We are now ninety days out from the release of An Artificial Night (October Daye, book three). It's up on Amazon.com, and people are pre-ordering. The ARCs should be arriving at my house any day now; they may even be waiting for me when I get home tonight. My page proofs have been reviewed, returned to DAW, and confirmed as received, which means this book is now officially outside my control: I can't change anything.

Ninety days.

An Artificial Night is the third and last book on my original contract was DAW. It's also the last book to be mostly complete at the time of sale. Barring editorial notes, small changes, and typo correction, all three have been done since before Rosemary and Rue was released. In many ways, this has been a great thing. On the one hand, it's meant that I couldn't change what I was doing based on outside criticism. On the other hand, it's meant that I couldn't change what I was doing based on outside criticism—I couldn't fix anything, but I also couldn't have a first-time novelist freak-out and wind up completely rewriting the rest of the series to meet an unreachable standard. I know this has been a luxury. It's one I'm very, very glad to have had.

This book is my favorite of the first three. I love the whole thing. I love the situation, I love the reality of it, and I love that Toby is finally past the events of the first book to such an extent that she can really stand up and do her job. I love that in just ninety days, you'll be able to hold it in your hands.

How many miles to Babylon?

Not that many.

First up, for those of you who've wondered what it's like to live with my cats, here's a video link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2P0QVvqHys

Now don't say I never gave you anything.

Second up, I have just actually mapped out the remainder of my year, so as to see where the holes are. The holes are...nowhere. I'm booked. Like, until December. And that doesn't count the various things I need to be working on, since they're not so much "events" as they are "endemic conditions." You know, like mono, rather than strep throat. So if I turn down an invitation to come out and be social, it's nothing personal, it's just that I can't afford to catch anything else until I've received some mental medical care, and maybe a nice, long nap.

Third up, I should have the ARCs for An Artificial Night any day now, at which point it will once again be time for our summer giveaways. Get your thinking caps on; I want to have truly awesome contests this time, earth-shaking, world-shattering contests. Or, y'know, at least contests that don't bore me. You know, whichever way turns out to work for folks. Let me know if you have suggestions.

Fourth up, I am most of the way through the Sparrow Hill Road story for August, which may need a different title, since it's turned out to be rather more...antic...than was originally expected (it's currently called "Dead Man's Curve"). This seems to be the obligate humorous episode before things get really, really unpleasant, moving up to the December season finale, "Last Kiss," wherein everything becomes, well. Unpleasant for Rose and company. I've got a little time to work it out before things get really urgent.

Fifth up, today I get to go to my favorite bakery with a camera and a Flip video, where I will thoroughly document the process of Jennifer (the owner) making awesome, awesome brain cupcakes. I then get to walk away with the cupcakes. My life is awesome sometimes.

Sixth up, a request: if you speak any language other than English fluently enough to translate, please reply to this post with the following sentences in whatever languages you can, identifying them clearly:

"The dead are rising/walking! Run for your life!"
"I have been infected. Please shoot me."
"I am not infected. Please do not shoot me."

Thank you!

Tuesday, I realized there was something wrong with The Brightest Fell (October Daye, book five).

Wednesday, I began reworking the book from the beginning, to see if I could figure out what the problem was. Twenty pages in, I figured out what the problem was. Twenty pages after that, I came up for air.

Thursday, a package containing the page proofs for An Artificial Night landed on my doorstep, roughly four hours after the official sign-and-return contracts for Late Eclipses and The Brightest Fell landed in my hands. And to this I say...

Here we go again.

Tonight, I'm going to go home, pick up the page proofs, and decamp to the Starbucks down the street, where the combination of caffeine, iPod, and no fixed bedtime will enable me to burn through a decent number of chapters before I collapse into a twitching heap. Tomorrow, I'll get out of bed, take my walk to the 7-11 (land of "it's exactly a mile and a half round-trip"), and get back to work on The Brightest Fell. By the end of the weekend, I expect to be at least eighty pages into both manuscripts.

Toby's world is one that's very familiar to me, and very welcoming, because I've spent so much time there. At the same time, The Brightest Fell has been a challenge—it's resolving a lot of things that should make people very happy—while An Artificial Night remains my favorite of the first three, and thus needs to be as bad-ass as possible. So, you know. No pressure or anything.

But gee, it's nice to be running away with the faeries again.

Mindy Klasky has been talking about "author branding" lately. Is it a bad thing that my brand is "slightly maniacal but easily distracted Disney Halloweentown Princess on a never-ending quest to dominate your puny planet"? I mean, it doesn't fit very easily on a T-shirt...

Anyway, today is a day for awesome news that is awesome. Those of you who follow dianafox will have already seen the first part of this: the Newsflesh trilogy (Feed, Deadline, Blackout) has sold to Egmont in Germany. Egmont is also the German publisher of the Toby Daye books. Because of this (and some questionable black marks on Mira's legal record, but that's beside the point), they'll be publishing the Newsflesh trilogy under the name "Seanan McGuire." I like being confusing!

Meanwhile, rights to the first three Toby books (Rosemary and Rue, A Local Habitation, and An Artificial Night) have sold to Azbooka in Russia. Vixy is very excited, because she actually speaks Russian, and will thus be able to read my books in a whole new language. I'm very excited because dude, Russia.

Soon, my conquest of your world will be complete, and my collection of foreign language editions will require its own shelf.

Yay!

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

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

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

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

What's up with all of you?

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

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

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

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

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

Wheeeeeeeeeeeee.

Well, what happened around here in 2008? Let's see...

1) I signed with the eternally delightful dianafox, who has shown a remarkable capacity for taking the things I say (some of which make very little sense, filtered as they are through my sunshine-and-zombies Pollyanna worldview) and doing something functionally useful with them. Everybody needs a personal superhero.

2) I started this journal. Because everybody needs their sunshine-and-zombies updates as regularly as possible. No, seriously. How can you know what's happening in their magical playland if somebody isn't making a point of telling you on a regular basis?

3) I arranged to have my website fully revamped, thanks to the design talents of taraoshea and the technical can-do of porpentine. Now it's glorious, it's gorgeous, and it's changing pretty much daily as we hammer the text into place and start getting the various sections hammered into their desired configurations. Which matters because...

4) I sold the first three Toby Daye books to DAW! Yes! Rosemary and Rue, A Local Habitation, and An Artificial Night have all been sold, after so many years in my head that it's really not even all that funny. Soon, the world will understand why I love these people so much. I hope.

5) I finished writing or revising six books in 2008. The three mentioned above, along with Late Eclipses of the Sun (Toby, book four), Newsflesh (The Masons, book one), and Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues (Coyote Girls, book one). So that's, y'know. Pretty productive of me.

6) I started work on three more books -- The Mourning Edition (sequel to Newsflesh), The Brightest Fell (Toby, book five), and Discount Armageddon (InCryptid, book one).

7) I recorded an album. Scaaaaaary. You can still place pre-orders for Red Roses and Dead Things at my website. I promise that it will be awesome. And filled with corpses.

So it's been a huge, exciting, amazing year, and next year is just going to be a bigger, more exciting, more amazing year. Thanks for being here, and I really can't wait to see what happens next.

Yesterday, I...

...got official sign-off to turn in An Artificial Night to my publisher. This means that the entire first trilogy has now been turned in, and I can focus (at least for a few days) on the process of prepping the second trilogy, starting with Late Eclipses of the Sun. I'm deeply excited about this. I have a finished rough draft of Late Eclipses, and about half of The Brightest Fell, but Ashes of Honor is an entirely unfamiliar country. I hope my passport photo doesn't make me look like an idiot.

...finished processing some full-body machete-shot edits to Late Eclipses of the Sun, resulting in my needing a cold shower and the book needing some serious medical attention (the big baby). There's still a lot of work to be done, but the overall shape and structure of things is getting cleaner by the day, and by the draft. I'd estimate that I have maybe two or three passes through left to go before I can file it and get to work on book five. Book five lives in fear. Book five has every reason to be afraid.

...finished the next Velma Martinez installment, 'Velveteen vs. The Flashback Sequence, Part I.' (Technically, that means I need to write the second part of the story still, and I'm direly afraid that it's going to develop a third part, but we take what accomplishments we can get.) I've finally had the opportunity to fully introduce The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division. Velma 'Velveteen' Martinez, David 'The Claw' Mickelstein, Yelena 'Sparkle Bright' (no last name released by her handlers), and Aaron 'Action Dude' Frank. As a lifetime comic book girl, it's incredibly awesome to have the excuse to taunt the things I love.

...fully outlined my story for Grants Pass, after realizing that I was trying to write it from the wrong point of view. Yes, again. Only this time, I was in first when I really needed to be in third. (It seems that my novel default is first, and my short story default is third. I do not know why this is, only that it is.) I am a happy girl, full of pep and the love of horrible pathogens.

...watched an enormous amount of television.

Now we shall have victory cake and Diet Dr Pepper, for no other libation could properly match this victory. VICTORY!

I have sign-off! Yes! Toby Daye, book three, An Artificial Night, is ready to ride the bullet train to my publisher's desk! (Note that this doesn't actually mean the book is in its final form, since DAW has the right to request changes and edits -- I made changes and edits to Rosemary and Rue after it had been turned in -- but I become a much happier bunny after it's slammed down on my editor's virtual desk.)

Final book stats:

111,304 words.
377 pages.
Twenty-three chapters.

The best part about finishing the finishing of a book (since even the finishing process can take several shots) is falling in love with it again. The revision process is sort of like cleaning a really messy house. When you're doing the heavy lifting, you pretty much hate the place and want to burn it down with a flamethrower. But when you're just going through the pretty, pristine rooms, wiping up those last smears of dust and straightening those last few books, well...

It's wonderful, because it's yours.

This book is wonderful because it's mine. Also because it's just a pretty rockin' book, all full of adventure and excitement and actual pie (and Toby being so very, very Toby that it hurts). And I have sign-off.

YAY.

As a rule, I'm working on a minimum of three projects at any given time. For 'working on,' read either 'writing' or 'seriously and intensively revising.' (There will usually be other projects overlapping, but they're generally the sort that require less constant attention -- processing light edits, outlining, setting up the continuity guide for a sequel.) Right now, those projects are Late Eclipses of the Sun (Toby four), The Mourning Edition (sequel to Newsflesh), and Discount Armageddon (Incryptid one). A month ago, they were Late Eclipses of the Sun, Newsflesh, and Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues. What a difference a few weeks can make, huh?

I like working on multiple projects at the same time. When something is really on fire, I can buckle down and dig my heels in, and when everything is just chuckling along at a normal pace, it means I keep myself rotating so that nothing ever has the chance to get stale. I know something is going well when I start thinking about the next thing. I'm really comfortable inside a book when it's so familiar that it's practically transcription of things I already know, and that frees my mind to go pondering what happens next in the next thing in the cycle.

When I finished last week's chapter of The Mourning Edition, I was immediately thinking about a pacing problem in the last quarter of Late Eclipses, and finally figured out how it could be repaired. While I was dealing with Late Eclipses, I found myself thinking about Verity, and ways to keep things moving without losing the quixotic edge that makes her story so damn much fun to write. And now that I'm back on Discount Armageddon, I'm pondering what's going on in my happy zombie wonderland. As long as I know what happens next, my mind is free to roam, and the text is almost always the better for it.

People periodically ask me how I juggle things. It's one of those questions that sort of causes me to look blank and blink a lot, because I really just do. I write about as fast as I think, and I need to pause sometimes and think about what I'm going to do next; that's what the alternate projects are for. As for making sure each gets its fair share of my attention, well, that's why I keep to-do lists.

My week so far has looked like this:

MONDAY: Work on revisions to the end of Late Eclipses.
TUESDAY: Finish revisions to the end of Late Eclipses, process reader edits.
WEDNESDAY: Agent revisions to An Artificial Night, start on chapter four of Discount Armageddon.

Today, I'm finishing chapter four of Discount Armageddon, and tomorrow I'll be starting on the next chunk of The Mourning Edition, with a break to work on my story for Grant's Pass. My to-do lists are robust and sassy, and glad to assist me in making progress.

Life is good.

(I don't have a Late Eclipses of the Sun icon yet, so you're getting my Rosemary and Rue icon, instead. Oh, the humanity.)

So last night, I finished some fairly serious surgical adjustments to the end of Late Eclipses of the Sun, the fourth book in the Chronicles of October Daye. I also processed a huge whacking stack of edits from Brooke, who once again waded into the alligator pond with machete swinging, whistling a happy song. I love my editors so very much sometimes. Most of the time, actually. They're just fabulous people.

An Artificial Night is still with my agent, who's reading it over so that she can suggest any changes before I turn it in to my editor. We figure turning in the first two books of the trilogy six months ahead of deadline means I can be a little more leisurely with book three (and besides, my due date is still more than a year away). Someone asked me yesterday if I was planning to have the entire second trilogy finished by the time the second book came out, and I just looked at them blankly. Of course I do. Duh.

This is the part in revising a book where I really start to fall in love with it again. We haven't found and fixed all the flaws, obviously, or it wouldn't still be in revisions, but most of the major structural damage has been resolved. The porch has been torn down and replaced with something sturdier, we've had the landscapers come in and do the garden, and the plumbing has stopped making that weird clanking noise. It becomes a little bit more like a book with every day that passes.

I'm excited. Because this is made of awesome.

It's time for the August installment of 'Seanan's current projects,' the post where I explain what I'm working on and what its status happens to be! Please note that Rosemary and Rue and A Local Habitation have once again vanished from this list, as they have finished another stage in the revision process and been returned to DAW. The next input I'm gonna have will come with the ARCs. Ah, progress. It smells like fear.

The cut-tag endures, because this list is getting slowly longer and longer. This is a natural consequence of living inside my head, where the darkness is. The darkness and the pumpkin pie and the bats. The bats have plague, by the way.

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

So here's the skinny on the first four books:

Rosemary and Rue. First-pass editorial is done, and the book has been sent off to DAW to get cuddly with my editor, who will hopefully find it to be an amazing construction of chocolate chips and chainsaws, and thus be able to pass it straight on to the line-editors. While I'm wishing for impossible things, I'd also like a zombie pony full of money.

A Local Habitation. I have my editorial notes from The Editor and The Agent, and I'm about to start processing them. This should be a lot of fun. I find that every book improves immensely as it goes through the editorial process, even if, occasionally, it comes out the other side looking extremely different than it looked going in. This hasn't been officially 'turned in' yet, but it's getting very close.

An Artificial Night. We're still in 'game preserve' edits on this one -- I've been working industriously, and The Agent has seen it, but it hasn't gone to DAW yet. I'm planning to finish the home-team editing before the end of July, and I'm shooting to have the book turned in on an official basis by the end of the first week in August. This will be awesome, as it will free up a lot of my brain for working on...

Late Eclipses of the Sun. Book four! Book one of the second set of three, since almost everyone seems to think in trilogies these days! I'm in the middle of rewriting this one, and by 'the middle,' I mean 'currently, I'm on page 277 of 375, and things are rocking like a cruise ship in a tsunami.' I haven't turned the lions loose on it yet, but dude, the improvements are vast and epic as it is, and I can't wait to move on to the next stage.

After I finish with the LE revisions, I'm going to focus on The Brightest Fell, aka, 'book five,' and then move on to other projects. Because standing still is for other people. Also because I really enjoy having several books written past the point of 'current' in the series, since that means I have the luxury of changing my mind before the deadline.

It probably says something that my reward for finishing book four is going to be quality OCD-girl time with my brand-new continuity Wiki, but I'm trying not to think about that overly-hard.

Whee!

It's time for the July installment of 'Seanan's current projects,' the post where I explain what I'm working on and what its status happens to be! Please note that Rosemary and Rue and A Local Habitation have returned to this list after a brief vacation, because they've finished their initial review at DAW and are now entering the glorious revision process. Ah, progress. It smells like fear.

Also, this time we're cut-tagging, because the list has, as is so often the case with me, managed to get longer. My brain, ladies and gentlemen. Nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live here.

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

Right. Today, I have...

...processed three full sets of edits for An Artificial Night, one of which was twenty pages long and may as well have been subtitled 'everything you know is wrong.' I have now repaired everything I know. Everything I know is now right, and it's a better book (as it almost always is after one of these experiences). But oh my stars and garters, that took hours.

...brought my initial rewrites on Newsflesh up through chapter eighteen. Note that Newsflesh is over five hundred pages long. I have essentially rewritten an entire book this week, with another entire book to go, just as soon as I wake up. This terrifies and thrills me on multiple levels, and it's really very cathartic to wade into the text with a machete and giggle hysterically as I remove the unnecessary words.

This week, I have...

...started the revision process on Late Eclipses of the Sun, the fourth book in the Toby Daye series, which is currently subtitled 'please let the first three be incredible, mind-blowing successes, so that I can sell this book, because I love it so.' Because I am occasionally an insane workaholic, I'm already more than a hundred pages into the revision. It's very soothing. I'm enjoying it.

This weekend, I'm going to get back to work on Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues, because I feel like a slacker. (Yes, I'm aware of the sheer insanity of that statement. Carry on.) And with all this done and yet to do, I am going to bed, where I will sleep the sleep of the just.

Good night, world!

So back on June 9th, I started the major surgical adjustments to the third Toby Daye book, An Artificial Night. Again, I know the exact date because I never ever ever throw anything away ever, and also because my planner tends to have notations like 'started rewrites today' and 'actually ran out of pickle relish' on the monthly view. Because that's just the way I roll. After spending most of yesterday threatening a single chapter with pitchforks and torches, I cleared the hurdle and raced to the end of the book. WINNER!

I still need to do more proofing and processing before the book gets shipped off to The Agent for further consideration, but the heavy lifting has been done; it's time to put away the machete, get out the scalpel and the staple gun, and start repairing the smaller, more easily overlooked issues. Even after spending several months in 'everything I know is wrong oh dear heavens did I really write that?!' mode, this book remains my favorite of the first three, and that's like, seriously magical.

VELOCIRAPTOR DANCE PARTY TIME!!!! Because nothing says 'I just finished a book revision' like dancing dinosaurs.

Still being me, and still being totally incapable of sitting still for more than a few minutes, I've already started the revisions on Late Eclipses of the Sun, the fourth of the Toby books. (This is the first book that comes after my current contract with DAW. So if you want to read it, y'know, encourage everyone you've ever met to buy Rosemary and Rue.) I'm also getting ready to seriously buckle down on the Newsflesh revisions, because nothing says 'detox after wallowing in urban fantasy for six months' like 'zombies and politics.'

I love the fact that right now, there's always something else waiting to be worked on. And, of course, the editorial process is going to be kicking in sooner than later, which will take me right back to Rosemary, and a whole new set of adventures. But for right now...

Dance!

It's time for the June installment of 'Seanan's current projects,' the post where I explain what I'm working on and what its status happens to be! Please note that Rosemary and Rue and A Local Habitation are temporarily off this list, because they're under review at DAW. They'll be reappearing when the editorial process kicks in.

Also, this time we're cut-tagging, because the list has, as is so often the case with me, managed to get longer. My brain, ladies and gentlemen. Nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live here.

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

One month ago today, we officially sold the first three October Daye books to DAW. Rosemary and Rue, the first, had already been through the editorial wringer over here on my end of things; A Local Habitation, the second, had just started the editing process. (An Artificial Night hadn't even been touched.) One month later, book two is just about ready to be turned in -- the goal is to have the last few tweaks in place by Monday -- while book three is being industriously rewritten. I've even started thinking about working on book four.

It's all starting to feel real. Finally. It's all starting to feel less like the universe pulling some cosmic joke, and like it's something that's really and genuinely happening. It helps that the editing process is frequently painful, frequently grinding, and frequently disrupts my sleep. It's substantially harder to disbelieve something that isn't letting you go to bed.

There are roughly twenty million things still to get done. I mean, Rosemary and Rue hasn't started the editorial process at DAW (which is a whole new ball of wax), my new website hasn't launched yet, and I still need to buy my tickets to New York. There's going to be a lot of work that has to get done before I can actually start saying 'go buy my book' and praying for an audience. I know that. And it doesn't matter, because one month ago today, we sold my first novel.

I am the happiest blonde there is.

Last night, after a lot of introspection, prodding, and generally gnawing at the idea like a velociraptor gnaws on a brontosaurus bone, I took the entire first chapter of An Artificial Night, shifted it to a separate file (where it wouldn't get in the way), and started working on a new first chapter. It contains a lot of the same elements and setting-establishment themes, but is, at the same time, a very, very different beastie. This has become a pattern. Every time I start revising a book, the first chapter seems to wind up in the recycling bin.

(I am at least reasonably confident that this won't happen with Newsflesh, since it starts with rip-roaring zombie adventure, or with Chasing St. Margaret, which starts with...um...Indian food. And I'm pretty sure taking off the first chapter of Upon A Star would cause the rest of the book to stop making any sort of linear sense. So it's probably safe.)

I find this part of the process insanely annoying -- I had a perfectly good front porch on this house! I was just getting used to it! -- but also deeply gratifying, because I have yet to build a new porch that isn't substantially better than the old porch. Plus, it gives me the excuse to really go to town with the chainsaw, and I always love that.

(Editing viciously and with little concern for life or limb, machete. Editing carefully, with surgical care and precision, scalpel. Editing in a way that leaves women weeping, strong men sick to their stomachs, and entire chapters broken and bleeding on the road to editorial perfection, chainsaw. I don't get to use the chainsaw very often. It is not an instrument for small adjustments. The chainsaw does not forgive authorial weakness. The chainsaw does not care. I love the chainsaw.)

I should be finished with the new porch by the end of today, and I'm just sort of amazed, because it's so very clearly a better porch, and it's so very clearly the porch we needed, and yet? I really thought the old porch was the right one.

It's a funny old game, writing.

Well, on May 29th, I started the major surgical adjustments to A Local Habitation, the second of the Toby Daye books. (I had actually started the revision process on April 13th. The fact that I can say this means that I really, really never throw anything away.) Yesterday, after lo these many hours of whacking my head against the keyboard and bemoaning the day I decided I wanted to be an author, I sent it off to my agent for review. Everybody dance!

No, seriously. Everybody dance. I DEMAND A VELOCIRAPTOR DANCE PARTY.

...okay, better.

Since I am apparently incapable of extended periods of idleness, I have already started the revisions on An Artificial Night, aka, 'Toby Daye, book three.' I'm so super-excited about working on this book, there are no words. Although I'm also a little skittish. I was talking to Rey last night, and said I didn't know what I was going to do with myself after the trilogy had been turned into DAW (beyond waiting for editorial comments, of course). He looked at me funny. I guess the part where I'm writing at least three other books that he's aware of sort of made that statement sound a little odd...

So now I'm happily hip-deep in An Artificial Night, still in that happy place where edits are new and exciting. They'll become a slog soon enough, but right now, everything is made of awesome.

Dance!

These are likely to come up with a fair amount of frequency, because, well, that's just how this sort of thing tends to work. So here's a list of projects you're probably going to hear about, one way or another, with a reasonable degree of frequency:

Rosemary and Rue.
October Daye, book one. Urban fantasy/fairy tale noir, modern setting, first-person protagonist. Status: sold, under review.

A Local Habitation.
October Daye, book two. Urban fantasy/fairy tale noir, modern setting, first-person protagonist. Status: sold, in current rewrites.

An Artificial Night.
October Daye, book three. Urban fantasy/fairy tale noir, modern setting, first-person protagonist. Status: sold, pending rewrites.

Late Eclipses of the Sun.
October Daye, book four. Urban fantasy/fairy tale noir, modern setting, first-person protagonist. Status: pending rewrites.

Newsflesh.
Modern political/zombie horror, near-future setting, first-person protagonist. Rise up while you can. Status: pending rewrites.

Upon A Star.
Young adult comedy/romance. Drama kids are awesome. Modern setting, first-person protagonist. Status: pending rewrites.

Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues.
Coyote Girls, book one. Young adult horror/supernatural romance. Modern setting, first-person protagonist. Status: now writing.

There are lots of other books floating around here -- some finished and slated to be worked on further, others pending getting started -- but these are the ones you're likely to hear the most about, at least currently. I'll probably update this list from time to time, as things move from 'project' to 'print', and new things take their places on the workshop floor.

My first trilogy has been purchased by DAW Books! This set of urban fantasy/mysteries is best described as 'fairy tale noir', and will be coming soon to a world near you. The order is:

Rosemary and Rue
A Local Habitation
An Artificial Night

I am grateful, excited, delighted, and really looking forward to the full-contact editing bonanza that's sure to be coming my way. There's nothing more exciting than a red pen, a machete, and a whole manuscript to explore. So this is the beginning of the process. Now, we make our hack-and-slash way to the end!

Yay!