Sorry for the delay; work got crazy. Anyway, the third and final winner of our ARC Valentine's giveaway has been selected. Congratulations to...

...antigoneschase! Please email me your shipping information via the contact link on my website (www.seananmcguire.com), and I'll get your ARC in the mail by early next week!

Thanks to everyone who participated, and watch this space for more giveaways and excitement as release date approaches.

Yup. It's that time again. The time when my collection of links has become ludicrously large enough to force my hand and generate a post of review and interview links. In fact, let's start with the interview links, since I'm in pre-release madness right now. Fun for the whole family!

The delightful Realm Lovejoy not only interviewed me, she drew a picture of Toby. Wow! She'd previously interviewed my agent, who introduced the two of us, and I couldn't be more pleased with the interview as a whole. (I may have already linked this. I can't remember, and in the case of data failure, it's best to take a second shot.)

Book Bound invited me over for an interview, and we had a dismaying amount of fun. Check it out, and learn more about my writing habits, what I think one should do with canned peas, and, naturally, my cats. This was a cheery, macabre conversation, and I'm happy to share it.

In the "reviews" division, Jennifer Brozek has reviewed A Local Habitation for Flames Rising. She says "This is an excellent standalone book that may be read without reading the first book in the series while still fitting into the supernatural world McGuire has created to overlay the San Francisco Bay Area," and "Over all, A Local Habitation is an excellent book that continues October Daye's story after a fourteen year curse, a hell of a wake up, the murder of her only friend and her attempts to make sense of a life that refuses to cooperate. This is my favorite urban fantasy series to date and I'm eagerly looking forward to the next installment." Yay!

Jenn at I Read Good has posted her review of Rosemary and Rue, and says "Rosemary and Rue is the great book set in the world of Faerie." She also says "Seanan McGuire has put together a great book. Toby's an interesting protagonist and you really want her to succeed in her mission." Rock on.

AJ reviewed both books in one huge, delicious sandwich. AJ says "At last, urban fantasy done right! Oh, I'm sure there's plenty of good urban fantasy out there, but it's hard to find amongst the books that feel more like mis-shelved romance novels. Seanan McGuire's October Daye series gives us that perfect melding of "real world" and magic, with just a dash of romantic subplot, enhancing the main story rather than derailing it." Of Rosemary and Rue: "It's a pretty fast-paced page turner and kept me in the dark about who the killer was until the end." Of A Local Habitation: "I enjoyed this one even more than the first, as Toby and a young faerie squire named Quentin find themselves investigating a series of mysterious deaths—in a software company run by faeries. Finally! Faeries not just able to use technology, but outright embracing it."

The Discriminating Fangirl has posted a review of Rosemary and Rue, and says "I'd been waiting for this book for quite a while. It was worth the wait." At more length: "McGuire's grasp of dialogue is realistic, with different quirks of speech for each different character; I’ve read a number of books lately where everyone talked exactly alike, so much so that each exchange could have been stamped out with a cookie cutter. The description here is lush and decadent, vividly describing both the mundane setting of San Francisco and the otherworldly vistas of the faerie realm. The action sequences and plot twists were fast-paced and kept my heart pounding. The mixture of noir detective story elements (reminiscent of the best work of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett) with the urban fantasy setting makes Rosemary and Rue stand out from the crowd of other urban fantasies."

Whee!

Finally for this roundup, it's not too late to potentially win a free copy of Rosemary and Rue! Hie ye over to the Confessions of a Wandering Heart and find out how.

Congratulations to...

...ttamsen! Please email me your shipping information via the contact link on my website (www.seananmcguire.com), and I'll get your ARC in the mail by early next week!

One more winner will be drawn! To enter, comment on this post with your favorite character in Toby's world. I'll be choosing the last winner at noon Pacific Friday.

Rock on!

Congratulations to...

...bookblather! Please email me your shipping information via the contact link on my website (www.seananmcguire.com), and I'll get your ARC in the mail by early next week!

Two more winners will be drawn! To enter, comment on this post with your favorite character in Toby's world. I'll be choosing winners at noon Pacific on Thursday and Friday.

Rock on!

Dear Great Pumpkin;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I remain your faithful Halloween girl,
Seanan.

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

To celebrate Valentine's Day (and the excuse that it provides—I might as well be celebrating Champion Crab Races Day on the 18th), I've decided to do something truly awesome: a three stage ARC giveaway. Yes! Three ARCs of A Local Habitation will be awarded to three lucky entries over the course of the next week!

Here's how it works:

1. Comment on this entry telling me who your favorite character in Toby's world is, and why. Be as detailed as you want. (Yes, technically, this does make the contest open only to those who've read Rosemary and Rue. As this is a sequel, I don't feel bad about that.)
2. ...that's all, actually. Your part in things is now done.

I will select winners via random number draw tomorrow, Thursday, and Friday. All winners will be selected at noon PST. All winners must contact me via my website "contact" link before eight PM PST on Sunday, or another winner will be selected, and I will shake my head in sorrow.

Game on!

From the new issue of Publisher's Weekly:

McGuire follows 2009's Rosemary and Rue with a fast-paced cross between a murder mystery and a slasher film, liberally spiked with magic and technology. Half-faerie PI October "Toby" Daye leaves San Francisco for the nearby County of Tamed Lightning to check up on her patron's niece, January, who's uncharacteristically fallen out of contact. Toby soon realizes that ALH Computing, the county's secret seat of power, has big problems. Someone doesn't want outsiders snooping around, and as the body count rises, Toby will risk life, limb, and soul to find out what's really going on. While most of the deaths could have been prevented with a little less plot-mandated stupidity, the world-building is solid, the storytelling energetic, and the atmosphere sinister as mythological creatures face off against mad scientists. (Mar.)

Yay! (I don't completely agree that most of the deaths could have been prevented with a little less plot-mandated stupidity, for reasons that I can't really go into beyond "in Faerie, when your liege gives you an order, you follow it, whether it's stupid or not." But that's besides the point.) Getting a good review in Publisher's Weekly makes me feel like a real girl. For, y'know, the ten minutes before I find something else to get freaked out about. Today's terrifying adversary: oxygen. It's a corrosive poison, you know.

A Local Habitation is on the verge of becoming a really and truly real book, available for really and truly real purchase at a store near you. For some values of "near," anyway.

Whoa.

We are now twenty-five days from the official street date of A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy], the second book in the October Daye series. If I had a penny for every day remaining, I would have a quarter. If I had a quarter for every day remaining, I would have six dollars and twenty-five cents, which isn't really enough to do anything useful. If I had a dollar for every day remaining, I'd probably just blow it on Diet Dr Pepper and Dance Dance Revolution down at the arcade, so I guess it's for the best that I haven't got a dollar.

I guess.

I'm pretty much just as nervous now as I was this time last release, thus confirming my belief that the pre-release crazies are an ongoing condition, not a once-in-a-lifetime event. They're like the flu, rather than like smallpox (which you're only likely to catch once, assuming you can survive that first encounter). I think I would have preferred smallpox. The flu can also be fatal, and smallpox, at least, doesn't happen on an annual basis unless you're really, really unlucky. I've started having the classic* anxiety dreams, I'm twitchy, and I find myself tearing up over episodes of Wizards of Waverly Place.

I'm both excited and terrified. Terror is winning at the moment, but I'm sure that, too, will pass, given sufficient caffeine and maybe a cupcake or two (dozen). Twenty-five days and this stage of the terror will be over, replaced by new and exciting types of terror into which I can dive.

I need a nap.

(*Classic for me, that is, which means they mostly involve being late for flights, missing connections, missing planes, and Ebola outbreaks wiping out the state of California. I haven't had the "you lost your luggage on the way to the con because your plane went down and now you're dead but you can't let anybody know" dream yet, but I'm sure that's coming. It's always coming. My brain is awesome.)

1. My beloved personal superhero, dianafox, is giving away a copy of A Local Habitation. Read her post for details (and don't ask me about them, since it's not my giveaway). Here's your opportunity to make my agent give you stuff! A chance like this doesn't come along every day, not even for me!

2. You still have four hours in which to enter my random drawing to win a copy of Feed. I'll be picking a name at noon California time, and all you have to do is leave a comment. You now how to leave a comment, don't you? Just type some things into your browser and click.

3. The fantastic talkstowolves has gone to the trouble of working up a linked list to all the free fiction on the Locus recommended reading list! These are the stories that professional reviewers selected as the best of 2009, and they're totally free for you to read. So if you get bored, you should do that.

4. There is no number four. Move along, citizens, move along.

Sometime in the last few weeks, reviews of A Local Habitation started trickling in while I watched, amazed and a little afraid. It's difficult, seeing a book go out into the world for the first time. (It's also hard to keep from trying to explain things to reviewers, but I manage to restrain myself. Mostly. And when I don't, it's usually because they've asked a direct question.) Since it's a shiny new month and we're on the verge of a shiny new book, here's a shiny new review roundup to try to distract me from my impending book release.

TJ over at Book Love Affair beat the crowd with the first review of A Local Habitation that I saw anywhere. TJ says "For those of you who have read Rosemary and Rue, I have to say: A Local Habitation is even better. All the things that made Rosemary and Rue such a strong debut are still there: the wonderfully damaged heroine, the melancholy story, the gritty details, the perfect rendering of San Francisco, unique and varied fantastic creatures, and I could go on a long while. However, I would say without hesitation that A Local Habitation improves in many of these areas." She also says "Toby Daye is probably one of my favorite protagonists in urban fantasy." Such statements make me a happy girl.

Suzie over at Confessions of a Wandering Heart has posted a long and fairly involved review of A Local Habitation. She says "Toby Daye is fast becoming one of my favorite heroines in urban fantasy," and "Toby is witty, sarcastic, tough, and no nonsense, yet she has a softer side—she takes care of the people she's responsible for. And she's loyal to her friends. I feel for her. I'm hoping she'll find happiness and love (with Tybalt! I love him) and I'm rooting for her to find and punish the guys responsible for ruining her life." She also says "The October Daye series has easily become my favorite faerie urban fantasy series. Toby is the kind of kick butt heroine I can admire, relate to, and root for. This series is best read in order, so if you're interested pick up Rosemary and Rue and keep an eye out for A Local Habitation in March."

Rosemary and Rue reviews keep cropping up, on Livejournal and others. Among them is this noir-informed review from bookelfe, who is a friend of several friends but doesn't know me (and was hence understandably nervous about the book). She calls Rosemary and Rue "a genuine noir urban fantasy novel" and calls out a lot of the more noir aspects of the book very nicely. She isn't too hot on the worldbuilding, saying "it's your standard almost-entirely-European mix of fairy creatures," but that's a fair cop, and she goes on to say "if you are looking for a fun mystery-fantasy read that is high on the awesome noir tropes and low on the completely gratuitous sex, maybe give this a go!" Thanks!

Karissa has posted a long, well-balanced review of Rosemary and Rue, including "There are some wonderful action scenes in this book. McGuire does an excellent job with these. The plot is fast moving and very engaging. The book was hard to put down, you always wonder what is going to happen to October next and if she will be successful in solving the murder. This is definitely not a romance book, but an action packed urban fantasy." She goes on to list the things she didn't like (which are quite well-considered), and closes with "Overall I liked the book. I think this could be the start of a magnificent series." Works for me!

John received an ARC of A Local Habitation, which spurred him to read Rosemary and Rue and post his review. I appreciate this immensely. He says "This book is everything that I love about urban fantasy. It has well developed characters, a vivid setting, a well defined world, and a story that will suck you in." He also says "Toby is an amazing character"—a statement I'm sure she'd appreciate, with all the crap I put her through—and "McGuire's plot moves along quickly, and holds enough turns to keep the reader guessing. It also leaves plenty of unresolved things to make you want to pick up the second book to see what's going to be revisited later. It's also great to see another urban fantasy book that involves other supernatural races other than vampires at werewolves." Awesome!

Our last review of the day comes from Jennifer at the Warren County-Vicksburg Public Library in Vicksburg, Mississippi. She says "Seanan McGuire begins her October 'Toby' Daye series with a bang!" I like bangs. She also says "This is a great book, full of mystery and a great story" and "This book is the first in the October Daye series and I know that I am looking forward to reading more about this character."

That's all for today. I now resume my march toward madness.

I am in the fascinating position right now of having two books in the ARC stage—A Local Habitation (Toby two) and Feed (Newsflesh one)—at the same time. This means there are ARCs all over my house, making people feel that I have an extravagent number of the things. My care and caution with giving them away is hence viewed as channeling my inner Scrooge, rather than conserving limited natural resources. (This makes me think of ARCs as some sort of rare bird. The migratory North American ARC, majestic in flight, aerodynamic like a brick.) The cats view them as natural enemies which Mommy Likes Better, and stalk them with ears flat and whiskers in full threat position. My mother attempts to steal them. And, occasionally, reviewers request them or contest entries win them. Right now, they're worth their weight in kittens, and as the window of their usefulness is narrow, I'm enjoying them while I can. Reviews of A Local Habitation are starting to appear, and various bloggers are starting to announce that they've received their copies of Feed, which means reviews of that should start appearing right about when I get my equilibrium back. Fun!

People periodically ask me* how ARCs get out into the wild. Well, there are three main ways, not counting contests. Namely...

1) You are already on a list, which is in the possession of my publisher, and they will send you one automatically. Most large review outlets are in this category. Feed is being sent to Fangoria Magazine, which is sort of like saying "Seanan, we're going to dip you in chocolate, roll you in selected pages from the script of Night of the Living Dead, and deliver you to James Gunn with a gift tag."

2) You contact my publisher and request an ARC. You probably need to prove that you have a review site or an affiliation with a legitimate review outlet. Your Livejournal is unlikely to count, I'm afraid. I'm sure there are exceptions, but you'll need a readership the size of like, Ohio.

3) You contact me through my website and request an ARC. I go through a lot of the same vetting steps as my publisher—I'll go read your blog, I'll look up the magazine you say you're affiliated with, I'll ask the magical moon ponies whether they've really seen you dancing naked at midnight in the middle of Mare Imbrium—before I decide one way or another.

Be aware that any time you elect for an option that includes the word "ask," you may get told "I'm sorry, no." ARCs are an extremely limited commodity, and just to make things more fun, the number printed tends to decline with each book. It's reasonable math. Your first book, you want to spread it as widely as possible. So you give more copies away, trying to create as much early excitement as possible. Your second book, well, some of that buzz already exists, right? So you don't need quite as many free copies out there, circulating and being read before the actual release date. As the number of people asking for ARCs goes up, the number of ARCs to be had goes down. This isn't the author being mean, or the publisher being dumb. This is using your promotional dollars as sensibly as possible.

What do ARCs have to do with promotional budgets? A lot. Page for page, making an ARC costs more than printing a hardcover. The print runs are small enough that they never tip over into bulk pricing, and since ARCs have no resale value (people selling them on eBay and earning my eternal annoyance aside), there's no way to recover the cost, beyond praying that sending the ARCs out into the world will result in positive reviews and higher sales. So as the "spread the word" value of the individual ARC goes down, the number of overall ARCs printed will also decline, putting those dollars back into the promo budget. I've been very lucky, and have received a decent number of ARCs for all three books to date. The definition of "decent" will continue to shift as days go by.

As a secondary note, if you ask me for an ARC, and I say "yeah, okay," and the ARC then shows up on eBay, I'm afraid I won't be sending you any further books. I can't afford the copies or the postage.

Hope this helps.

(*For values of "me" that mean "the Internet at large, only they use my name, so my Google spiders pick up the post and bring it back to me.")

The votes are in, and the winner, by a single vote, is...

"Faerie is full of old dangers" by sysrae.

sysrae, please email me your mailing address through my website contact link, and I'll package your ARC!

As a note to anyone and everyone currently waiting for mail from me: we've been having some terrifying storms lately, and as a consequence, I haven't done any mailing in a week. (I have to walk a mile to reach the post office, and I sort of thought you'd like your stuff to reach you in envelopes, not in paper mache shells.) I'll start mailing again as soon as the rain decides to stop for more than twenty minutes.

Whee!

It's time to vote for the winner in our second-ever "write a poem, win an ARC" contest. Please, read, vote, and help somebody win a copy of A Local Habitation!



Voting will be open through the end of the week. I'll do the random number drawing for a signed cover flat later today.

Thanks, all!

Please remember that I am still taking entries in the "write a poem, win an ARC" contest. Please write a poem and win an ARC. Or, y'know, don't win, but write the poem anyway.

Rules are on the original post, and I'd love your participation.

...who wants to win a copy of A Local Habitation? This particular giveaway was incredibly fun the first time, and very rewarding, and that means I'm doing it again. So here's the game:

You all know that I adore structured poetry, from the haiku to the virelai. (Actually, that's a lie; I abhor the virelai. But I respect people who actually enjoy writing them.) You also know that you're a pretty creative lot. So here: the gates are thrown open! Write me a structured poem about A Local Habitation, Rosemary and Rue, or Toby in general. Since you haven't read the new book, it can be about anything from what you think it's going to be about to pre-ordering to how much you want a copy—whatever makes you happy. Any structured form is allowed, as long as you can tell me what it is when asked.

Entries will be taken through the end of the week. Then, next Monday, I'll put up a voting post, and let people vote for their favorites. The winner will receive, naturally, a copy of A Local Habitation. Just in case that's not sufficient incentive, there will also be a prize for participation—just entering a poem will enter you in a random number drawing for a signed cover flat. I don't have very many of these, so this is something pretty spiffy for you to stick on your wall.

Game on!

(Real quick: g33kboi, this is my last call. You have won an ARC of A Local Habitation. If I do not receive email through my website "contact" link with your mailing address by bedtime tonight, I will give your prize to someone else. For serious.)

As of today, we are fifty days away from the official release of A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy]. (Of course, if Rosemary and Rue is anything to go by, we're actually about thirty-five days away from my hysterical meltdown in the Borders near my office.) If I had a penny for every day remaining before the official release, I wouldn't have enough to buy myself a cup of coffee. I would have enough to make a penny roll, though, which is always soothing. I like penny rolls.

Rosemary and Rue [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] was my first book. It taught me a lot about marketing, pre-release crazy, post-release crazy, going crazy from good reviews, going crazy from bad reviews, living by my own rules regarding engaging reviewers and trying to explain myself, hyperventilating when I see my book on shelves, and trying to look nonchalant when I really just want to be screaming "I WROTE A BOOK OH MY GOD YOU GUYS LOOK LOOK LOOK YOU CAN TRADE MONEY FOR GOODS AND SERVICES AND THE GOODS AND SERVICES ARE MY BOOK!!!" while jumping up and down and providing expository hand gestures. It was, in short, a learning experience, and while I'd like to claim that it has left me a calm and mature author, prepared for anything, the fact of the matter is this:

I am so totally going to cry the first time I see A Local Habitation on the bookshelf. And then I'm going to call Vixy and make shrieky bat-noises until she talks me down from my happy hysteria. Because that's just how we roll around here.

I only have one convention between now and book release—Conflikt, in Seattle—and unlike last year, I'm not the Guest of Honor, which means that I have time to breathe. Of course, I have a convention immediately after the book is released (Consonance, in Santa Clara), but again, not Guest of Honor, just Head of Programming, so I'll be able to stop and stick my head between my knees every once in a while. This is A Very Good Thing, especially since, once A Local Habitation is safely out, I'm going to be putting on my Mira-pants and going immediately into freaking out over Feed.

Fifty days. A year ago, I was worried that no one would like Toby, that she'd just disappear into the urban fantasy jungle and never be seen again. Now I'm worried about not letting people down, and whether they'll still like Toby now that she's a little more comfortable with her new apartment.

Fifty days.

Wow.

The results of the FAQ question contest:

g33kboi, you are the winner of an ARC of A Local Habitation! Please email me through my website "contact" link with your mailing address.

tigertoy, you are the winner of a signed copy of Rosemary and Rue! Please email me through my website "contact" link with your mailing address, or with the address you'd like it sent to, if you want to give it to someone else.

If I have not heard from you by the end of the weekend, a new winner will be selected, and your prize will be given to somebody else. If you think you've already emailed me, and I'm not getting it somehow, please comment here.

After going through the truly awesome questions presented for possible inclusion in the FAQ, I've settled on...

g33kboi, you are the winner of an ARC of A Local Habitation! Please email me through my website "contact" link with your mailing address.

tigertoy, you are the winner of a signed copy of Rosemary and Rue! Please email me through my website "contact" link with your mailing address, or with the address you'd like it sent to, if you want to give it to someone else.

Thanks, all!

So as you may have noticed, I love FAQs. I love writing them, I love updating them, and I love pointing people to them. With that in mind, we come to our second giveaway for the day:

Here is the current October Daye FAQ. You may notice that it's pretty sparse. That's why I'm turning to you, my best-beloved people who live free things, to ask for more questions. Be creative, be specific, be general, be pedantic, be whatever makes you happy, but ask questions.

I will be adding the best questions to the FAQ. I will also be selecting two winners from out those questions. One will receive a signed copy of Rosemary and Rue (and if you already have one, I can send a copy to your local high school or library).

One will receive a signed ARC of A Local Habitation.

I'll take entries until tomorrow morning. Now please, please, question me! Get rewarded! Flesh out my website! I'll be your bestest blonde if you will...

Once again, we can celebrate the awesome-ness of the geekery of the world through a spectacular book release counter! Yes, from now through the release of A Local Habitation, we'll be counting down the days to the ultimate awesome, with this totally bad-ass treat.

( Cut because we care. Also to spare your screen from going wicker-kapow.Collapse )

Since we're counting down to the release of A Local Habitation—seventy-one* days, but really, who's counting? Beyond, I don't know, me—it seemed like a good time to get some awesome new graphics out into the world, courtesy of the always-spectacular taraoshea. And so, without further ado, I direct you to take a look at the Icons and Wallpapers Page of my website. Go ahead. I can wait.

Now, aren't those amazing? The icon and wallpaper sets at the top are totally new, designed to go with A Local Habitation; we'll be adding a few more in January, but this was just a mind-blowingly awesome start. If you scroll to the bottom (or make use of the handy new navigation bar, of which I am justly proud), you'll find the wallpaper and icon sets for Winterfluch, the German edition of Rosemary and Rue which comes out this January. Tara did a remarkable job of recreating the feel and emotion of the cover without using any part of it in her graphics: that's all stock photography and CGI magic. She also relabeled several of the original Rosemary and Rue icons with the new title, so as to create a wider range of choices (this is going to be standard with non-U.S. releases).

I am beginning to get excited and scared and all that other good stuff. But the new graphics are gorgeous, and I totally recommend taking a peek.

(*Seventy-one is the twentieth prime number, and is the twin prime of seventy-three. It's also the permutable prime of seventeen. This has been your moment of prime number math geekery for the day. Sadly, I feel better now.)

Voting has closed on the second A Local Habitation ARC giveaway, and it's time to announce our winners. Remember, we expanded the slate to four in response to the many, many awesome entries. Winners get to pick their prizes in order (first place first, etc.). All winners have twenty-four hours to tell me what prize they want and email me—not LJ message—their mailing address. Any winners who do not contact me within this time period will be disqualified, and I'll move down the list.

In first place, batwrangler and the very orange snake! batwrangler has claimed the ARC of A Local Habitation.

In second place, stealthcello and the very blue Maine Coons!

And a tie for third between okayokayigive and exapno!

I will update this post as prizes are claimed. Thank you all for participating, and I'll announce the next contest soon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was going to post about how today was a hundred days from the release of A Local Habitation and isn't that exciting and isn't it terrifying all at the same time. I was going to post about how today marked the point at which "far from release" became "near release," and all my inner Muppets danced. And then I was looking at my planner pages, and I thought "something about my math looks off."

And then I re-counted.

And then I freaked out.

Today is ninety-one days from the release of October Daye, book two, A Local Habitation. If I had a penny for every day remaining, I wouldn't even be able to buy a can of soda (taxes being what they are). Thanks to my little math error, I have just been dropped off a scheduling cliff, falling past "safely remote" and into "ha ha, gotcha." Yes, it's only nine days, but there's a psychological element to "one hundred" that isn't there with "ninety-one." (Although ninety-one is seven times thirteen, which is pretty awesome. That makes it a semiprime: a natural number that is the product of two prime numbers. Even when math betrays me, I love it so.)

Part of my calm, measured, perky productivity is the fact that I am really a lot more tightly scheduled than most people who haven't actually seen my planner ever realize. Losing nine days is a shock to the system that I didn't particularly need today, and while I'll recover in reasonably short order, I can't say I'm very happy right now.

Arrgh.

EDIT: Here's irony for you: I made another math error. Yesterday was ninety-one days to book release. Today is ninety days to book release. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go Xerox my head.

Winnowing down the number of amazing entries we got on the second ALH ARC giveaway was borderline impossible. So I selected my five favorites, solicited favorites from a few friends who didn't have entries, and let the random number generator fill out the rest. Please vote for your favorite picture or pictures; winners will be announced on Monday, December 7th.

Since we got such an amazing range and variety of entries, I'm going to expand the number prizes to four. First place gets first pick, second place gets second pick, and so on. The prizes are:

* An ARC of A Local Habitation.
* A copy of Rosemary and Rue (which I am happy to sign to someone else, if the winner wants it to be a gift).
* Two signed cover flats of A Local Habitation.

And now...the voting!

First off, remember that I'm still taking entries in the A Local Habitation ARC contest! To answer two questions I've been asked a time or two, no, the pets don't need to be yours, just photographed with owner consent, and yes, this contest is open to everyone, not just US residents. (To answer a third question, yes, you're welcome to cover your book with snails or give it to an octopus, but in those cases, I won't replace it. "Book eaten by tiger" is an accident, "book given to marine resident" is a very odd choice and an excuse to go to the bookstore.)

I'll take entries until the end of the weekend, and open voting Monday or Tuesday. Pet photography is fun!

( Now, what is the power of kittens compelling you to do this time? Click to find out. Alice says hello.Collapse )

It's time to get ready for the second A Local Habitation ARC giveaway of the season! Yaaaay! Now that we've all flailed around like Muppets on an electrified floor for a few minutes, here's the way this particular giveaway is going to work:

1. Get a camera.
2. Get a copy of Rosemary and Rue.
3. Get a pet.
4. Combine.

This contest, originally suggested by The Agent, is simple: take pictures of your pets (or the pets of someone else you know) hanging out with a copy of Rosemary and Rue, and submit them here. All pets are eligible. Cats, dogs, pythons, spiny African flower mantises, whatever you have and trust with your book, they're all invited to this party.

Be creative. Be dramatic. Have fun. Do not allow your Burmese python to swallow your book (it would be bad for the snake). Post your pictures here; after Thanksgiving, we'll open to voting, and winners will be selected. Winner #1 will get their choice of an ARC of A Local Habitation or a signed cover flat of A Local Habitation. Winner #2 will get whatever winner #1 didn't select, that being the way we roll around here.

Let me know if you have any questions, and game on!

According to my infallible little planner countdown, A Local Habitation will be released in one hundred and thirteen days. One hundred and thirteen is the thirtieth prime number (I love prime numbers), following one hundred and nine and coming right before one hundred and twenty-seven (my personal favorite prime). It's a Sophie Germain prime, which means that p2 + 1 is also a prime number. Two hundred and twenty-seven, totally prime. Is that not awesome?

Okay. Maybe it's just awesome if you're me. One hundred and thirteen is also a Chen prime, a Proth prime, and an Eisenstein prime with no imaginary part. There's a lot of other fun stuff you can do with this particular number, including treating it as a permutable prime (with one hundred thirty-one and three hundred and eleven). And? One hundred and thirteen is three and a half months to the release of A Local Habitation.

That's a pretty big shocker, huh?

I'm just getting really started with my pre-release madness. Wallpapers and icons are being prepared. The countdown tool is going to be assembled as soon as the graphics are ready. My website is being relaunched, streamlined and spiffed up for the sake of ease-of-use. ARCs are going out, both to reviewers and through fun giveaways. People are starting to get excited. I'm working on the next promo comic.

One hundred and thirteen days. That's, like, absolutely no time at all. That's, like, tomorrow. And immediately after that, I'll put on my Mira-pants and begin working toward the release of Feed. Last year at the San Diego International Comic Convention, you couldn't buy any of my books in the dealer's hall. This year, you'll be able to buy three.

How's that for a slice and a half of creepy pie? Mmm. Tasty, tasty creepy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's new in the world of you?

Point the first: I have drawn the winner for the first A Local Habitation giveaway! I literally do this by feeding the number of comments into a random number generator, and then counting (this is very laborious, but worth it). So our first winner is...

asthecrowfly!

Please email me—DO NOT use the LJ messenger function—with your mailing address. I will be mailing the ARC out after I get home from New York (so next week).

Point the second: I am about to shut down my computer, get into the car, go to the airport, and fly to New York City. I'll be online in the evenings, and may even be online from the plane, since I'm going to need distractions while in the air. I have a lot of writing planned for the actual transit portion of the trip, and a lot of business meetings planned while in New York. I'm going to be Seanan and Mira this time. Fun for the whole family. Plus, The Agent is taking me to Serendipity 3. Mmmmmm, frozen hot chocolate.

Point the third: Coyote has decided that I depend too much on modern technology, and my iPod has died. Hard. Like, I spent half an hour on the phone with Apple technical support, and finally got told "I think it's your hardware." No shit, Sherlock. Anyway, I'm going to go to an Apple Store in Manhattan, where hopefully they'll say something like "gee, this is still under warranty, have a new one." If not, I'm going to sell one of Brooke's kidneys (again) or something, because my mental health really hinges on having portable music, and I no longer have my faithful old Sony Discman (it died quite some time ago). My housemate has loaned me his iPod for the duration of my trip, largely, I think, because he was afraid I might eat him if he didn't.

And that's the news from California. There will be more contests and ARC giveaways in the months to come, including the first contest proposed by The Agent, and I'll let you know when I reach New York alive.

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!

Remember, folks, I'm going to be doing a random drawing on Saturday to win an advance reader's copy (ARC) of A Local Habitation. You could get your hands on the second Toby book months before release day! And all you have to do is...

...click this link and leave a comment.

Seriously, that's all. Just don't leave your comment on this post, since no comments made on this post will be fed into the random number generator. Leave your comment on this post over here. Not this post. This other post.

Good luck!

I was intending to make this post yesterday, on the actual two-month anniversary of Rosemary and Rue being released into the wild. Tragically, intentions only count in horseshoes and hand grenades, and my post-World Fantasy exhaustion resulted in my spending the evening watching Supernatural and playing "Plants vs. Zombies." I'm actually not all that sorry. I really needed the rest. All that being said...

Rosemary and Rue has now been available for two full months. People I don't know and never will have bought and read my book. (Sometimes I can tell who doesn't know me, because they call me "Mr. McGuire" in their reviews. I find this adorable.) People have loved it, people have hated it, people have called it original and amazing, people have called it the usual urban fantasy fare. I have stopped having chest pains when suddenly confronted with large book displays. I have stopped having stomach pains when stores had other books in my genre, but didn't have mine. I have, in short, calmed down a lot. Much like a woman who spends a year planning her wedding, then finally realizes she can do other things, I am basically recovered.

Which is good, because now it's time to get ready for A Local Habitation. Which is, I think, a better book than Rosemary and Rue (and I do believe Rosemary and Rue to be a good book; I wouldn't have bothered trying to publish it if I didn't). Rosemary and Rue was the book that established my world, and that means that large chunks of textual real estate did have to go toward making the rules coherent and clear; without the rules, the whole towering palace comes tumbling down. It was also the book that made the largest number of introductions—much like inviting all your friends who've never met to the same cocktail party. A Local Habitation gets to skip all that, and go straight to the "smashing stuff" part of our program. I like smashing stuff.

I have learned a lot about self-promotion, event organization, not taking everything personally, keeping myself pointed in the correct direction, organization of the world in general, and not exhausting myself too much. I have learned that no matter how much I feel like I've thrown my book at everyone in the known universe, there will always be people going "Who are you again?" I have learned that a bad review is not the end of the world, and that a good review is exactly as awesome as I always hoped it would be. I have learned to take the time to breathe.

And now, in a hundred and thirty days, I get to learn all these lessons all over again.

Whee!

Well, it's November. Rosemary and Rue has been available for two months, and has been performing pretty well, thus making me feel slightly less like I need to spend all my time flailing. And I have the ARCs for A Local Habitation, which means it's time for...

An ARC giveaway!

To enter to win a copy of A Local Habitation, please comment on this entry. That's all; just comment. I'll be selecting a winner via random drawing on Saturday, so as to give people plenty of time to chime in with their burning desire to have the second Toby book in their hot little hands. (Please remember that I really really really need you to buy the book even if you receive an ARC.) I'll sign it and everything.

Well, then: GAME ON!

Hey, guys. Sorry to have been so incredibly scarce recently. Between the Ohio Valley Filk Festival, going through the page proofs for Feed (which killed no fewer than four pads of Post-It notes), getting ready for World Fantasy, and trying to finish a variety of projects before deadline, it's been hectic squared around my place, resulting in a lot of things slipping. (Ironically, my viewing of America's Next Top Model and conquest of "Plants vs. Zombies" are not among the things which have slipped. This is because skinny crazy girls and plant-eating undead don't require all that much thought, while composing a coherent blog entry does.)

So what's been going on? Well, for starters, I have my Advance Review Copies of A Local Habitation, and they're flat-out gorgeous. I'd take a picture of Alice with the books, so you could get an idea of how big she's gotten, but unfortunately, she killed the camera a while ago, and it has yet to be replaced. Seriously, I love these books. I also blush a lot when I look at them, because the back cover and inside page are covered with quotes about Rosemary and Rue being awesome. I always sort of envied authors who got that much good press, and now I am that author. It's weirdly quantum. The Great Pumpkin loves me so.

(Before y'all ask, yes, we will be having a few ARC giveaways. Watch this space for further developments.)

The cats have greatly enjoyed my week off from work. This will not make them any more forgiving when I disappear for the entire weekend, but at least I don't feel quite so neglectful. Alice has been thoroughly brushed, and Lilly "helped" me kill zombies for about an hour last night, by sitting on my lap and occasionally attacking the mouse.

Hope y'all are having a fabulous Halloween season, and that all your bonfires are smoky, your jack-o-lanterns spooky, and your black cats sleek and strange.

1. We're over a month out from the publication of Rosemary and Rue [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy], and the book still seems to be going over generally well. It's selling briskly, it's received a lot of positive press, and people look excited about book two. This makes me happy, as I, like all authors, am highly neurotic. (Remember, urban fantasy novels set in San Francisco make the perfect gift for any occasion! Buy two, they're small!)

2. The cover for A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] is now up on Amazon, displaying my awesome new front cover blurb from the lovely Ms. Charlaine Harris herself. Yes! She likes my book! I am basically on top of the world right now.

3. Since it gets asked with fair regularity these days: no, "Wicked Girls Saving Themselves" has not been recorded on any of my three currently available albums. It's the title song on Wicked Girls, which is going to be released in late 2010. I don't have a full finalized track list for the album yet, but it's definitely going to include "The Ghost of Lilly Kane," "Writing Again" (by Brian Gunderson of We're About 9), "The True Story Here," and "Counting Crows," among others. The theme for this album is, essentially, the strength to rise above your story.

4. All three of my currently extant albums remain available through CDBaby.com, but I can't promise how long that's going to be the case. My stock assessments are always a bit questionable, given my tendency to discover CDs under the bed, but I'm going to say that there are between 150 and 180 copies of Stars Fall Home remaining, and I'm not currently intending to reprint the album. Pretty Little Dead Girl is in slightly better shape, being the live album and hence a slower seller, but I still wouldn't malinger forever on placing an order, or that order may not be place-able.

5. The cats are reacting to my current illness by behaving like this is Kitty Christmas, and basically running the Blue Cat 500 all around the house. They know I can't do anything to stop them. Remind me again that I actually like my cats? Because I am so not getting that right now.

6. Paging silvertwi. I do not yet have a mailing address for you. You have forty-eight hours to supply me with same, or your prize will go to somebody else.

And now we must rinse.

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

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

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

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

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

Here I go again.

See you soon.

Earlier this week, I pointed you at a teaser for an upcoming review by the Book Zombie (still the best name ever). Well, her full review has been posted, and it was just as awesome as the teaser implied that it was going to be. I realize that I'm still in the rosy glow of "all my reviews have been positive ones," and that this doesn't last forever, but that doesn't change the part where this review is just absolutely gorgeous, and warms me down to the tips of my tippy-toes.

jennifer_brozek has also posted her review of Rosemary and Rue over on the Apex Books blog. This, too, is a splendid review, and I'm struck once again by how many people love such different things about the story. I've been in love with Toby for so long that it's a little odd to watch other people meeting and loving her, too. Although Jennifer's right; if I ever met Toby on the street, she'd totally break my nose. She wouldn't even hesitate.

In other exciting news, A Local Habitation is now available for pre-order from Amazon.com. I just found this out this morning, and I am over the moon about it. Look! Book two! Right there, on the screen, with an ISBN!!!!! Maybe I'm just a total nerd, but having an ISBN is so exciting to me, in so many ways, that it's difficult to express in words. The cover art hasn't been posted yet, but it should be coming along in due course.

We're getting closer every day.

...or, to stop paraphrasing Grease II, who might that irritated looking woman with the brown hair, the sensible clothing, and the large knife be?

Does this give you a clue?

In other news, yes, that is the cover illustration for October Daye, book two, A Local Habitation. Not the cover, mind you -- the cover illustration. I'll be posting the book covers here as soon as they're finished and I'm allowed, but since my awesome awesome awesome cover artist has posted the illustration, I'm allowed to link to it. (I'm also allowed to order a print. Because my walls need to have Toby hanging from them. It's a moral imperative.)

Please note that Toby looks better, cooler, and more just plain Toby than I ever dreamed she would be. We used to play this game of 'how bad can it get?' when talking about my eventual book covers. These games usually included words like 'blonde' and 'chain-mail bikini.' Instead, I got a genuine snapshot of the bitchy, curt, wonderful woman who lives inside my head, and now everybody else can see her, too.

I am happier than words can express.

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.

Okay, now we REALLY have to have a dino dance party. Why, you may wonder? Why, you may ask yourself? Because I have just finished my first post-editorial pass through A Local Habitation, book two in the Chronicles of October Daye. And I have turned that puppy in. Yes! No longer is my manuscript malingering around on my thumb drive, looking lost and lonely and wondering whether it ever gets to go anywhere! It's gone, off to the magical wonderland of sunshine and zombie ponies that is DAW Books. (I've seen the offices at DAW. They're totally filled with sunshine and zombie ponies. I swear. Okay, not really, but wouldn't that be lovely? Zombie ponies for all!)

I kinda completely love this book right now. I mean, I kinda completely love this book all the time, because hello, my baby, all grown up and ready to go play with the big books, but also, I've just gotten up close and snuggly with all its little bells and whistles, and this has resulted in me kinda completely loving it. This is sort of awesome, as I have a very love/hate relationship with my books while I'm working on them.

I'm reasonably sure all this glowing happy 'yay my books are finished yay' is just the endorphin rush before the inevitable and soul-consuming crash. I'm basically okay with that.

Meanwhile, off in the land of 'people doing arcanely productive things that I don't understand but which fill my universe with buckets and buckets of awesome,' Tara is mostly finished with my website redesign, and Chris continues to keep the site itself alive and not eating people who happen to be passing randomly on the street. Let's be clear, here: my skill with HTML basically extends to the cutting-edge of 1997. I can close a tag with the best of them, as long as it's not, y'know, a hard tag. Once it gets difficult, I crawl under my desk and hide until Chris manfully rescues me. So credit for every ounce of visual and functional awesome? Goes to Chris and Tara, rather than to me.

Plans for this weekend include a lot of house cleaning in preparation for Terence's upcoming visit, a family funeral, and probably starting to dig myself into The Mourning Edition (which is the sequel to Newsflesh). I may also head for the Starbucks and spend a few peacefully isolated hours inking, as that's the best way to get ahead of myself.

I have finished this week in triumph.

DINO DANCE PARTY!

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 )

The second of the Toby Daye books, A Local Habitation, has officially been turned in to DAW. Everybody dance! There's a lot of editing to come on both the books I've turned in -- the in-house editorial process hasn't even started, and you'll all have the opportunity to watch me lose my tiny little mind as things get going -- but the editing and correction that can happen independently on my end is done. My babies are out of my hands.

(It probably says something about my psyche that, after sending A Local Habitation to its reward, I spent an entire train ride poking fiercely at the pacing problems I'm having with the start of An Artificial Night. Someday I'm going to write the last book in this series. The next day, I'll probably start something fifty books long, just so I never have to experience that lack of destination again.)

For right now, I will pretend there's no work left to be done, and that the books are perfectly perfect in every way. Because that allows me to throw my hands in the air and declare a velociraptor dance party to last until dawn.

DINOSAUR DANCE PARTY TIME!

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.

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!

Today, I begin doing the major surgical adjustments to A Local Habitation. This is, honestly, one of my favorite parts of the writing process. The book is done -- for certain values of 'done' -- and I can see the entire shape of it, all stretched out upon my screen like a patient etherized upon a table. Now I can start determining which of its major organs it really doesn't need, which ones can be easily extracted, and which ones need a little more beefing up. It's a really rewarding period in the evolution of the text.

I managed to get some work done on Lycanthropy yesterday -- not as much as I would have done on, say, a day when I wasn't down with Martian death flu, but since I'm sick, and a next-day review of the text has shown it to be pretty darn good, I'm a happy girl. Clady is just plain fun to write for. I can't wait until everyone else gets to meet her.

Also on the happy-happy joy-joy side of things, when I finish the surgical adjustments to A Local Habitation and send it off, I should be able to take a month or so off from playing in Toby's backyard to address the changes I've been wanting to make in Newsflesh. Because everything is better with zombies. Even chocolate chip cookies. And since I have steadfastly refused to allow my love for the living dead to insert them into any of my other ongoing series (except for Deathless, but that's a special case, given my protagonist), I figure I deserve a little bit of a zombie break. ZOMBIE BREAK!!!!!

Life is good. There's so much writing to be done!

I've finished the first pass-through on A Local Habitation! Yes! Every chapter has been smacked with the editorial machete of Bringing Things Into Line With The Final Submitted Version of Rosemary and Rue! Now, this doesn't mean that it's done, submission-ready, ready for print, or anything fancy like that...

...but it does mean that I'm done with the really heavy lifting, and can start worrying about the pacing, the flow, the subtle points of continuity, and the fact that I somehow made it through multiple drafts of the book without noticing that I had a car suddenly materialize twenty-six chapters in. Win!

As I am still too sick to die, I will retreat with my triumph to update my continuity guide.

I have just finished the big payoff in A Local Habitation. What's left is cleanup and resolution, tying off loose ends, and about eighteen pages.

Wow.

My hands hurt.

I'm in the middle of revisions on A Local Habitation, the second Toby Daye book and the sequel to Rosemary and Rue. The following bit of nuttiness was the result:

Me: "Tybalt has just shown up. Wackiness is sure to follow."
Brooke: "Yay Tybalt! He'll know what to do."
Me: "Injury may be on his list."
Brooke: "Tybalt's to-do list: Items 1 through 7: INJURY. Item 8: INSULT. Items 9, 10: INJURY."

Two observations arise from this. One: it's good to be the King of Cats. And two...I love my proofreaders.