Too busy to brain. Here, have some bits and pieces.

Wicked Girls T-shirts.
My mother is on her way to Carmichael, California to pick these up right now. So assuming that there hasn't been some horrifying and unforeseen printing error (which seems unlikely, as we had very clear graphics, and a very clear work order), I will be starting to mail these out this week. I'll post again once I'm absolutely certain that everything is good. I will also announce when and where hand-delivery will be available, for those of you who don't want to wait for the mail, but will be in the same place as me in the weeks to come.

CD statuses.
When CD Baby runs out of Pretty Little Dead Girl, that's it, it's gone. I have twelve copies left; five are going into my vault, and the other seven will be going to the book release party and my October conventions. I will definitely be reprinting Wicked Girls, but it may need to wait until early 2012, since there's a whole process involved in doing something like this. I am also considering reprinting Stars Fall Home, with certain changes/enhancements (new cover, to match better with Wicked Girls, maybe a new track). I'll keep you posted.

Conclave, October 9th to 11th.
I'll be posting about this at more length once I make it through the weekend alive, but next week, I am the Literary Guest at Conclave, in Romulus, Michigan. It's going to be a big party, with me teaming up with Wild Mercy (including Amy McNally) to set the stage on fire, as well as bunches and bunches of exciting panels, fabulous events, and general good times. If you're in the Michigan area, this should definitely be on your radar.

Mailing things.
If you're expecting me to mail you something, and I haven't mailed you something, and you're wondering if the post office may have eaten your something, it didn't. Everything has been insane, and I am way, way behind on my mailing of things. I am sincerely hoping that the shirts will fix this, since it's going to mean taking van-loads of crap to the post office, and that usually inspires more stuff to go into the mail.

Why aren't you watching this?
Man, the new season of Fringe is so good that I want to take it home to meet my parents. If you're not caught up, or if you dropped the show in season one before it got good (which many people did, I know), you should totally give it a go. I could not love this show more if it was dipped in chocolate and rolled in candy corn.

...okay, maybe that's going a little far. Om nom nom.

Candy corn.
In my belly.

The Pirates of Emerson!
If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, you should be aware that the Pirates of Emerson haunted house park is re-opening tomorrow night for its annual Halloween bash. There are six haunted houses included in general admission, and there's a corn maze, and ghost pirates and and and. It's like someone made a sweet, refreshing oasis for my soul, and then kindly dropped it within easy driving distance. Best of all, general admission is only $20. Not suitable for easily scared children, adults, or house pets. Hugely recommended for everybody else.

Anything else?
Be...excellent to one another.

And PARTY ON, DUDES!

So there's been a huge influx of people over the course of the past few days—hello, people!—and while I expect that the majority will leave again when it becomes clear that discussion of sweeping social issues is less common around here than discussion of that cute thing my cats did, some of the new folks will probably stick around. Welcome! A few things you ought to know...

1. My name is Seanan; I'm an urban fantasy author. My name is also Mira Grant; I'm a science fiction author. Both of my personas write other things, but those are mostly what we're known for. As Seanan, I won the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. As Mira, my first book, Feed, was nominated for a Hugo Award in 2011. I put out three books a year. I don't sleep.

2. I have cats. I'm not currently blogging about them much, because there was some unpleasant mail that I'm still calming down from, but they are a huge part of my life, and my word count posts include a note about where the cats are. All my cats came from reputable breeders. I believe in supporting both animal rescue and healthy, responsible breeding.

3. I watch a lot of television. Like, a lot of television. However much you're thinking, it's probably not enough. During the fall, my DVR is a sad, overworked little monkey that deserves lots and lots of treats. Given a choice between sleeping and watching television, the TV wins. Thankfully, writing is like TV for my brain, so I manage to meet my deadlines.

4. I collect toys. Specifically, I collect classic 1980s My Little Ponies, Monster High, interesting plush, the occasional totally awesome vinyl figure, and dolls from Wilde Imagination (Evangeline Ghastly and Ellowyne Wilde). As I type this, a Beautiful Nightmare Evangeline and a Blithe Spirit Ellowyne are sitting on my desk. It is very difficult to hang out in my room if you have issues with creepy dolls watching everything that you do.

5. I try to answer every comment posted on one of my entries, although not necessarily every comment posted on a thread. This can take a while. Please have patience with me.

I have a free friending policy, and a permanent unfriending amnesty. You don't need to tell me, either way. :) Again, welcome, and I'm glad you're here.

This is the third of my five promised posts about the background of Toby's world, and it's addressing two closely related questions. Specifically, from markbernstein:

"There are multiple fae races. Do all of them trace their lineage back to Oberon, Titania, and Maeve? Is there a record of when each separate race came into being, and when was the last time that happened?"

...and kaleidors:

"How do you decide which mythical beings are real in Toby's world? Along with kitsune, are oni, kappa and tengu real? How about jiang shi? What about Abalone Woman from the mythology of northern California? When the fae came from Europe, did they displace or remove natives, or was there no one in California? (I remember talk about settling briefly in the book, but I cannot recall the particulars)."

Interesting questions!

First, the out-universe answer. All fae in Toby's world trace their lineage back to some combination of Oberon, Maeve, and Titania. Some have two of the First in their background, some only have one. The Cait Sidhe have all three, but they're a special case (as they so often are). This means that only mythical creatures whose backgrounds are somehow malleable can be subsumed into Toby's world. Kitsune, Tengu, Bakemono, Tsukumogami, Shi-Shu, Menehune, Nawao, and other creatures who don't have a very firm "and then so-and-so begat..." or who were originally presented as a lone individual and can be made into a race (such as the Blodynbryd) exist in Toby's reality. Other creatures, such as most of those found in Australian mythology, and pretty much all of Inuit or Native American folklore, don't exist, because there's no respectful way to say "and Oberon was your daddy's daddy's daddy, yay!" It's a juggling act. If I were establishing the rules of this universe today, I would probably either keep it more Euro-centric, to avoid possibly disrespecting another culture's folklore, or find a way to incorporate other fae monarchs in other places. I didn't do that when I wrote the first book, and so these are the rules I have to work with. If they're not descended from the Three, they don't exist.

Oh, and jiang shi don't exist because they're very explicitly dead in every accounting I can find. They'll eventually show up in InCryptid, which has very different rules.

Now, the in-universe answer:

We've established that all fae races trace their lineage back to the Three, by way of their Firstborn, who are the immediate descendants (children, although not always in a recognizeable sense) of the Three. The Undine, for example, were wept, not born, but are still children of Maeve. This includes Faerie's various monsters, although, so far as anyone knows, all the monsters are the result of the Firstborn tinkering, not the Three themselves. (This may or may not be true. I haven't decided, and since it's one of my few bits of beautiful indecision, I'm holding it for a while.) Regardless, everything in Faerie finds its way back to the Three, one way or another.

Here's where it gets complicated. The children of the Three are Firstborn, and while they can be similar, they are always entirely unique in all the world. Most of them can blend into their own descendant races, pretending to be what they create, but they'll always stand a little bit apart, no matter how hard they try to disappear. They get good with illusions and minor shapeshifts, because otherwise, they'd never have any peace. No one knows how many Firstborn are still alive. They don't want anyone to know.

The libraries track the lineages and the origin points, when they're known. Good luck getting a pass to the stacks.

Any time a Firstborn takes a new lover and has children, the child or children will begin a new race. Firstborn are more fertile than normal fae, partially because otherwise, no races would ever become established. The Roane Firstborn, for example, had three children, and those three went on to beget all the rest of the Roane. As for when the last time this happened was...

Firstborn still exist. Firstborn may still have children. So maybe it was yesterday. But things move slowly in Faerie, and children are only born so fast. So who knows?

Here's the second post in my promised series of five about aspects of Toby's world that may or may not be covered in the books. Our question, from beccastareyes:

"Are there other geographic divisions among the fae besides those that live underwater and those who live on land? Are there duchies/counties/etc. where one must be able to fly, or ones situated underground, or places of great heat or cold?"

Oh, are there ever.

The simplest way to divide Faerie is by element. You have land fae, water fae, sky fae, and "we live in a volcano, no, you can't come over for dinner, WE LIVE IN A FUCKING VOLCANO" fae (er, fire fae). Most of the Toby books deal with land fae, since Toby herself can't fly, live in lava, or breathe underwater. (Since this is a magical universe, she can do any of those things with help. She doesn't always have help. Or want help. Or hold still long enough to be helped, since "let me throw you in this volcano" is not her idea of assistance.)

That's the simple form.

The land kingdoms are divided into temperate areas (IE, anyplace where humans can live without major protective gear), along with frozen kingdoms, high desert kingdoms, and deep forest kingdoms. The elevation divisions—high mountain and underground—are technically considered "land," but are also considered "border zones" (more on this later).

Most of the land kingdoms are inhabitable by most of the fae races, with some exceptions. Land-bound water fae (undine, who are always fresh water, rusalki, who are water fae, but don't do oceans) can't survive in the desert; neither can the true cold fae, like the snow fairies, some of whom would actually melt. True desert fae, like the peri, don't like cold climates, although not all of them would die if subjected to cold. And naturally, most fae who live in a human range, like the Daoine Sidhe, will die of frostbite or dehydration if forced to go out without the proper gear.

The water kingdoms are divided primarily into fresh and salt; the Undersea doesn't include the freshwater fae, most of whom are treated as land denizens, due to lack of a coherent governing body in every single pond. The saltwater kingdoms are divided into the shallows, the middle-sea, and the deeps. Merrow can handle shallows or the middle-sea, but not the very bottom of the deeps. Cephali can handle the middle-sea and the deeps, but become very uncomfortable in the shallows. There are stories about some of the things that live in the deeps. Bad stories. For the most part, no one goes down there, because for the most part, people aren't idiots.

The sky kingdoms are the least divided, because, thus far, no fae have been confirmed capable of breathing in a vacuum. So they live in the clouds and pray no one flies a plane through their living room. Storm fae help with this. Good luck finding the capital city. It drifts.

The fire kingdoms are all very isolated, and very little is known about them, on account of the part where they're ON FIRE ALL THE TIME. They are the only kingdom which does not yet have reliable wireless.

Now, borders.

Every kingdom borders on every other. Land/sea border = shoreline. Land/sky border = mountains. Land/fire border = deep caverns. Sea/sky border = more nebulous; usually weather patterns. Sea/fire border = deep rifts. And yes, there are fae basically everywhere. The land fae are the most accustomed, and adapted, to living with humans, and even they don't tend to like us very much.

Biology: Faerie does it weird.

Yesterday I said that, to celebrate the upcoming release of One Salt Sea, I would once again make five blog posts detailing the background aspects of Toby's reality. This is the first of those posts.

liret asks "Can parents of changelings send their child off to the Summerlands alone and stay with their mortal spouses? I got the impression that Amandine was as stuck as Toby after Toby went through the Changeling's Choice, but I was wondering if arranging for a foster-family and writing the kid off was also possible."

The short answer: No.

The longer-form answer is, naturally, a little more complex.

For those of you who aren't aware, the Changeling's Choice is the process via which changeling children (fae/human crossbreeds) are presented with the two sides of their heritage. Pick fae, be whisked away to Faerie and never see your human family again. Pick mortal, your fae parent has to kill you on the spot. There are no takebacks; this is not something that can be negotiated. The Changeling's Choice is a necessary part of playing fairy bride.

The only exceptions are the weak-blooded fae, like Stacy or Marcia. Their magic was clearly strong enough to have triggered the Changeling's Choice at some point, since they're in Faerie, but if either of them were to have children with a human, there's a fifty/fifty chance that those kids would never manifest measurable magic, which means the Choice would never be triggered. (This is how we wind up with merlins.) Toby slept with Cliff knowing she might get pregnant, and chose to ride the odds as to whether Gilly would fall into that "magic too weak to become visible" sub-category. Since Gilly is still with her mortal family, and they haven't noticed anything unusual about her, Toby's gamble appears to have paid off.

Now, here's the thing: when a changeling is removed from the mortal world, either through abduction or death, they don't just vanish. That would leave too many questions unanswered, and could result in people searching for their children long past the point where it would be safe for Faerie to have them looking. Toby's father found bodies in the remains of the house; Natasha and October Daye were both declared dead, and were buried in Colma. Toby's father is buried next to what he assumed was his wife, but was actually a night-haunt's mannequin.

So could someone send their kid packing and stay with their mortal spouse? Sure, if they were able to convince their liege (and everyone has a liege, even if it's just the local King or Queen) that they could absolutely sell the idea that their child was dead, find a foster family, get the kid to choose Faerie, ship the kid off without getting caught, and manage to weather the aftermath of the "accident" without making any mistakes or getting accused of murder. Hint: this is very, very hard, especially given that most fae are incredibly attached to their children. Many purebloods think of human lovers as nothing more than a convenient way to get a baby, and would never even consider picking a spouse over a child.

In the event that a fae parent somehow convinced their liege that they could pull all this off, and then actually did manage to pull it all off, they would never be allowed to see that child again, and would have a seriously hard time convincing other fae to date them, since they have just proven that they're shitty parents. (I am aware that this is an apparent contradiction, given the fae fosterage system. Most societies are built on minor contradictions, and at least under normal fosterage, you'll eventually get the kid back. You know. When they finish being a teenager.)

So it's logistically hard, emotionally difficult, and culturally frowned upon. Technically, it's possible. Functionally, it's something no fae parent would really consider doing, even if they wanted to.

Since I have a book coming out in a week, I figure it's time to once again offer to answer your questions about the world. So...

I will make five blog posts detailing aspects of Toby's universe. Ask me anything! I will not answer every question, but will select the five that I think are the most interesting/fun/relevant, and will detail them to my heart's content. There's a lot to learn and know, and asking loses you nothing.

Leave your questions on this post. I'm declaring comment-reply amnesty for any that I choose not to answer this time, since otherwise, my wee head may explode.

Game on!

ETA: Things covered last time we did this: inheritance, fosterage, madness, historical records, and Cait Sidhe court structure.

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 )

Since I'm currently trying to clear out all the older reviews from my link file, thus enabling me a) to post reviews of newer books while they're still, you know, new, and b) to find the non-review links I saved because I wanted to write about them, I thought I should take a moment to explain my position on reviews. Namely...

1. I don't link to every positive review I find.
Yes, good is good, and everybody likes a little good news, but some reviews are very brief, or don't say anything especially new. I appreciate and am honored by every review that I receive. That doesn't mean I want to subject people to the all-reviews, all-the-time channel. That's a good way to get myself hit.

2. I don't go looking for reviews.
I'm way past the point of ego-surfing looking for reviews of my books, and I've found that, on the whole, I'm happier if I only read the things people email me links to, or that are found by my Google spiders. So if I don't post about your awesome review full of witty comments and deep thoughts, it may be because I never saw it. Or it may be because, as now, I'm three books behind in the file. Both things can happen.

3. I don't read Amazon or Goodreads reviews at all.
This is a hard rule. For serious. Some of the reviews posted on those sites seem to have been written by people who think authors don't have feelings, and while I try to say "judging the work, not judging me," it's really hard when people get personal. So I just don't go there, and everyone stays happier.

4. I don't generally link to negative reviews unless they have something really interesting to say.
I've had a few people say, somewhat sharply, that I'm a Pollyanna when it comes to reviews; I just post the good ones. This is largely true. There are two reasons for this: one is selfish, and one is altruistic. Selfishly...this is my journal. Why should I link to people saying bad things about my stories? I love those stories. They're my babies. Altruistically, most of the people who read this journal are here because they love those stories, too. I don't want to unleash a swarm of flying monkeys on some blogger who was just having an honest opinion, and then found themselves unexpectedly linked to by the author. It's not nice, it's not fair, and I'm not that kind of a girl.

5. I make no promises as to the timeliness of my links.
I have had one reviewer—just one—email and yell at me because their long, thoughtful review hadn't been linked to three weeks after it was posted. It's August, and I'm posting reviews from October. I love linking to reviews. It makes me happy. But wow, are there no guarantees as to when it's going to happen.

A vague disclaimer is nobody's friend!

So there's been a spate recently of people going "What's the status on _________?" or "Where can I buy _________?" This is usually referring to either the Lycanthropy books or the print edition of Sparrow Hill Road, although I've also had a somewhat surprising number of inquiries about print editions of "Velveteen vs." Here, then, is my across-the-board answer:

If I am able to give the status on a project (sold, in print, not yet shopping, not yet finished), I will. I am not in any way shy about going "OH MY GOD YOU GUYS GUESS WHAT?!" I will probably give you this status whether you want it or not, whether you care about it or not, and whether you ask me or not. And just to live up to this statement, my confirmed publications for the remainder of 2011 and the beginning of 2012 are...

One Salt Sea, novel, September. Toby Daye book five.
"Cinderella City," short story, in the collection Human For A Day, December.
"Flower of Arizona," short story, in the collection Westward Weird, February.
Discount Armageddon, novel, March. InCryptid book one.
"We Will Not Be Undersold," short story, in the collection The Modern Fae's Guide to Surviving Humanity, March.

The third Newsflesh book, Blackout, will be published in May 2012.

I have a few other short stories slated for publication, but don't have release dates and/or permission to announce them yet. See, once something is sold, I am unable to tell people until I am given permission from the publisher—it's part of the standard contract. So if I'm not telling you where you can buy something, it's because there's a "can't" involved. Either you can't buy it, or I can't tell you. Either way, please, please believe me when I say that anything I am allowed to share, I share as quickly as I can, to keep my own head from exploding. This includes information about audio books and foreign editions.

Thank you for understanding. And stuff.

We are now twelve days from the release of Late Eclipses [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy]. I'm starting to freak out, and that means it's time to talk about things that make authors freak out. Here are twelve things about authors.

12. Asking an author who has just released a book (or is in pre-release for a book) "When's the next one?" is like asking a woman who's nine months pregnant "When's the next one?", only the author is probably not nine months pregnant, and is thus more likely to hit you. I am aware that this metaphor makes me out to be one of those faintly frightening women with twelve children, planning for twelve more. It's still true.

11. Most authors don't know where their ideas come from. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't ask; I seriously doubt I could be the one who killed that question in the hearts and minds of readers everywhere (although if I was, SFWA would probably saint me). It just means that when we answer you, we're probably lying.

10. No, that nice author you met on the bus once doesn't want to read your manuscript. I'm sorry. That nice dentist you met on the bus once doesn't want to clean your teeth for free, either.

9. An author on deadline is faintly neurotic, faintly obsessive, faintly hysterical, faintly depressed, and faintly insane. Sometimes just one of these; sometimes all five. Poke at your own risk.

8. Most authors are writing the genres they're writing because they love them. Telling a romance writer he or she should write a real book is a good way to find out how heavy that romance writer's satchel or purse really is.

7. I would do anything for love, but I won't do that. I would, however, do that for research, especially since research, unlike love, is tax-deductible.

6. Authors who say "I'm staying home to write on Friday night" aren't saying "I am lonely, please save me from myself." They're saying "I'm staying home to write on Friday night." This goes double for authors with day jobs.

5. I dare anyone who says writing isn't work to copy-edit and revise a three hundred page manuscript in under a month. Oh, and it has to be better when you finish than it was when you started. If you can do that, you can say anything you want.

4. Authors tend to be fiscally conservative, because there's rarely a guarantee of when the next check will come. This makes us dangerous in warehouse stores. We really do go "I could totally buy enough toilet paper wholesale to survive nuclear winter." Never look in an author's pantry.

3. Ways not to introduce yourself to a working author: "Nice to meet you. I read your last book, and it was shit." If you do that, please expect to get "Nice to meet you. I hope you have medical insurance," as a reply.

2. Everything eventually shows up in a book. Everything. Yes, even that. No, we're not trying to be mean. It's just how our brains work.

1. Authors write because we have to. It's how we're made. So please forgive us for those Friday nights, okay?

We are now thirteen days from the release of Late Eclipses [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy], and to celebrate, here are thirteen things about San Francisco!

13. Yes, parking is as difficult to find as I make it out to be in the Toby books. In fact, it's usually slightly worse; because Toby has magic (and narrative flow), she usually manages to find street parking after only a paragraph or two of driving around. The rest of us usually wind up paying for our parking. Lucky Toby.

12. In areas like Valencia, you can walk for miles without seeing a Starbucks, although you will encounter dozens of small, independent coffee shops and cafes. In areas like North Beach and the Financial District, you can find a Starbucks every two blocks. It's like the city has a median average to maintain, and has decided to dump them all in the same place.

11. Many San Francisco natives rarely, if ever, visit the rest of the Bay Area, and are surprised when interesting things happen in the East Bay. (Not 100% true, but definitely supported by my personal experience.)

10. San Francisco is a city which never met a hill it didn't think "hey, I could put houses there, and people will totally figure out how to park at an eighty-seven degree angle." And because parking is at such a premium, people do.

9. It may be apocryphal that Mark Twain once said the coldest summer he ever spent was in San Francisco, but there's a reason so many people believe it. Thanks to the marine layer, we often have heat waves in December, and cold snaps in July.

8. Despite the hills and the messed-up weather, we still have joggers. Joggers are insane.

7. San Francisco's pigeon population is fairly epic, and most of them are pretty healthy, because there's so much food dropped by the tourist trade. Also, they eat their own sick. It's disturbing and fascinating, like an avian recreation of The Lottery.

6. Cable cars, not really worth it. No, seriously. They're not.

5. Ghirardeli Square sells a sundae called "The Earthquake" which costs around twenty dollars and needs at least five people to eat it. It's a towering monument to gluttony, and all visitors to our fair city should treat it as a mandatory undertaking. Unless you're lactose intolerant or diabetic.

4. San Francisco proper covers a span of 46.7 square miles. That's why we have South San Francisco, San Bruno, and Colma. Because otherwise, we'd run out of space really, really fast.

3. A team of fae without human disguises on could probably run the Bay to Breakers without anyone saying anything but "cool costumes, man."

2. The Ferry Building Farmer's Market is one of the best in the state. It's huge, diverse, and a little bit scary, since who really needs an heirloom tomato the size of a human head? Me, that's who. Now gimme.

1. I do an incredible amount of geographic research when introducing a new location in the Toby books. Half of it gets thrown out the window in the interests of not turning into a guidebook, but I do it. And this city is really weird. That's what makes it so great.

We're fourteen days from the release of Late Eclipses, my fourth published urban fantasy! And so I give you fourteen things about urban fantasy that I think you ought to know. You're welcome.

14. Urban fantasy has its roots in fairy tales and folk stories. Remember that when "Little Red Riding Hood" or "The Boy Who Had No Fear" were first being told, they were about contemporary people, in contemporary settings. Despite its relatively recent resurgence in popularity, urban fantasy is a very old genre.

13. You can usually tell the difference between urban fantasy and paranormal romance based on the covers (but not always). If the woman has a head and all her clothes, it's probably urban fantasy. If she's naked or headless, it's probably paranormal romance. If it's a fully-clothed man, it's definitely urban fantasy. If it's a shirtless man, it's definitely paranormal romance. Both genres like brooding gazes and leather trousers.

12. Not all urban fantasy is set in cities; you get urban fantasy set in small towns, rural areas, and even the suburbs. "Urban fantasy" is just a convenient label.

11. Much modern urban fantasy draws aspects from westerns, film noir, horror movies, fairy tales, and yes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's a good genre for magpies and people who enjoy writing snarky dialogue.

10. One of the big advantages of urban fantasy is the way it lends itself to writing series. If you want to do twelve books about the adventures of your Ikeamancer, you're a lot more likely to succeed in urban fantasy than in any other genre.

9. One of the big disadvantages of urban fantasy is the way it lends itself to writing series. Stories set in these worlds tend to splinter, and because the readers are there, it's harder to resist the urge to just roll with it. (I am a natural serial thinker, so this is perfect for me. Other people, it ends in tears.)

8. No, not all urban fantasy involves sex you don't want your mother reading.

7. The label "urban fantasy" is just an umbrella for something that can include comedy, horror, romance, adventure, mystery, wackiness, and good old-fashioned caper stories. It provides a frame. Individual authors will provide the details.

6. A lot of the issues people have with urban fantasy covers are there to give a visual clue as to the contents of the book. Tattoos, leather pants, and impractical shoes have become hallmarks of the genre, and they're likely to be on the cover whether or not they appear between it.

5. I created Verity Price partially to justify having a heroine wearing impractical shoes. I'm probably not the only one.

4. Good urban fantasy is enthralling because it's so immediate. The present-day world is there; all you need to do is buy into the changes.

3. Bad urban fantasy is bad because it's so immediate. The present-day world is there, and changes that aren't supported by the text are going to be jarring in the extreme.

2. Most urban fantasy writers are writing what they do because they love it. That's why it's such a rich, varied genre right now, with so many things to offer. Urban fantasy really does have something for everyone.

1. I love it, and read it, too.

(This post was supposed to go up yesterday, when we were fifteen days from the official release of Late Eclipses. I was ill, and so it didn't get posted, and you are thus getting a double-dip today. Either I'm sorry or you're welcome, depending on your point of view.)

15. Formal courtship is still alive and well in Faerie, and involves a great deal of poetry, flowers, and elaborate ritual. It is customary for the person being courted to thank the person doing the courting for each step after the first, to remind them that they have an obligation to finish what they've started. If you see a couple of moon-struck young fae thanking each other a lot, they're engaged in a formal courtship.

14. Most purebloods speak and utilize the ritual language of flowers when courting; every bouquet is a poem in and of itself. Never buy a Daoine Sidhe flowers from Safeway, you'll just confuse them.

13. The majority of fae marriages do not result in children, and are dissolved without issue by the participants. In these cases, it's not even really considered a "divorce," so much as a parting of the ways, and there is almost always no resentment between them. In some cases, people will even dissolve a marriage, and then turn around and marry the siblings of their former spouses, just because they're bored, but enjoy the overall dynamic of their extended family.

12. Same-sex marriage is relatively common, and even well-regarded, especially by families who do not have titles of their own; long-term fostering leading to formal adoption will usually provide these couples with an heir, and provide the foster's original family with a closer tie to the nobility.

11. Setting quests for a suitor is acceptable, if currently somewhat out of fashion for anyone lower in rank than the heir of a Duke.

10. Because sexual relations with a mortal are not considered infidelity, many married couples will take human lovers from time to time, just to break up the tedium.

9. Marriage to a human is not considered legal or binding under fae law. Consequentially, all changelings are considered bastards.

8. Purebloods have access to incredibly rich, complicated foods in the Summerlands. Their wines are beyond mortal comprehension, their cakes a doorway into divinity. This does not prevent them really, really liking Hershey's chocolate. Many otherwise expensive courtships are heavily centered around Mr. Goodbar. No one knows why.

7. Arranged marriage still occurs among some races of fae. This is a hold-over from when Faerie was very young, and they needed to make sure people were as distantly related as possible. (Fae genetics are weird and not the topic here, and all members of any given race are descended from the same First, but they still wanted to avoid marrying their sisters when possible.) The underground races are especially fond of arranged marriage.

6. But not the Gremlins. Gremlins marry for love, or because you have a really big...forge. There's nothing a Gremlin girl likes better than a man with a really big forge.

5. There are different rules for courtship between a man and a woman, two men, two women, a man and two women, or a woman and two men. Beyond that, they sort of make it up as they go along.

4. Yes, group marriage occurs. It's especially common among Centaurs, Satyrs, Cetacea, and Gremlins. As a rule, we don't ask. Especially not about the Gremlins.

3. It is considered exceedingly rude to break off a courtship in the middle for anything short of "My liege has arranged a marriage for me" or "We're going to war." Once the courting period has been finished and you're just dating, it becomes a lot more acceptable.

2. Watching really traditional purebloods try to court their human lovers is funnier than anything currently on weeknight TV.

1. The fae believe in true love. Even when it hurts them. And because they're going to live forever, they're usually willing to wait until the time is right to buckle down and pursue it. This can make them infuriating to humans and changelings, because they're so damn slow...but when they marry for love, it tends to be forever.

I recently volunteered to make five detailed blog posts on things people wanted to know about the Toby universe, and provided a dedicated thread for them to make their suggestions. While these posts will not be specifically spoiler-y for published books, they will provide background material on the universe, and can be viewed as part of my functional canon. This is the fourth such post.

sumeria asks, "How relevant really is the existence of "royal" members of the Cait Sidhe, if they determine the ruler by combat? I had assumed there was no real royal family until Tybalt made such a big deal of Raj being the only younger royal there was and Toby seemed to assume that Raj would one day replace Tybalt. Or is it just that only royals can fight for the right to rule? (also, the assumption that Tybalt will be replaced seems odd to me, just in that if he's immortal, he should theoretically grow stronger, not weaken with age)"

Come one, come all, to the Jellicle Ball! It's time to talk Cait Sidhe.

Now, the first thing we have to address is "Why do the Cait Sidhe get their own government?" The short form is that they went to Oberon and petitioned him for it, and he was so impressed by the fact that they had the audacity to do so that he gave them what they wanted. Ask and ye shall receive, in other words. Part of what made it possible for them to get away with it is their relationship with the Shadow Roads. There are other races in Faerie, like the Candela, who can access something similar, but only the Cait Sidhe can use the Shadow Roads for distance travel, or to connect places that are geographically unconnected. So when they asked for their own government, they were able to promise that their Courts would only use space that no one else had a claim to. At the time, the Cait Sidhe had a good relationship with all three of their Firstborn, and were able to get them to back the claim. So the Court of Cats was born.

The Court of Cats is not subject to the whims of the local monarchy, although it is subject to Oberon's Laws...with one major exception. Cait Sidhe are permitted to kill each other over succession, providing it happens openly, and is not a matter of assassination. They have a violent society, and their laws reflect that.

Cait Sidhe don't handle succession the way the regular Courts do, in part because they accept all their changelings as full members of their society. It's rare to find a Cait Sidhe Court that doesn't include multiple human- and cat-form changelings, none of whom are looked down upon for the circumstances of their birth. This means that bloodlines get complicated, as there are Cait Sidhe who are the children of fae who were the children of a changeling and a pureblood, or quarter-blood children who were born in the Court and have never entered the mortal world. Many Cait Sidhe Kings and Queens have bevvies of changeling children, using their existence to prove that they can provide for their people. So heredity is not necessarily a factor. So what does "royal" mean?

"Royal," among the Cait Sidhe, is a measure of strength of magic. A royal Cait Sidhe must be able to travel the Shadow Roads without hindrance; carry others with them; transform from cat to human and back again, without any unwanted traits bleeding over from one shape to another; cast basic illusions; open doors between the deepest Court of Cats and the Summerlands; create Courts by hewing small spaces out of the Shadows and keeping them open, essentially as temporary shallowings, until they are no longer needed; command loyalty; and die and come back. This is not a comment set of skills. Most Cait Sidhe can access the Shadow Roads, cast illusions, and change forms...but not all of them. Some Cait Sidhe are always bipedal, or always cats. Some Cait Sidhe have tails in their human forms, or no tails in their cat forms. And so it goes.

There are also specific talents related to Kings of Cats and Queens of Cats, but that's something for another day.

Royal Cait Sidhe are relatively rare, which is probably a good thing, since it means that succession fights are also relatively rare. Most areas will have a King and a Queen, each with their own Court; Kings and Queens of Cats do not tend to get along very well, and will very rarely operate their Courts in the same city. In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, Tybalt maintains the Court of Dreaming Cats in San Francisco, while the nearest Queen is centered in Berkeley. They can, and do, enter one another's territory, but for the most part, they tend to stay in "their" cities.

Courts must have royals to stay stable. Their Kings and Queens are their protectors, and the lines which keep the Cait Sidhe from becoming totally lawless, and thus a danger to the rest of Faerie. Part of the agreement with Oberon was that the royal Cait Sidhe would do this thing, no matter how much they didn't want to.

Kings and Queens must take their thrones through combat. This is true. Most of the time, however, this combat is ritual at best; it's fairly rare for a sitting King or Queen who hasn't become a total despot to be forcibly deposed. Cats don't necessarily like responsibility, after all, and being King or Queen for all time is going to get boring. Kings and Queens of Cats tend to adopt potential heirs, train them, and then, if they judge the heirs to be suitable, essentially cede the throne. The fight still happens, and it's a pretty bloody one—the throne can't go to an unsuitable ruler—but it's not as serious as it would be if they didn't already intend to step down.

Toby assumes Raj will eventually take Tybalt's place because she assumes Tybalt will either a) get himself killed somehow, or b) get bored. He's been King of Dreaming Cats since the late 1800s, which isn't that long for a fae reign, but is a very long time for a cat. Also, the fact that he allows Raj to stay means that he's probably considering giving up his throne sometime in the next ten to seventy years.

Once Tybalt is no longer a King of a specific Court, he'll still be a King of Cats, and may eventually have another Court of his own. That won't happen until he's ready for it, however; witness Barbara from ALH Computing, who was a Queen without a dedicated Court, and seemed happy that way.

And that is Cait Sidhe succession. Any questions?

ETA: This is the "how do they govern" post, not the "detailed biology" post. No further questions about Cait Sidhe biology will be answered. Thank you for understanding.

I recently volunteered to make five detailed blog posts on things people wanted to know about the Toby universe, and provided a dedicated thread for them to make their suggestions. While these posts will not be specifically spoiler-y for published books, they will provide background material on the universe, and can be viewed as part of my functional canon. This is the third such post.

cbpotts says, "One wonders who keeps all the stories of the fae; have they historians or sociologists or a league appointed to keep track of a vaguely accurate record of everything important. It can't possibly be all word-of-mouth; there are too many people and it's too complex. So which of the Fae keep track of the rest of it?"

Ah, the fascinating life of the archivist and historian. I actually mean this—fae historians are more Indiana Jones than small-town librarian a lot of the time, since their books really can get pissed off and rewrite themselves, or turn you into stone, and sometimes, you really do lose entire libraries for three hundred years due to a don't-look-here charm gone horribly wrong. Sure, there's also a lot of time spent cataloging and filing things, but your job, really more fraught with peril than the average small-town librarian's (statement not universal to all small towns; Buckley, I'm looking at you...).

Every fae kingdom has a Library. Yes, with a capital-L; Libraries are a big, big deal. They're not affiliated with the local crown, and are instead considered neutral ground, answering only to Oberon...which means that for several hundred years now, they've been answering to nobody at all. That means that the filing has gotten a little lax, and there are a lot of uncollected overdue fines. Since the Libraries are considered neutral ground, they're often the subject of resentment from the local nobility, and with Oberon missing, that means they're also unprotected by anything beyond their own security. Most of them have gotten really picky about who they issue library cards to.

Most archivists, historians, and librarians apprentice to or even Foster with the Library itself when still young, being literally raised to the craft. Others come to it late in life, since the neutral status of the Libraries makes them the perfect place to flee for sanctuary. More than a few fae criminals have found second lives for themselves inside the Libraries, where as long as they follow the rules, they will be allowed to shelve books and transcribe manuscripts until they decide to go back outside and face the music. The Libraries are allowed to deal with their own as they see fit...which does include violations of the Law. So those who seek sanctuary with the librarians had better really, really mean it.

Traveling historians are generally considered untouchable, even by local nobles who would happily burn the Libraries themselves down if they thought they could get away with it. The fear of Oberon and his frequently rather heavy-handed enforcement of the rules hasn't gotten any weaker as time has gone by. Most historians are aware that this is a tenuous respect, and don't do anything to endanger it—basically, no one wants to be the straw that breaks the camel's back and causes the Kings and Queens to start testing the neutrality of the Libraries.

Periodically, Libraries will disappear, either due to natural disaster, someone "accidentally" dropping a match, or because they're anchored in Faerie, and Faerie is not a reliably predictable place. Sometimes they reappear again later. Other times, they don't. Some Libraries are hidden so well that they've basically disappeared, unless you know a guy who knows a guy who knows someone who has a library card. The Library in the Kingdom of the Mists is one of the missing ones; it was last seen during the reign of King Gilad. No one's really gone looking for it. Libraries are problematic, as they tend to maintain records, and records have an unpleasant habit of telling truths people don't want told.

The Library of the Kingdom of the Mists is called the House of Stars, for reasons that no one save for maybe the Librarians who work there can really explain. Assuming you can, you know, find them. The Head Librarian when the place when missing was a Puca named Magdaleana Brooke. The odds are decent that if the place still exists, she's still in charge. Without Oberon around to intervene, no new Library will be opened in the Mists to take its place.

And that's Libraries and archives. Any follow-up questions?

I recently volunteered to make five detailed blog posts on things people wanted to know about the Toby universe, and provided a dedicated thread for them to make their suggestions. While these posts will not be specifically spoiler-y for published books, they will provide background material on the universe, and can be viewed as part of my functional canon. This is the second such post, and is taken from multiple related questions.

faithfulcynic asked, "Can you break down Court hierarchy for us and talk a little about title inheritance? I know that the King of Cats has to be won but is that the same with other courts? Would a changeling ever have a shot at ruling a court? Could Sylvester ever rule them all? Does relationship to the Big Three play a part?"

hanabishirecca said, "Toby's universe has a complex system of fiefdoms and courts that have been seen to be caught in a supernatural version of real world politics. Sovereignty seems to be shaky in many cases...I don't necessarily want an entire political history lesson, but I'm fascinated with the division of territory. I'd love to know what it takes to be appointed your own title and piece of land, to what lies at the very top of the feudalistic rankings. Really, anything on this would make me happy."

And drakos_inferno said, "I'll echo a few other people—can we get a who's in charge flow chart of some sort?"

Let's talk politics! Yaaaaay!

So first off: who's in charge? Oberon. Dude doesn't even need a title. He's just, you know, Oberon. He's also missing, and has been for several hundred years, along with both Maeve and Titania, who are also in charge. When the three of them fight, watch out. They're collectively known as the King and Queens of Faerie; that's their territory, that's their fiefdom, and that's where their word is law. Again, however, missing, and even before they went missing, they needed the equivalent of local governments to save them from spending all their time telling their kids to stop hitting each other. Enter the fae system of governance. Now, the main thing to remember here is that all these people essentially serve at the pleasure of the President. If Oberon says you lose your throne, you lose your throne. If Titania says you're finished, you're finished. So fae monarchs are always, always aware that they could be deposed just for wearing shoes that Maeve doesn't like. For the most part, they muddle through anyway, because power is neat.

At the top of the non-Three fae government food chain, you have the High Kings and Queens. There's usually one of them to a region, with "region" being determined by a combination of population density, amount of time the fae have been living in the region, and whether anyone's gone to war to schism off a new High Demesne. (Note: This is a dangerous proposition. If you don't have the buy-in from the majority of the current reigning High Kings and Queens, no one's going to help you do it, and you're going to get your ass kicked.) There are currently quite a few High Demesnes, but the one we're primarily concerned with is North America, the royal seat of which is located in Toronto.

The original High Kings and Queens were chosen by Oberon, Maeve, and Titania, and were a fairly broad representation of the races and ideals of Faerie. In the modern era, most of them are Daoine Sidhe. Make of this what you will (and hint, "we like assassinating people for their thrones, it's fun" is a perfectly reasonable line of thought). At this point, the title is hereditary, unless you manage to get yourself deposed. High Kings and Queens have absolute authority over those Kingdoms contained in their High Demesne, unless contradicted by one of the Three, which hasn't happened recently (for obvious reasons). They mostly don't mess with things, unless those things are threatening to mess with them.

Once the original High Kings and Queens were chosen, they proceeded to choose Regional Kings and Queens. Think of it as sort of like the relationship between the President of the United States and the Governor of Oregon. Yes, the President is technically the boss of him, but odds are good that he can do almost anything he wants, short of killing his constituents, before the President gets involved. Again, these positions started as a good racial and idealistic mix, and have managed to maintain a bit more of their diversity, largely because a sitting monarch can only be deposed by a) the Three or b) actual warfare—taking a throne away from someone without a good reason is one of the only things the High Kings and Queens can't do. So once the Daoine Sidhe started deposing the High Kings and Queens, the Regional Kings and Queens got a lot more passionate about maintaining large armies. It's fun! Again, once given a throne, the throne is hereditary, and will remain with a family until that family is wiped out, deposed, or manages to piss off the Three.

Now we hit the tricky part. See, not all parts of a High Demesne will be part of a Regional Kingdom. In North America, for example, the High King and Queen maintain Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland and Labrador as their own private holdings; the first Regional Kingdoms are Frozen Sun (Manitoba and Minnesota, roughly) to the west, and Lakes to the south. That means that all crimes committed in the private holdings of the High King and Queen go straight to them, with no intermediate monarch. Sort of like going to the Supreme Court over a traffic ticket. Oddly, this doesn't make their populace any better-behaved.

Let's keep things getting trickier. Dukes/Duchesses, Marquis/Marquessas, Counts/Countesses, Viscounts/Viscountesses, Barons/Baronesses, Earls, Lords/Ladies, Knights, and a variety of other lesser nobles fall under the Kings and Queens. Most of the time, it'll follow the ranking of the list above. But not always. In some areas, a Marquis may be considered to outrank a Duke (not many, however). This is basically the local ruler's to decide. There are quite a few unlanded nobles at this point, thanks to Faerie's many, many wars, and an unlanded noble will always be outranked by a landed noble of the same title. So...Sylvester, a Duke, outranks Evening, a Countess. Simon, an unlanded Baron, outranks Toby, a knight, but would be outranked by a landed Baron. Again, all these titles tend to be hereditary...

Unless, of course, your children are changelings. Changelings cannot inherit lands or titles from their fae parents. They can be granted by the crown, but that is the only way for them to rise in fae governance, and even then, it's going to be very local. Toby was knighted by Sylvester. Most people in the Mists will respect that, if only to avoid pissing off Shadowed Hills. If Toby were to travel to the Kingdom of Angels, who knows what would happen? A changeling can, of course, take a title by force of arms, but any changeling who chose to do that would need to be prepared to have a lot of people gunning for them. A lot of people.

Titles are passed either when the title-holder dies, as in the case of King Gilad Windermere, the former regent of the Mists, or when the title-holder chooses to step down and cede all right to their place. This prevents assassinations, at least most of the time. The only way a forsaken title can be reclaimed is if the current holder dies with no named heir, and the former title-holder is judged entirely without blame in their death. This doesn't happen very often. There are some "lost" titles, connected to objects, family lines, missing knowes, or ancient mysteries. It's doubtful whether those claims could be proven if they were brought forth, but wouldn't it be fun to try?

You'll note that the Kings and Queens of Cats are not covered here. This is because they are considered, by Oberon's edict, to essentially have diplomatic immunity in any of the "noble" Courts, so long as they don't go interfering. They settle their succession in completely different, and usually quite bloody, ways.

So that's the quick and dirty version of politics in Toby's world. If you have any follow-up questions, feel free to ask them here.

I recently volunteered to make five detailed blog posts on things people wanted to know about the Toby universe, and provided a dedicated thread for them to make their suggestions. While these posts will not be specifically spoiler-y for published books, they will provide background material on the universe, and can be viewed as part of my functional canon. This is the first such post.

Quoth seawench:

"What are the rules for fostering fae children like Quentin? How long do they have to stay? Do the fae families get anything in return? If children are so precious, why would parents give them up for extended periods? Do fae families ever foster changelings, or do they only foster purebloods? Are fae parents more likely to foster children with another fae race, or within their own?"

Fosterage! I love fae fosterage. Basically, it's the system via which fae children, especially the children of fae nobles, can be shipped off to live with other households for a certain period of time. There are five basic types of fosterage: Educational, Economic, Exchange, Protective, and Control. To complicate things a bit further, there are two styles of fosterage: Open, and Blind. The types of fosterage break down as follows.

* Educational. You're shipping a kid off to learn something he or she couldn't learn at home, whether that's "how to deal with living near the ocean," "how to handle a large mortal population," or "how they do it in the Kingdom of Silences." Most fosters in the equivalent of their teens are sent out for educational reasons. The general consensus in Faerie is that the young are better at learning to adapt to extreme situations; children are expected to get the bulk of their education before they reach maturity. After that, they may apprentice to a trade, but that's learning specialized things, not general "how the world works." Many, if not most, noble children will be sent on an educational fosterage if they're expected to inherit someday, because they need to learn to deal with people outside their home fiefdom.

* Economic. You can't afford to keep your child properly, either because you literally don't have the resources, or because you do some sort of job that doesn't allow for childrearing (sailors, soldiers, some specialized diplomatic positions). It's considered lucky and important to have a child, even if they don't live with you, and some fae have used the proof of fertility represented by an economic fosterage to further their positions in life. It is extremely rare for an economic foster to be returned to his or her original parents, and some will even be adopted by the families which foster them. When changelings are fostered, it is almost always for economic reasons, and they are almost always taken by families who are already fostering one or more pureblooded children. This provides playmates for the purebloods, without the necessity of stealing babies from the mortal world (historically popular, currently frowned upon).

* Exchange. You give me one, I give you one. Exchange fosterages are rare, simply because they require two households of relatively equal social standing to have children of approximately the same age. In cases where this occurs, the children will be swapped for a pre-determined period of time, allowing for the creation of an educational fosterage with the additional benefit of strengthening ties between the households.

* Protective. There is a reasonably good chance your household is about to be wiped out for political reasons. Your fiefdom has just gone to war. There's a dragon in your backyard. For whatever reason, your kids are no longer safe, and need to be shipped off to live somewhere else until they can be sure nothing's going to eat them back home. Protective fosterages can be very short, lasting only a few weeks. They can also turn unintentionally permanent.

* Control. Nobles will sometimes insist that the children of those lesser nobles within their domain come and live with them as fosters for a certain period of time. This does a lot to keep the lesser nobility from rebelling. It's also the most miserable type of fosterage, and sometimes backfires, as some fae parents will decide to go ahead and rebel anyway, since they have nothing left to lose.

Multiple types of fosterage can be combined, with educational/exchange and educational/protective being the most common. The styles of fosterage are somewhat simpler:

* Open. "This is Carl, the son of Bob and Marsha. He'll be staying with us for a little while."

* Blind. "This is Suzy. She lives here now."

The only type of fosterage that can't be blind is control, since you tend to lose control when you don't tell anyone whose kid you've got there. Quentin is on a blind educational fosterage; he's stated several times that he's in Shadowed Hills to learn, and no one seems to know who his parents are. There can be a lot of reasons for that, ranging from "his parents are criminals" to "his parents have a lot of enemies" to "we just don't want people sucking up to him because of who his family is." Shadowed Hills is a generally ill-regarded Duchy, since it tends to be modernist, so it's most likely to be one of the former, although nobody knows for sure except, presumably, Sylvester.

The length of a fosterage is set by both the parents and the foster parents, and can range from "until I can come to get him" to "until she reaches maturity." Declaring someone as your foster makes you legally responsible for them, and releases their biological parents from that responsibility, until the fosterage has been dissolved. A foster parent can't dissolve the fosterage unless the child does something so incredibly bad that they have no choice; abandoning a foster without really, really good reason is considered the height of impropriety, and the fae care a lot about such things.

Fae families can be compensated for fostering a child/allowing their children to be fostered in a variety of ways, ranging from reputation ("My child is fostered with the High King") to improved marriage prospects ("My son is being fostered by the family of the girl he's going to marry") to not being invaded ("My daughter, um, isn't here anymore..."). Some families are compensated financially; this usually happens with the parents of changelings whose children are being essentially purchased to be playmates for purebloods.

Fae parents give up their children for many of the same reasons humans do. They want them to have better lives; they want them to have good educations; they want them to be safe; they don't have a choice in the matter.

Most fosters are sent to live with families of a race that is the same as, or closely related to, their own. This is by no means universal, but it's considered "the norm." Daoine Sidhe will almost never choose foster parents who aren't also Daoine Sidhe, while Gremlins will foster to anyone who owns a forge and doesn't mind being asked a lot of questions.

Speaking of questions...are there any follow-up questions on fosterage? No spoilers, please.

5. I love country music. Mostly modern country, Christian Kane and Little Big Town and Taylor Swift, but I also love that sappy old dead dogs and pickup trucks country that you find on AM radio at six in the morning. I inherited my love of the genre from my grandmother, who was respectable and stoic and could bellow along with "Fancy" like nobody's business.

4. When I'm having a bad day and want comfort food, I go home and curl up with a big bowl of frozen peas that have been heated in the microwave. All I put on them is a) salt, and b) pepper. This stems from a childhood misinterpretation of what chickpeas were, when the characters in a book I loved ate "fresh hot buttered chickpeas."

3. My family was very, very poor when I was younger. As a consequence, I think that butter tastes horrible, because we always got a brick of government butter in our "please don't starve to death" box. Margarine, on the other hand, is the taste of luxury. I had a bad margarine habit for a while after getting my first job, and bought a tub every time I went to the store.

2. I am very superstitious, and very picky about my superstitions. I count crows, pick up pennies, and occasionally look for auguries in bags of M&Ms. I do not, however, freak out when I see a funeral procession, or insist on touching my collar and asking magpies how their wives are. This helps me strike a good balance. Just never get between me and a street penny.

1. I have a paralyzing phobia of pudding, which extends to all "pudding-type" substances, including custard and overly-warm milkshakes. Suddenly biting into an unexpected cream filling has been known to make me throw up on the spot. Luckily, this does not extend to the unnatural white goo inside Twinkies.

So that's five things you may or may not know about me. What do you think I may or may not know about you?

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 )

So there's been a spate recently of people going "What's the status on _________?" or "Where can I buy _________?" This is usually referring to either the InCryptid books or the Lycanthropy books, although I've also had a somewhat surprising number of inquiries about print editions of "Velveteen vs." and Sparrow Hill (hint: even if I'm able to arrange for a print edition of Sparrow Hill, it won't be until well after the virtual edition has finished, since TEoP gets first crack at the series). Here, then, is my across-the-board answer:

If I am able to give the status on a project (sold, in print, not yet shopping, not yet finished), I will. I am not in any way shy about going "OH MY GOD YOU GUYS GUESS WHAT?!" I will probably give you this status whether you want it or not, whether you care about it or not, and whether you ask me or not. And just to live up to this statement, my confirmed publications for 2011, so far, are...

"Gimme a 'Z'!," short story, in the collection Zombiesque, February.
Late Eclipses, novel, March. Toby Daye book four.
"Alchemy of Alcohol," short story, in the collection After Hours: Tales From the Ur-Bar, March.
"The Girls Next Door," essay, in the essay collection Whedonistas, March.
Deadline, novel (as Mira Grant), May. Newsflesh book two.
One Salt Sea, novel, September. Toby Daye book five.

The third Newsflesh book, Blackout, will be published in 2012.

I have a few other short stories slated for publication, but don't have release dates and/or permission to announce them yet. See, once something is sold, I am unable to tell people until I am given permission from the publisher—it's part of the standard contract. So if I'm not telling you where you can buy something, it's because there's a "can't" involved. Either you can't buy it, or I can't tell you. Either way, please, please believe me when I say that anything I am allowed to share, I share as quickly as I can, to keep my own head from exploding.

And stuff.

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 )

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

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

Anyway, here you go:

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

1. Only four hours remain to enter my random drawing for an ARC of An Artificial Night! It's probably the simplest contest I'm going to have, so what have you got to lose, right? Besides, they're pretty. I like pretty things. I am a simple soul.

2. Speaking of pretty things, remember that the ALH pendant sale will be starting today at Chimera Fancies. I cannot possibly overstate how much I love Mia's pendants. If I were a wealthy woman, I'd just pay her to sit around and make them all day, and keep the bulk of her output for myself. Again, simple soul. Also, occasional magpie.

3. Leverage comes back this weekend! So You Think You Can Dance is back on the air! Cartoon Network has Unnatural History and Total Drama World Tour! Oh, I love you, summertime television. I love you so much, forever.

4. Tomorrow is my last pre-Westercon rehearsal with the fabulous Paul Kwinn, renowned in song and story, master of the meaningful look while wearing a gaudily-patterned shirt, husband of Beckett, whom I love beyond all reason. I'm very excited, despite the fact that I'm still occasionally coughing like I'm on the verge of actual death. It's gonna be awesome.

5. I have my editorial notes for Late Eclipses, and I'm busily incorporating them into the finished manuscript...while, possibly, fixing a few little language issues at the same time. It's been long enough since I touched this book that it appears to have been written by an alien, which is the best time for doing editorial. It's still my baby. It's just my weird alien baby, and that makes it more fun to autopsy.

6. Zombies are still love.

7. It's June already. That means we're getting closer and closer every day to my departure for Australia, LAND OF POISON AND FLAME, which I have only been dreaming about for most of my life. I'm so excited it's scary, and not just because I'm on the ballot for the Campbell (although that remains a constant GOTO loop at the back of my brain). I get to go to Australia! I get to breathe Australian air! My life is awesome sometimes.

8. We've entered the final stages of recording Wicked Girls, and it should, I hope, I pray, be able to make the October release date that I so optimistically set for myself. I'll be announcing the pre-orders soon, since that's how I finance mixing and mastering, and I'm really, really happy with this album, as a whole. It's just...it's what I wanted. And that's incredible.

9. I think the cats are stealing my will to leave the house. I just want to sleep.

10. I need more ARC contests! Suggest something. Be silly, be serious, request that I do your favorite all over again, whatever. I need ideas, and so I turn to you, the glorious Internet, to give them to me.

It's Friday!

1. I am almost ready for Marcon! If by "almost" you mean "a packing list has been made, although no actual packing has been done, and hey, look, I have a set list." I'll pack tonight when I get home; tomorrow, I'll decamp to Kate's, since we need to get up at four o'clock Thursday morning if we want to catch our flight. Oh, the things I do for the love of conventions.

2. Last night was one of those "sleep so hard you wake up feeling hung-over" nights. I appreciate this. I don't get many of those nights anymore, and after I get over hating the universe, I tend to be refreshed and peppy. This sometimes creeps people out, as they aren't accustomed to seeing me peppy. Full of pep! There is nothing more dangerous than a truly cheerful blonde.

3. I'm currently cleaning and indexing my room, as part of an ongoing attempt to get my possessions under something resembling control. In the process of so doing, I found three copies of my 2009 chapbook. Now, I was under the impression that I had sold all the copies of my 2009 chapbook, which means either a) I can't count, or b) three people didn't get their chapbooks. If you requested a chapbook and never got it, please let me know, so that we can sort out what happened (and you can finally get your poetry).

4. I've finally updated my Upcoming Appearances page to include appearances through June, as well as the two stops on the Murder and Mayhem Tour that I'm doing with jennifer_brozek. I'll be adding more information to the June/July appearances, but at least now people will basically know where I'm going to be.

5. An Artificial Night is now on Amazon! What's more, it's on Amazon with a release date (September 7th), and actually relevant-to-the-book information (rather than the carry-over description of A Local Habitation that appeared there initially). The cover isn't up yet, but I'll totally scream when it appears, because every time one of my books is actually fully on Amazon, an angel gets its wings. I want my own CELESTIAL HOST, dammit.

6. I've rewritten the first six chapters of The Brightest Fell, and suddenly, without warning, this book has started to actually WORK. It's not uncommon for me to spend a hundred pages or so wandering lost in the wilderness, but The Brightest Fell is a particularly hard book. It's the last of the Toby books that was started pre-publication, which means it's been shelved several times while I worked on more urgent projects. To make matters worse, it's complicated, and changes a lot of things about Toby's world. So it's been kicking my ass, and I have finally started kicking back.

7. Who found a copy of Kelley Armstrong's out-of-print Eve novella, Angelic, while she was at Dark Carnival in Berkeley? Would that be me? Why, yes, I do believe it would be. I'll be doing more book gloating later, but I needed to offer this little snippet now. Because dude.

8. The cats come running when they hear the opening theme from The West Wing, because they know it means I'll be sitting still for at least forty-five minutes. Possibly longer, if the power of their purring is enough to make me start a second episode. Yes, I have managed to train my cats into taking an interest in the democratic process. When Lilly takes the state to court for the right to vote, you have permission to blame me.

9. It's cherry season. You do not want to know how many pounds of cherries I've consumed in the last week and a half...but as a hint, I could probably reforest Utah with my cherry pips, and I am now capable of telling fortunes for the whole of Oregon.

10. Zombies are love.

Point the first: There has been an epic influx of new people around here in the past few days. Like, epic. The kind of influx which causes me to start doing careful web checks to see if someone has been claiming that I regularly give away chocolate, kittens, and live Suicide Girls. (Hint: I do not do any of these things.) In the end, I have to admit that I'm stumped. I don't know where y'all are coming from, and while I'm happy as heck to have you, I'd love to know where you're coming from. And yes, I get the part where I have a book coming out in three days and this might—might—potentially be influencing the sudden flood of new names and faces. Still.

Point the second: If you enter a CVS Drugs in search of the tiny, addictive balls of malted goodness called "Robin's Eggs" by the makers of Easter candy, you may find that there are no Robin's Eggs on the shelves. There are, instead, extremely similar-looking candies called "Speckled Malted Milk Mini Eggs." Now, this is basically what Robin's Eggs are, so you could be forgiven for saying "fuck it, buy generic" and picking up a bag. You would not be the first. Once you had purchased this cruel temptation, it would be understandable if you then opened the bag, and placed one of the little balls of sugar in your mouth. But I have walked this path for you, and I have come to tell you the truth:

Speckled Malted Milk Mini Eggs are NOT fucking Robin's Eggs, and whoever decided to market these things as if they were should be forced to drown in their horrific, slime-like pseudo-chocolate coating.

I suffer so you don't have to.

Point the third: My house is currently in the throes of a full-scale invasion. To be specific, it is currently inhabited by Betsy Tinney, her daughter Katie, SJ Tucker, Kevin Wiley, Alexander James Adams, and the people who normally live here. Plus my opinionated monster cats, who can fill a house all by themselves. On Monday night, the fabulous Amy McNally arrives. If we run out of coffee at any point, cannibalism cannot be far behind. You have been warned. Also, if fandom did reality show filming, we would so be prime time right now.

Point the fourth: Since A Local Habitation comes out in three days, and one of them is mostly over now, I have to warn you that I may go basically batshit at any moment, and need to be removed from the ceiling fixtures by men with tranquilizer darts filled with Diet Dr Pepper. On the plus side, again, Amy gets here Monday, and she will sacrifice herself upon my dark altar that you may all be saved. Be kind to her. She suffers for your protection.

Point the fifth: Here. Have a picture of Lilly and Alice, sitting together, without injuring each other.

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

7 Things You Should Know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, here you go:

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Welcome!

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

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

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

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

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

People have been asking me what galleys are for. Why do I have them, why would I need them, what am I planning to do with them, and—most commonly asked of all—why can't they have one. (Seriously.) So:

Galleys, ARCs (Advance Reader/Reviewer Copies), and other pre-release forms of a book have exactly one purpose: to drive up the book's visibility, and hence, sales. They're primarily given to bookstores, especially independent bookstores (where a good-looking ARC can potentially increase their order by quite a lot), reviewers (both print and online; the blogging community has been getting an increasing number of pre-release review copies over the past few years), and authors, who are a little crazy at the best of times, and are likely to get crazier as our book releases approach.

As authors, we're expected to distribute our ARCs and galleys in whatever way will do this most good. Also to our mothers. So we send them to smaller bookstores that our publisher may not know about, we give them to bloggers we know well enough to ask for reviews, and we hand them to other authors in hopes that they'll find our work appealing. And we try to keep the cats from using them as furniture (although this is basically a lost cause). ARCs are interesting, because they have—simultaneously—a very high importance and a very short shelf-life. Once the mass market edition hits shelves, dude, it's better-printed, better-designed, better-able to stand up to stress, and best of all, it's better-edited, because ARCs are printed before page proofs are returned. Once the mass market edition exists, the ARC is an interesting curiosity, and you'd better pray you found them all good homes. Or that the cats really, really like them.

Right now, I'm in the "reviewers I know personally" and "setting up competitions and give-aways" stage of our program. I'll have a few copies with me at BayCon and DucKon, naturally, and much like the art cards at Wondercon, there will be a Secret Password that gets me to give you a book (if I have one on me). I'm also questing for places where books need to go, and have found some fun promotional channels that I'm testing out.

Galleys. They're not just to keep the cats entertained while I'm at work.

Since there's been a massive influx of people over the past two days, due to the fact that Alice is adorable—welcome, massive influx of people; it's nice to meet you, although I realize half of you will leave again as you realize that this isn't the all-kitten-doing-weird-stuff, all-the-time channel, and that's fine—I thought it would be a good idea to do the abbreviated "here are ten things" version of the periodic welcome post. So here it is. Ta-da!

***

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

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

3. I believe that editing is a full-contact sport, complete with penalty boxes, illegal checking, and team pennants. My editing team is the Fighting Pumpkins. We're going all the way to the WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS this year, bay-bee!

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

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

6. Things I find absolutely enthralling: giant squid. Plush dinosaurs. Siamese and Maine Coon cats. Zombies. The plague. Pandemic flu. Horror movies of all quality levels. Horror television. Science Fictional Channel Original Movies. My window garden of carnivorous plants, and the spiders that have colonized them. Shopping for used books. Halloween. Marvel comics. Candy corn. Pumpkin cake. The Black Death.

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

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

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

10. I write: urban fantasy, horror, young adult, supernatural romance, and straight chick-lit romance. I occasionally threaten to write medical thrillers, but everyone knows that's just so I'd have an excuse to take more epidemiology courses. I love me a good plague.

***

Welcome!

Hello, and welcome to my journal! I'm pretty sure you know who I am, my name being in the URL and all, but just in case, I'm Seanan McGuire, and you're probably not on Candid Camera. This post exists to answer a few of the questions that I get asked on a semi-hemi-demi-regular basis. It may look familiar; that's because it gets reposted roughly every two months, to let new people know how we roll around here. (I will make no more Clueless references in this post, I promise.) Also, sometimes I change the questions. Because I can.

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

Anyway, here you go:

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

At the risk of sounding sappy, here are things that make me happy.

I think that everyone has certain things that make them unconditionally happy. Because it is a gray and dismal day, I'm listing some of the things that work for me. It's good to be happy.

( What makes Seanan happy? Well, among other things, people using cut-tags for long entries makes Seanan happy. If you want to know what else works for her, click here.Collapse )

So that's my list. What's yours?

Ever listened to some of the things that come out of my mouth and wondered just what the heck I was actually trying to say? Well, wonder no more: here is a handy-dandy Dictionary of Seanan, containing words, terms, and phrases that have oozed their way into my somewhat uncommon parlance and have shown no signs of oozing out again. I think all people have their own private languages, and that life would be a lot simpler if we became fluent in each other. I can't promise actual dictionary format, because I'm lazy, but I can promise alphabetical order, because I'm also a twitchy little OCD girl. So.

( Ducks. DDP. Romanian au pairs. Purple hair problems. Penny. Street pennies. Go away, Kim Delaney. Dinosaurs eat people. Mandibles of loooove. What the heck is Seanan saying? Find out here. Dun-dun-DUUUUUUUN.Collapse )

So there's my dictionary, 2008 edition. Somehow, I'm not sure it makes me any easier to understand. But hey. It was fun to write, so really, who cares about its functionality?

What's in your dictionary?

Hello, and welcome to my journal! I'm pretty sure you know who I am, my name being in the URL and all, but just in case, I'm Seanan McGuire, and you're probably not on Candid Camera. This post exists to answer a few of the questions that I get asked on a semi-hemi-demi-regular basis. It may look familiar; that's because it gets reposted roughly every two months, to let new people know how we roll around here. (I will make no more Clueless references in this post, I promise.) Also, sometimes I change the questions. Because I can.

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

Anyway, here you go:

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

Number of people with 'Toby Daye' as an interest: 24
Number of people with Newsflesh as an interest: 7
Number of people with Lycanthropy and Other Issues as an interest: 3
Number of people with 'Price Girls' as an interest: 1 (me)

And, of course...

Number of people with 'Seanan McGuire' as an interest: 16

From this, I can determine that Toby is the most popular thing around these parts, and I really need to talk about Verity Price more, because she's way too awesome for me to be solo on adoring her and her family. Although I suppose it would probably help if I, y'know, finished writing her book.

Have I mentioned recently that I get very, very silly when I'm ass-deep in unending edits?

Hey, look, I'm in Dear Author! I'm assuming I fall under the category of 'leaves me completely unmoved' for the blogger, but that's okay, because it just gives me a lot more room to be a total DINO NINJA SURPRISE ATTACK. For serious. I will come out of nowhere and blind the world with science!

Oh, and hey, I found my official genre acquisition announcement. It reads:

"Seanan McGuire's ROSEMARY AND RUE, the first book in a new urban fantasy series featuring a half-human, half-fae private investigator, to Sheila Gilbert at DAW, in a three-book deal, by Diana Fox at Fox Literary (world)."

...have you ever noticed how almost everything sounds bland when you boil it down to a single sentence? Must. Blind. World. With. Science. Well, in this case, must blind world with folklore, magic, and an insanely intricate plot. But still. I have an announcement!

From seferin: Animated icons of my horror movie alphabet. Because dude, there is no world in which that is not awesome. Also because dude, there is no world in which this is not all very good advice. (Mike wants to make a calendar of the horror alphabet. I admit to being enormously tempted by the idea of an illustrated comic. And the beat goes on.)

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

So I've actually started getting my own set of 'frequently asked questions' from people who hear that I've sold a trilogy. They don't include a lot of the classic writer's questions, as yet -- I figure I'll start getting really sick of 'where do you get your ideas?' and 'can you introduce me to your agent?' sometime after book two comes out -- but they're fascinating all the same. Here's a selection, with exposition.

Why do you write about ______?
People who know me through horror and are thus aware of my undying passion for dead stuff and diseases tend to blink at me and ask 'why do you write about faeries?' like it was some sort of unhealthy personal grooming choice. (One acquaintance picked up the opening chapter of Rosemary and Rue, read about ten pages, and then said, clearly perplexed, "This has faeries in it." Perhaps he assumed I wouldn't have noticed.) People who know me through fantasy and are thus aware of my lifelong obsession with folklore and fairy tales tend to ask the reverse question, looking puzzled as they say 'why do you write about zombies?' I sometimes want to arm both camps with boffer weapons, get popcorn, and watch them try to beat each other into submission. Because it would be funny.

Why haven't you quit your day job yet?
Well, beyond the fact that I don't actually have any books published at this particular moment in time, I like paying my mortgage. I like eating things other than canned tuna (although, I must admit, not often). I like being able to buy comic books. Do I eventually want to quit my day job? Oh, hell yes. I'm a fast, disciplined writer, but there are only so many hours in the day, and the idea of being able to get up in the morning and just start writing is heavenly. I'm just not quite there yet.

When is Rosemary and Rue coming out?
I like this question, because people who ask it tend to want to buy my book. Unfortunately, I don't have anything resembling a functional answer to this one yet, because it's still early days. I have a whole lot of editorial to look forward to before I can even take guesses at the date.

Will you be at WorldCon?
2008, no. 2009, yes. 2010, if I have to sell one of Brooke's kidneys to do it. (She's Canadian, she has good kidneys.) I want to go to THE LAND OF POISON AND FLAME. That's what I call Australia. THE LAND OF POISON AND FLAME. The idea of an entire continent devoted to destroying human life is sort of like the idea of Willy Wonka's factory: too good to be true, but oh, if only it were...

Do you sleep?
No.

I can't wait to see what gets asked next...

1. My name is Seanan McGuire; I'm an author, musician, poet and crazy person, presently living in Northern California. I am a very chatty person, whether you're talking literally 'we are in the same place' chattiness, or more abstract 'someone has left Seanan alone with a keyboard, run for the hills' chattiness. This does not, paradoxically, make me terribly good about keeping up with email or answering comments in anything that resembles a reasonable fashion. We all have our flaws.

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

3. I believe that editing is a full-contact sport, complete with penalty boxes, illegal checking, and team pennants. My editing team is the Fighting Pumpkins. We're going all the way to the WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS this year, bay-bee!

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

5. I am a musician! More specifically, I'm a filk musician. If you know filk, this statement makes total sense. If you don't know filk, think 'the folk music of the science fiction and fantasy community'. I have two CDs currently available, Pretty Little Dead Girl: Seanan McGuire and Friends Live at OVFF 2005, and Stars Fall Home. I'm in the process of recording a third CD, Red Roses and Dead Things. I write mostly original material, and don't spend much time in ParodyLand. It just doesn't work out for me.

6. Things I find absolutely enthralling: giant squid. Plush dinosaurs. Siamese cats. Zombies. The plague. Pandemic flus. Horror movies of all quality levels. Horror television. Science Fictional Channel Original Movies. The large colony of infant preying mantises currently living next to my front door, where they wave their tiny alien arms in menacing fashion at all that comes to challenge them. Halloween. Candy corn. Pumpkin cake.

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

8. I am owned by a classic bluepoint Siamese named Lillian Kane Moskowitz Munster McGuire. Yes, I call her that, usually when she's been naughty. The rest of the time, she's either 'Lilly' or 'Lil'. She shares me, grudgingly, with my elderly chocolate-point, Nyssa.

9. I'm still trying to sort out exactly what I want to post here, beyond general updates and my approach to the madness that is the writing process, and I'm open to suggestions.

10. I write: urban fantasy, horror, young adult, supernatural romance, and straight chick-lit romance. I occasionally threaten to write medical thrillers, but everyone knows that's just so I'd have an excuse to take more epidemiology courses. I love me a good plague.

Welcome!