman who might as well have been the love of her life...Collapse )

Hi.

My name is Seanan McGuire, and I'd like to talk to you about the Hugo Awards.

I'm going to be upfront here: I do have a potential horse in this race. I've posted about my eligibility for this year's awards already, and I've never made any secret of the fact that I really would love to win a Hugo for fiction. In my perfect world, this would be my year, because a Hugo for Blackout would be like a Hugo for the whole trilogy. There's no way I could make this entry without these facts being considered, because if I didn't state them up front, it might seem like I was trying to hide them, and I'm not. I just want you to set them aside for a moment, and focus on the awards as a whole.

Did you know that anyone can nominate, and vote, for the Hugo Awards? All you have to do is become a Supporting Member of this year's World Science Fiction Convention by January 31st. (You could also become a full member and attend the con, if you've been hankering for an excuse to go to Texas and see lots of cool people, like me, and Paul Cornell, and probably more than that, but let's be honest. Me and Paul in the bar for the weekend would be a pretty good time.) The Book Smugglers hosted this amazing post about the Hugos, and I want to quote one bit that really stood out to me:

"I highly encourage everyone, especially people who believe, like I do, that there’s space for YA recognition, more women, non-white, and international voices, to look at the membership options and if joining the process and the conversation around it is possible, give it a shot. See if it’s worth investing in each year. Nominate the people and things you love. Vote for the stuff you think represents the best of genre, the best of all the things that the future science fiction and fantasy fandom should remember."

We can shape the future of the genre, everybody, and that's amazing.

Now that I've made my plea for the awards in general, and made my own horses known, I'd like to bring up three horses that I have nothing to do with, but which I still think deserve your consideration, if you have the opportunity.

Fringe season four, episode 19, "Letters in Transit." Oh my sweet Great Pumpkin. This is an amazing hour of television, it's just breathtaking, whether you're a Fringe fan or someone who doesn't know the show. Fringe hasn't made the ballot before, and seriously, I think that may be a crime against televised science fiction. Please consider this episode for Best Dramatic Short Form.

Phineas and Ferb season three, episode 18, "Excaliferb." Phineas and Ferb is some of the best science fiction being made for television today, and the fact that it's primarily geared at eight-year-olds doesn't stop it from being enjoyable and accessible to an adult audience. This was the first part of the time-slip chronicles, and is basically a Princess Bride parody with a fire-breathing dragon/platypus hybrid. Please consider this episode for Best Dramatic Short Form.

And finally, my biggest horse...Mark Oshiro, of Mark Reads. Mark produces interesting, hysterical, thoughtful videos and blog posts almost daily, and has built a huge, inclusive, interactive, exciting fan community dedicated to discussing and dissecting his reviews and analysis of speculative fiction. Seriously, this is some of the best deconstruction of genre I've ever seen. Plus the man is a living reaction shot. When he is not prepared for something, he is totally not prepared. Were he to win a Hugo, his acceptance speech would probably go on to receive an Oscar nomination, because it would be the ultimate in unpreparedness. He's a great guy who runs a great blog and provides some of the best fan writing I've seen on the Internet in years. Please consider Mark Oshiro, of Mark Reads, for Best Fan Writer.

Those are the horses, and those are the reasons you should put yourself into a position to choose some horses for yourself. The Hugo Awards are a big deal, and participation, while not free (or even affordable for everyone), is well worth the cost if you can swing it. Be a part of history. Be a part of choosing what the community etches into the roll of heroes. Help somebody win a medal so big and shiny that it'll make all of Felix's medals wet their pants (did I mention that I want Wreck-It Ralph to win everything, forever?).

Thank you for your time.

It's time for another giveaway of Midnight Blue-Light Special, because I really and truly miss having a bedroom floor that I could sometimes see, rather than walking atop a tide of books and papers and heavily-armed dolls.

So it's time for a return of everybody's favorite, the random number drawing, because I am sleepy and still a little sick, which means all my creativity is being channeled into actually getting work done (a dangerous pastime, I know). So...

1. To enter, comment on this post.
2. If you are international, indicate this, and your willingness to pay postage.
3. That's it.

I will choose two winners at 12noon PST on Monday, January 28th, so that we can see this month out with a bang (and yet another trip to the post office).

Game on!

Let me tell you about Rose Marshall,
The sweetest girl that you’d ever see.
They always say that the good die young,
Well, she died back in fifty-three,
Kept her prom night date with the cemetery...

They call her the spirit of Sparrow Hill Road. She's the girl at the diner, the phantom prom date, and the girl in the green silk gown. She's long gone, ashes and bones, and she'll never find the ride that brings her home.

Her name is Rose.

She's got a few stories she's been dying to tell.

I am delighted and a little bit blown away to be able to announce that Sparrow Hill Road, the book, will be coming from DAW Books in 2014. This full-length work will include heavily revised versions of eleven of the original "Sparrow Hill Road" stories, along with two all new stories, and a Price Family Field Guide to the Dead of the North American Ghostroads. (The story that was cut, "Bad Moon Rising," didn't add to the main plot of the book, and may appear in revised format elsewhere somewhere down the line.)

I seriously couldn't be happier about this, you guys. I'm just...Rose Marshall, the girl who thought she'd never get out of Buckley, is coming soon to a bookstore near you.

It's so cool.

...and, you know, a whole lot of other characters. I am pleased to announce the Kickstarter for Glitter and Madness, an anthology about the "secret nightlife of the 20th century." Raves and roller derby, drugs and debauchery, nightclubs and naughtiness, it's all there, including a brand-new InCryptid novella, "Bad Dream Girl," about Antimony Price and her time with the Slasher Chicks roller derby team. (The other three teams in her league are the Concussion Stand, the Block Busters, and the Stunt Troubles. They're movie-themed. Can you tell I enjoyed myself?)

The Kickstarter is here, packed with lots of lovely goodies:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnklima/glitter-and-madness-the-speculative-nightclub-anth

But wait! There's more! One of the pledge levels gets you a copy of "Bad Dream Girl" as soon as the anthology funds, which means bam, in your inbox, more Price girl goodness. It's a $50 pledge, which isn't for everyone (obviously), but if this story would be enough to motivate you to pick up the anthology, or if the theme and list of AWESOME AUTHORS would be enough, take a look at the tiers, pick your poison, and help us turn the lights on at the club.

Because seriously, any anthology that gives me an excuse to introduce you properly to Antimony, who is quite possibly my favorite of the Price siblings, is a-okay by me.

Roller derby!

...make them sweet instead, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh-oh, oh...

It's 2013 and everything is wonderful! Or at least, it's 2013 and everything is semi-functional for the first time in a while, which is nice. I'm out of bed, I'm doing things in the real world, and I'm no longer caught up on the contents of my DVR.

This is the current shape of my 2013, with travel dates and everything. Beautiful travel dates. Hope to see you sometime in the months to come. I'll start adding 2014 around February, once I've settled into the new year and confirmed a bit more of my travel.

Publications

"Laughter at the Academy: A Study in the Development of Schizotypal Creative Genius Personality Disorder (SCGPD)," February 2013.
"Emeralds to Emeralds, Dust to Dust," February 2013.
Midnight Blue-Light Special, March 2013.
"Daughter of the Midway, the Mermaid, and the Open, Lonely Sea," July 2013.
Velveteen vs. The Multi-verse, August 2013.
Chimes at Midnight, September 2013.
"Train Yard Blues," October 2013.

Parasite, unknown.
"Homecoming," unknown.
"Bad Dream Girl," potential.

Conventions/Appearances/Travel

Disneyland, January 4-7, Anaheim CA.
Conflikt, January 25-27, Seattle WA.
Vericon, March 22-24, Boston MA.
JordanCon, April 19-21, Roswell GA.
Disney World, May 17-23, Orlando FL.
OASIS, May 24-26, Orlando FL.
Musecon, August 2-4, Itasca IL.
Lone Star Con (Worldcon 2013), August 28-September 2, San Antonio, TX.
SFContario, November 29-December 1, Toronto Canada.

No fixed deadline/being written/unsold:

"Fiber"
"Carry Me Home"
"These Antique Fables"
"Pixie Season"
"Velveteen vs. Everyone"
"Velveteen vs. The Epilogue"
"Frontier ABCs: The Life and Times of Charity Smith, Schoolteacher"
"The Fixed Stars"
"Attractive Narcolepsy"
"Musical Patchwork"
"Honey Do"
"Loch and Key"
Half-Off Ragnarok
Echo
"How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea"
"Blended Family"
"Rhythm and Bruise"
Unnamed critical essay

...just looking at that makes me tired.

I need a nap.

I want to open this by saying that I love my cover art. It's a blanket statement: I am one of the rare, lucky authors who has never had to grit her teeth and stand behind a cover she didn't care for. The Toby covers are atmospheric and brilliant and show Toby accurately. The Newsflesh covers are iconic in a way I could only have fantasized about. The InCryptid covers are amazing representations of the characters, done by the first cover artist I got to choose for myself. I virtually campaigned for Aly Fell, and I could not be happier with his work. Like, seriously, could not be happier.

But here's the thing.

When I go to the bookstore, half-naked women greet me in literally every section except for cozy mysteries. There are elegant half-naked women on action novels, waiting to be ravaged. There are misty, wistful half-naked women on YA novels, ready to embark on romantic adventures, probably while drowning. There are lots of half-naked women on science fiction and fantasy, many of them happy to show me their posteriors. And this doesn't even touch on the comic book store, where there are so many half-naked women that I barely even notice them anymore. Once I stopped expecting puberty to give me a figure like Dazzler or Illyana Rasputin, I just tuned all the thrusting hips and pointy boobs out, like the white noise that they were.

I don't actually know very many women who go "Oh, oh, I gotta get me a book with a naked chick on the cover." I do know a lot of women who are uncomfortable with those naked chicks, and who try to avoid reading books with naked chicks on them in public. I had a few people get angry on my behalf when the cover of Discount Armageddon was released, before they realized that I had petitioned for that image, and that it was an intentional send-up of certain cheesecake conventions. And without speaking for any other authors, I am the only one I know of who actually said to her publisher, "Hey, you know what would be awesome? If my smart, strong, savvy, heavily-armed protagonist was in a miniskirt." (DAW took this in stride, by the way, which was hysterical when you consider that my one cover request for the Toby books was "Can she be wearing clothes?")

I also don't know many, if any, women who defend the often exaggerated and impossible anatomy that shows up on these covers. In fact, women tend to decry it, and when I have heard defense, it's mostly come from men. These are very general statements, and I know that: I am not trying to imply that all men love plastic spines and thighs the length of torsos. Jim Hines, for example, has done some excellent deconstruction of these covers, recreating them in the physical world (as much as he can) to demonstrate just how ludicrous they are. And if you think I'm exaggerating, I invite you to Google the phrase "Escher girls," and see how incredibly much oversexualized, anatomically questionable art makes it onto the cover of books and comics.

So it seems likely that the intended audience for the half-naked women is largely male. Okay. As a bisexual woman, I like looking at pretty girls, and I don't see anything wrong with men liking to look at pretty girls. When I sit on the train, I should see dozens of men reading books with half-naked women on them, right? Because they're trained to the male gaze, so they should attract it, right?

The single most common critique I received of the cover for Discount Armageddon was from male readers saying they could not read the physical book in public. And while I think anyone should be able to read anything they want to without feeling ashamed, this critique does raise a question about who the half-naked women are actually for, if guys don't want to be associated with them.

I was recently involved in an online "cover battle," where people voted for their favorite cover of 2012. It was super-fun, and I made it to the finals, where the cover of Discount Armageddon was rightfully defeated by the cover of Chuck Wendig's fantastic Blackbirds (which you should read if you haven't already). Except maybe I'm exaggerating a little when I say that it was super-fun, because for me, the fun started dying when people started leaving nasty comments about my cover.

"Wow, so garbage made in Poser consisting of a scantily clad woman in thigh-highs is winning over that beautiful piece of art on the Wendig book."

"WHY IS DISCOUNT ARMAGEDDON WINNING? D: When did we start liking slutty girls in miniskirts holding guns and swords, Dragonites? WHEN?"

Even some of the site text was faintly shaming, with comments like "because of our male readership massively voting for the sexy cheerleader chick" when trying to deduce why my (fantastic, thank you Aly) cover was still in the running. (The site text was updated after Chuck stated that my cover was still in the fight because it was a damn fine urban fantasy cover. The text was, in fact, updated to quote Chuck directly. I love Chuck.)

But let me tell you, shit like that? Harshes my squee real fucking fast. Thanks for the assumption that a girl in a miniskirt must be slutty, commenter! Thanks for calling it garbage, other commenter! Thanks for making me feel like I don't get to be a real author because I wrote a book where the main character can accurately be depicted by the cover image I asked for and received.

Riddle me this, o world. If women mostly don't ask for half-naked girls on book covers, if most book covers seem geared to the male gaze, whether rightly or wrongly, then why is it men stepping up to call those covers garbage, and to call the women who grace them slutty? Why is my cover getting slut-shamed by someone who doesn't know the girl in that picture, doesn't know who she is or why that image is an accurate one? It's like the art is awesome as long as it's on a closet door, but if you're asked to like it in public, it's time to throw out a few micro-aggressions to keep people from thinking you're "that kind" of person.

Fuck. That.

I want every book to have an accurate cover. If I open a book with a half-naked girl on it, I want that half-naked girl to be inside. I want to read those books while proudly proclaiming to anyone who sees them in my hands, "I have a book with a half-naked woman in it." I want everyone reading everything, and I don't want any more of this "these are the covers that sell, so these are the covers you'll get, but no one's ever going to admit to liking them." And part of this is going to be dialing back the crappy anatomy and the questionable sexuality. If the characters keep their clothes on in the text, they should do it on the cover, too. If the characters get naked, they should still be painted or photoshopped to look like people, not plastic nightmares with eleven-inch waists (unless they're wasps or something).

And let's stop slut-shaming fictional characters based on a single picture. It's not fair to the books, it's not fair to the authors, and it's not fair to the readers who might be waiting to fall in love with them.

We should be better than this.

First up, the winner of last week's good faith drawing for a copy of A Fantasy Medley 2 is...

bookblather!

Usual rules apply: you have twenty-four hours to get me your mailing information, after which I will select another winner if necessary. Thanks to all who entered, and all who offered to pay postage. You guys are amazing.

I'm going to be opening a few drawings for copies of Midnight Blue-Light Special this week, and try to finish mailing everything that sort of fell a few days behind while I was sick even unto death. Thank you all for your patience, and for your ongoing awesomeness.

Title: Velveteen vs. Vegas.
Summary: What happens when a former child superheroine and her allies finally decide that it's time to go up against the greatest enemy of all? Where can they find the information they're going to need to win?

( This is a terrible plan...Collapse )

Title: Velveteen vs. The Fright Night Sorority House Massacre Sleepover Camp.
Summary: What happens when a former child superheroine, her allies, and a bunch of co-eds wind up locked in an improbably large Greek house with a masked serial killer and unreliable super powers?

( Loud crashing sounds from the kitchen obscured whatever the Princess said next, although judging by the movements of her mouth, it wasn't anything G-rated or appropriate for children...Collapse )

I have been talking about this a lot on Twitter, to the point that I figured everyone knew, but apparently, I was wrong. So:

I am sick. Like really, really sick. Like "missing a week of work, barely getting out of bed, too exhausted to deal with anything" sick. I caught the flu. And yes, I got my flu shot. It's not a magic bullet; it just increases resistance and sometimes decreases the severity of the flu itself. Well, if that's the case, I'm damn glad I got it, because I think I'd be dead now without it.

This is a bad, bad flu season. Take care of yourselves. And please, please, don't pressure me for fast responses to anything. I am too sick to die, and you may have to wait longer than usual for an answer.

As of today, we are fifty days from the release of Midnight Blue-Light Special, the second book in the InCryptid series. I am...honestly, I am sort of in shock over here, still. This is one of those series that I desperately wanted to write, and never thought I'd be allowed to. Multi-generational family epic with talking mice and telepathic mathematicians? Seriously? But DAW believed in me, or maybe wanted to see if I'd actually produce the book I was talking about, and somehow that turned into a five book contract and a lot of time spent with the Price family.

I am so blessed, I can't even begin to express it. The fact that I can tell these stories at all is an honor. The part where I get paid for it is like...what? Are you sure? Really? But I do, and it's amazing.

I'm still not sure what I'm going to do as a pre-release countdown this time. I did the alphabet for Discount Armageddon, but that really only works once. Suggestions are totally welcome! And of course, we'll have another new short story going up on the website around the time the book comes out, featuring another Johnny and Fran adventure. Lots of things brewing here in Chez McGuire.

Thank you all, so much. Thank you for allowing me to tell these stories. Thank you for being here. And thank you for buying my books. This was a series that had a very narrow market when it started, and you bought enough copies to make DAW see that it had an audience, and that I should get to continue. Soon, we'll break through the candy shell and expose the true darkness of what people keep assuming is my fluffiest universe. Soon.

I can't wait.

This worked well last time, so here we go: it's time for another good faith drawing, this time for a copy of A Fantasy Medley 2.

Look. Times are tough right now, and a lot of us don't have a huge amount of disposable income. I know a $25 hardcover isn't always in my budget, even when I really really want it. So that is what this drawing is for. If you want a copy but can't afford it, please comment to let me know you'd like to be entered. I will select a winner on Thursday morning.

I don't need to know why you can't afford the book; I just ask that you only enter if you genuinely can't find the dollars right now. That way, we make things a little more level for everybody.

Same region rules as last time: US welcome, non-US only if you can pay postage. And because this has come up before, if you're in the US and would like to volunteer to pay postage for a non-US resident, you can. For this drawing, comment on the main entry if you can pay non-US postage, and while that comment won't win, I will be able to go back to it if someone from outside the US does.

I will be doing a more open giveaway later this week, I just need to take things slow while I get my footing back after the flu that kicked my butt for the last nine days.

Game on!

Title: Velveteen vs. The Robot Armies of Dr. Walter Creelman, DDS.
Summary: The continuing adventures of a former child superheroine and her allies, who include Rainbow Brite's lesbian little sister, an escapee from a Rankin-Bass cartoon, and a deeply irritated Victorian gadgeteer with a raygun that used to be a toaster. No, really.

( Victoria Cogsworth managed not to slam the door to her borrowed bedroom behind her, although it was a near thing...Collapse )

A wonderful fundraiser has been put together in the name of my beloved friend, Jay Lake, who is currently battling a recurrence of his cancer. The fundraiser is at http://www.youcaring.com/medical-fundraiser/Sequence-a-Science-Fiction-Writer/38705

To quote the description text:

"Jay Lake is an award-winning American author of ten science fiction novels and over 300 short stories. He is also one of more than a million Americans who have colon cancer. Diagnosed in April, 2008, Jay's cancer has progressed from a single tumor to metastatic disease affecting the lung and liver, recurring after multiple surgeries and chemotherapy courses, and multiplying from single tumor presentations to multiple tumors presentations. Jay is now in his fourth round of chemotherapy, but it's not clear that it's working, and his doctors have little to go on in terms of advising further courses of treatment for him. In short, things are not looking good for Jay. Not at all.

However, a new technology is becoming available—one that may offer his doctors a better option for treating the cancer. We're trying to raise funds to allow Jay to have whole genome sequencing. There is a small possibility that the results of such a test, which is more comprehensive than conventional genetic testing of tumors, may suggest a treatment path that Jay's doctor's may not have considered, and that could be life saving. It's a really small chance, and Jay knows that.

For this fundraiser, we have asked some science fiction and fantasy writers to donate an "Act of Whimsy" which they will share with the community as we reach milestones in our fundraising."

My act of whimsy? DISNEY MAGIC, BITCHES. I have promised an undisclosed act of filking, and here it is: I, and an assortment of the ever-rotating members of my mix and match band, will perform and record a cover of the Disney song of your choice in honor of Jay Lake. Animated movie? Musical? Live action classic? Phineas and Ferb? The possibilities, and the horrors, are endless. "Wreck It Wreck-It Ralph," "Age of Not Believing," "Rollercoaster," "That's How You Know"...whatever.

But first, we gotta pick a song. So! If you have donated ANY AMOUNT, go ahead and comment here with the name of the Disney song YOU want to hear. If the song you want has already been commented, do it again, as I will be using the random number generator to pick a song tomorrow afternoon at 5pm PST. I will NOT tell you what song has been chosen. ONLY TERROR WILL TELL. (Actual recording will have to wait until this cold gives me back my voice.)

This is honor system, guys; please only comment if you've donated, but I won't chase you down demanding proof.

GAME ON!

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

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

Anyway, here you go:

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

It's 2013; the nomination periods for many awards are now open; this is my "what I did in 2012 that is eligible" post. There are many such posts on the internet, but this one is mine.

Novels.

Ashes of Honor
Blackout (as Mira Grant)
Discount Armageddon
Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots

Novellas.

"San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats" (as Mira Grant)

Novelettes.

"Rat-Catcher"
"In Sea-Salt Tears"

Short Stories.

"No Place Like Home"
"We Will Not Be Undersold!"
"One Hell of a Ride"
"The Flower of Arizona"

Best Related Work.

Chicks Unravel Time, featuring my essay, "Waiting for the Doctor: The Women of Series Five."
Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them, featuring my essay, "Summers and Winters, Frost and Fire."

...so that's my horses in this potential race. And while they aren't my horses, exactly, I urge you to consider my editor, Sheila Gilbert, for Best Editor, and my cover artists, Christian McGrath, Aly Fell, and Lauren Panepinto, for Best Artist.

I will be posting more shortly about the Hugos in specific, and why you both can and should be a part of the process, but this is mostly about my eligible works. Having put them down for your consideration, I will now go away again. Bye!

Item: Tomorrow is my birthday!

Item #2: I am going to DISNEYLAND!

Item #3: So yeah, I am going to go offline for the next four days. I have no regrets. If you wonder why I have no regrets, see item #2.

Item #4: DISNEYLAND BIRTHDAY TIME!!!!!

...I am a happy girl.

So I received an email recently, from someone* who wanted me to know that, while they enjoyed the October Daye books, they didn't like the fact that the plot for Ashes of Honor involved a missing child case, since this had come up before. Furthermore, if there was any hint of a missing child in the back cover text of Chimes at Midnight, they would be dropping the series.

This? Is totally, absolutely, 100% fair. You should never have to read anything you don't want to, unless it's for a class (and even then, only if you want to actually pass said class). Life is too short! Don't read bad books unless reading bad books brings you joy, and don't read books that don't interest you unless you have a damn good reason.

At the same time, while I can totally appreciate the sentiment, I'm not sure it's a sentiment that I, as a reader, would ever feel comfortable expressing to a writer. Especially not now that I'm a writer myself, which means I know that a) the story will go where the story will go, and b) by the time you get your hands on book one in a series, book two is finished and turned in, making it impossible for the writer to avoid the plot elements you've said that you dislike. "Don't do this or else" is a wasted statement. It is already too late to avoid doing whatever it is you want to have avoided.

But still, for every person who speaks, there are ten more who don't, so I thought this might be a good time to say something about what's coming up for Toby. Specifically: yes, there will be more missing people, because after defeating Blind Michael and preventing a war, finding people is what she has a reputation for being good at. Ironically, Toby herself prefers murder cases; they're less time-sensitive, and she's less terrified of getting it wrong. But if she gets a call from out-Kingdom, there's a very good chance that it's going to be about somebody's missing son, daughter, or heir.

The plot of Chimes at Midnight doesn't center around missing children, but it does involve someone who has been lost. The Winter Long is still in progress, and is more about people being found than people being lost; there's also a murder, which is good for Toby's admittedly frayed nerves. This doesn't mean that there won't be missing children somewhere down the road, because those are the cases that make people sit up and say "I want my baby back alive, get that October woman."

Losing and finding people are huge themes in the Toby series, and that's a very intentional thing; that's never going to change. If that isn't the sort of thing you want to read, I'm really sorry. InCryptid has different themes, and changes narrators periodically, which should help to keep things more varied. But much like Newsflesh was about truth, Toby is about loss. At least until we find the ending.

So that's what's going on for Toby, and why things are the way that they are. I hope it makes sense; I hope you'll all stick around. And if not, I hope you'll at least understand why I write it this way.

This is how the story goes.

(*Names are withheld, as always, because that's how we roll around here. Playing nicely is the new black.)

Title: Velveteen vs. Bacon.
Summary: The continuing adventures of a former child superheroine and her allies, who include Rainbow Brite's lesbian little sister, an escapee from a Rankin-Bass cartoon, and a deeply irritated Victorian gadgeteer with a ray gun that used to be a toaster. No, really.

( Jackie Frost, presumptive heir to the role of Snow Queen and guardian-in-training to the season of Winter, stood framed in the crystalline glitter of her mother's magic mirror...Collapse )

My foot's giving me trouble again, which means I'm hopped up on painkillers and not the best judge of what does and does not make sense. To celebrate this legally altered state, here. Have a review roundup.

Well, this is sort of a review and sort of an ongoing game of verbal volleyball, but here: have the long-belated link to the Babel Clash I did with Devon Monk. I really miss the Borders Blog. It was a great community, and they rustled up some excellent postage. Plus they let me talk about the cold dead eyes of Care Bears.

Random Reads posted a review of Feed and Deadline, and says, "Grant constructs a very detailed and well researched world with wonderful, sympathetic characters. The action starts immediately and once it hooks you in, it doesn't let go. The pace is unrelenting, climaxing in a tragic denouement, with a scenario that I've never before seen an author attempt. I could not put this book down." Awesome.

Russ Allbery has posted a review of Feed, and says, " I utterly fell in love with this book; the world is a better place because it exists." Awwww. (The review also contains some absolutely fair criticisms, and I salute the reviewer for offering them.)

Blogcritics has posted a review of Deadline, and says, "Grant takes the political intrigue of Feed and ratchets it up to 11 to a stunning conclusion in Deadline." Victory!

And now for something completely different: Reflections on Reading Romance has reviewed Home Improvement: Undead Edition, and says, of my story, "Despite the absence of my favorite, hottie Cait Sidhe king Tybalt, the story is a delight and a great example of McGuire’s style. Definitely recommend this one!" Also: "For me the Patricia Briggs, Melissa Marr, and Seanan McGuire stories were definite highlights of the collection and more than made the purchase worth the price." Win.

I am well-pleased.

We have survived the great beast 2012! Hooray and stuff! So here is my post-game commentary.

First, the bad, since there was actually less of it by weight, but what there was colored a lot of things. I did not move to Seattle in 2012. I'm trying really hard. Banks are difficult, and my day job is difficult, and it's all still a work in progress. This doesn't change the fact that by the end of the year, "so when are you moving?" became a question that was guaranteed to make me start a) yelling or b) crying. Sometimes it's really hard to live in a fishbowl, and when I don't have something I really, really want, and people keep asking about it...that's one of those times. So until I say "this is a thing that is happening, it has worked out with the bank and with my current housemate and with my job," please don't ask.

I developed a severe issue with my left foot in 2012. It's called "plantar fasciitis," and it basically means "screaming pain every time I put my foot down." This is a problem, especially since I walk both for exercise and for recreation, which has had to be cut way, way back, due to the whole "screaming pain" thing. This is negatively impacting my fitness, which I don't like. I'm doing what my doctor tells me and I don't need help, but it's bad, and it means that sometimes, I walk on a cane or not at all.

Now, the good. I went to Disneyland twice! I saw the largest intact Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton in the world! I went to Maine! Basically, through these things combined, it was a damn good year. I got Vixy into pin collecting, which gave me someone to collect pins with (always good). I saw amazing movies and watched a lot of TV, and I don't even know how many books I read. So many books. Truly we live in a magical time.

Oh, and I won a Hugo for never shutting up. I make a wish on it every night. (Yes, sometimes I wish on my Hugo to win a Hugo for Blackout. I never said I was reasonable.)

Publishing-wise, I couldn't tell you how much I wrote in 2012, because I seriously lost count, but I released five books: Discount Armageddon, Blackout, Ashes of Honor, Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots, and When Will You Rise. I had my first reprint, "Lost", and my first reprint-in-a-book, "Crystal Halloway and the Forgotten Passage." It was a pretty slow year for me with short fiction, but there were some pieces I'm really proud of, like "San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats", and "In Sea-Salt Tears." I finished nine Velveteen stories, which is three more than the six I promised in 2011. It was a good writing year.

I'm excited about 2013, in all the ways. I'm going to spend my birthday in Disneyland. Wreck-It Ralph is coming out on DVD. And we're spinning our way around the sun again.

Whee!