I find myself in need of a meteorologist to assist me with...well, to assist me with things that I am not presently at liberty to discuss, but trust me, it'll be fun. I've already spoken to a climatologist about global warming and various other factors, but now? Now I need to construct a really awesome storm.

If you can help, or know someone who can, please drop me a line, either here or via the contact form on my website.

Thanks!

Because "done" is a misnomer around here, the ever-fabulous team of taraoshea (graphic design) and porpentine (back-end code) are hard at work preparing a redesign for SeananMcGuire.com, aka, "my website." We're not getting rid of the current content—we're not insane—but we are trying to make it a little easier to access and navigate, by doing things like shifting the majority of the menus to be down the side of the page, rather than at the top, and by making the drop-downs a little less likely to snap back up while you're trying to browse.

Among other things, I'll be revamping the FAQs, since I really do prefer keeping them as current as possible. I live in a magical cotton candy wonderland where someday, my email volume will be kept under control by the existence of clear, coherent, comprehensive FAQs. So here's the question for the floor:

What isn't currently answered in the FAQs that you want answered?
What answers do you want to see expanded?
What additional questions do you have?
Are there any sections missing? What are they?

I'll be soliciting for questions for a separate Toby Daye FAQ later this month, so please don't suggest Toby-specific questions as yet, unless they're the very general "what's the release date" or "who does your interior dingbat design"-style questions. Right now, I'm just trying to get base data.

As an aside, if you think there's a page missing that's not part of the FAQs, what is it? You never get what you want if you don't tell me what it is!

Thanks, y'all.

So people have been asking—because people are awesome—what they can do to help Rosemary and Rue be a success. So I've made a handy little list of do's and don't's, just to get you off on the right foot.

DO ask your local bookstore if they have it on order. If your local store is part of a large chain, such as Borders or Barnes and Noble, the odds are very good that the answer will be "yes," and that they'll be more than happy to hold one for you. If your local store is small, and does not focus specifically on science fiction/fantasy, they may have been waiting to see signs of interest before placing an order. Get interested! Interest is awesome!

DON'T berate your local bookseller if they say "no." Telling people they're overlooking something awesome doesn't make them go "gosh, I see the error of my ways." It makes them go "well, I guess it can be awesome without me." Suggest. Ask if you can special-order a copy. But don't be nasty to people just because their shelves can't hold every book ever written.

DO post reviews on your blog or on Amazon.com. Reviews are fantastic! Reviews make everything better! Please, write and post a review, even if it's just "I liked it." Honestly, even if it's just "this wasn't really my thing." As long as you're being fair and reasoned in your commentary, I'm thrilled. (I like to think you won't all race right out to post one-star reviews, but if that's what you really think, I promise that I won't be mad.)

DON'T get nasty at people who post negative reviews. You are all people. You all have a right to the ball. That includes people who don't like my work. Please don't argue with negative reviewers on my behalf. It just makes everybody sad. If you really think someone's being unfair, why don't you post your own review, to present an alternate perspective?

DO feel free to get multiple copies. No, you probably don't need eight copies of Rosemary and Rue for your permanent collection, but remember that libraries, school libraries, and shelters are always in need of books. I'm donating a few of my author's copies to a local women's shelter, because they get a lot of women there who really need the escape. There are also people who just can't afford their own copies, and would be delighted. I wouldn't have had half the library I did as a teenager if it weren't for the kindness of the people around me.

DON'T feel obligated to get multiple copies, or nag other people to do so. Seriously, we're all on budgets, and too much aggressive press can actually turn people off on a good thing. Let people make their own choices. Have faith.

DO suggest the book to bookstore employees who like urban fantasy. Nothing boosts sales like having people in the stores who really like a project. If your Cousin Danny (or Dani) works at a bookstore, say "Hey, why don't you give this a try?" It just might help.

DON'T rearrange bookstore displays. If the staff of my local bookstore is constantly being forced to deal with fixing the shelves after someone "helpfully" rearranged things to give their chosen favorites a better position, they're unlikely to feel well inclined toward that book—or author. It's not a good thing to piss off the bookstores. Let's just not.

So those are some do's and don't's. I'm sure there are lots of other things to consider; this is, at least, a start.

I have a few more ARCs to give away, and I'm stumped. So how should I give them away? (Hint: saying "give them to me" will actually not endear you, unless you finish that sentence with "I do all the buying for a major bookstore" or something similar, and can present credentials.) Have you got a favorite review site? Have I missed a contest? Should I abandon them on BART cars? What?

Propose anything. I am open to the crazy.

EDIT: So it's said, the "abandon on BART cars" option was a joke. I won't do anything that involves releasing ARCs into the wild, outside the bounds of the standard social contract, with no idea where they went. Not okay.

So I'm in the process of (once again) revamping and updating my FAQs, partially because I'm getting more writing questions (yay!), and partially because I need to be prepared to split the Toby questions off into their own FAQ somewhere around October 15th. Bearing this in mind, what do folks think I should add to my FAQ section? The current categories are...

...writing.
...general.
...music.
...horror movie survival.

The horror survival FAQ may wind up moved over to Mira Grant's site once it gets up and running, just so we'll have content there; I don't know yet. I'm not taking questions for a Toby FAQ yet, because so few people have been able to read it, and any questions beyond the very simple ones already on the site would be spoilery.

What should I be answering? Ask away!

...needs a roommate for OVFF. Preference is for female, non-smoking, non-snoring, and capable of not hitting me with a brick when on the way to bed. I tend to be an early-to-bed, early-to-rise sort of a filker, but I'm very quiet when creeping out in the morning, and I wear earplugs.

I know the room block is selling out. Oops!

* Busier than God.

* Remember, this is a paid LJ, and emailing me is way more likely to get a response than sending something to my LJ inbox. Also, if you send something to my LJ inbox, you'll eventually get a response that includes a cranky request that you not do that anymore. Don't make me cranky. You wouldn't like me when I'm cranky.

* Maine Coons + fun with physics = hysterical win. Lilly observes Alice in her attempts to conquer gravity with an expression of amused disdain, like "I was never that young, that puffy, or that stupid." She's right on one out of three counts.

* DucKon is coming up faster than a runaway freight train bearing down on an innocent young heroine tied to the tracks by a dastardly villain with a curly mustache. I am not ready. I am never ready until my plane leaves the ground, so I'll land in Illinois totally prepared, but right now? Right now, I'm not ready.

* As soon as I get past not being ready for DucKon, I have to start not being ready for the San Diego International Comic Convention. Where I am going to be a professional this year. Me. A pro. At Comicon. Did I mention that I think I may have sold my soul at the crossroads?

* I am here, I am responsive, I am doing my best to stay on top of the mountain. Please forgive delays.

One of the downsides to being a somewhat type-A math geek girl is having a constant awareness of the various numerical milestones unfolding all around me. It's the first of May! And quite aside from the various religious (Happy Beltane!) and humorous (Happy Jonathan Coulton Says You Have Permission To Do That, But Please, Not On My Lawn Day!) implications of the date, today marks the point at which we drop from "more than four months to Rosemary and Rue" to "less than four months to Rosemary and Rue." Yes, this is a big deal, if you're me. Also if you're going slowly crazy from trying to keep track of everything that needs to be accomplished in the next one hundred and twenty-two days.

Pardon me while I flail.

Also pardon me while I open the floor to questions. See, I want to give away a few galleys (and I'll have a longer post about why I have so many, and what's being done with most of them, a little later), and that means I need contests. Suggest things! What do you think would make a good contest? "One that I can win" is not a good answer, by the by.

I leave you with Sonnet 122, because I find structured poetry deeply soothing:

Thy gift, thy tables, are within my brain
Full character'd with lasting memory,
Which shall above that idle rank remain,
Beyond all date; even to eternity:
Or, at the least, so long as brain and heart
Have faculty by nature to subsist;
Till each to raz'd oblivion yield his part
Of thee, thy record never can be miss'd.
That poor retention could not so much hold,
Nor need I tallies thy dear love to score;
Therefore to give them from me was I bold,
To trust those tables that receive thee more:
To keep an adjunct to remember thee
Were to import forgetfulness in me.

—William Shakespeare.

Whew.

Dear Great Pumpkin;

I have continued to be a very good girl in the days since I last wrote to you. I have provided places for tired people to sleep, liquids for thirsty people to drink, and food for hungry people to eat. I have shared my ice cream and my candy corn. I did not spike the liquids for the thirsty people with interesting poisons. I have purchased and erected a cat tree so virulently orange that it sears the eyes of the unbelievers. I have not summoned the elder gods from their eternal dreaming. I have not purchased a chainsaw. Also, the swine flu isn't my fault. So clearly, I have been on my very best behavior for quite some time now.

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

* Freedom from typos, printing errors, and other plagues of the written word. Please, Great Pumpkin, guide my red pen through my page proofs and allow me to present Rosemary and Rue as the best book that it can possibly be. Please let all the errors be mine, and let them be reasonably small ones, so that I won't be forced to throw myself on my own machete. That would make me sad. Also, that would be messy.

* Wonderful author appearances, following a fantastic convention season. DucKon is approaching fast, Great Pumpkin, and so is the San Diego Comic Convention, which I'm going to be attending in full-on Disney Halloween Princess-mode. After that comes WorldCon in Montreal, and after that...after that, my book comes out, and I'm doing signings and raffles and all sorts of other things, many of them for the first time. Help me represent the orange, black, and green with honor, with dignity, and without overdosing on candy corn.

* Continued health for my cats. I have to admit, Great Pumpkin, you came through big time with that whole "perfect kitten" thing that I asked you for. I was dubious at first, since "Maine Coon" and "Siamese" are not the same thing, but Alice is amazing, and has won Lilly over completely, which is really what matters. (And if you think I don't know you had a hand in this, you're out of your gourd. So to speak. Betsy hasn't had a blue in years, and don't think I missed those smoky orange undertones. You are a very cunning supernatural force. I bow before the sanctity of your patch.)

* The perfect house for Newsflesh, wherein the Mason twins deal with politics, the Internet, blogging, dead stuff, each other, and their completely insane co-workers as efficiently and politely as possible. "Polite" usually means "with bullets and bitching." If you give me this, Great Pumpkin, I promise you at least three more short stories featuring the Fighting Pumpkins cheerleading squad, and another Velveteen adventure involving the denizens of Halloween. If you give me a trilogy sale, I'll actually do the origin stories for Hailey and Scaredy.

* A lack of total meltdown over this swine flu thing. I know it's not the slatewiper pandemic, Great Pumpkin, because you would never do that to me this close to my first book's release date. So clearly, this is just a minor plague, meant to remind the world that we need to wash our hands more often. Please let people remember to wash their hands and cover their mouths and take deep breaths (okay, maybe not that last one), so that we can get through this without anybody setting anybody else on fire.

* My galleys. Please let them come today, Great Pumpkin, as my twitchiness is beginning to bother people. I think some of them are becoming concerned that I may destroy the planet in a fit of pique, and frankly, I share their concern. Please, Great Pumpkin, help me to leave enough of the world's population alive to properly honor you on the next Halloween.

I remain your faithful Halloween girl,
Seanan.

PS: You did an amazing job with the cover thing. Thank you so much.

Almost everybody's heard the basic hitch-hiking ghost story—dude (usually) gives a girl a ride home, and later finds out that she was actually dead way before she got into the car—but there are some really fascinating regional variants. So here is my question for you:

How does the story go? Is she a victim, a predator, or just a confused kid trying to go home? Is seeing a hitcher like seeing the Bean Nighe—you're just doomed to die now? How does it go?

To be clear, I'm not asking you to make something up; I want to know how, in your part of the country or the world, the story goes. Or, if this is the first time you've encountered the idea (outside Disney's Haunted Mansion), I'd like to know that, too.

Curious cat is curious.

So my website improvements and updates are rocking right along—you can now visit the site for everything from news about the Toby books to the Velveteen stories, an assortment of FAQs, and stuff about my cats. The songbook and album information is all still there; so is the art card gallery, and the first of my Thoughts On Writing essays (along with the thoughts themselves). It is, in short, expanding at a truly epic rate...and that's where you come in.

What's missing? What needs more detail? What are you waiting to see? We currently have plans in the works for...

...forums. Chris is working on getting these functional. Once we have the code in place, we'll probably be in "closed beta" for a few weeks as the forum moderators sort out what they want to do with the space, and then we'll go open. I'll solicit suggestions for specific forums when we get closer, but once the forums open, I'm essentially going to be hands-off.

...a mailing list. People keep asking me to sign them up, and I have to look politely baffled. So again, Chris is crunching the code for it, and then we'll be opening one up. I'll probably have to do a quarterly newsletter to justify having a mailing list. Woe. Because getting me to chatter about what I'm doing is so hard.

So what else do we need? Speak, and be joyfully heard!

So here are our ribbon options; vote for your top five. Keep in mind that we want to go for both variety and interest, and that some of these will have a longer projected 'shelf life' than others (as, well, the ones with release dates are only really good through WorldCon). Adding a 'fun' ribbon or two will make people more likely to take the more obviously promotional ones. Psychology is fun!

Many of these would be/will be split onto two lines.



Vote, and be heard. Feel free to comment with additional suggestions, or with color ideas.

Hey, folks -- the Bay Area convention season is kicking off, and that means it's time to return to our fannish roots and celebrate with geeky bling. I mean, of course, BADGE RIBBONS. Because nothing says 'love' like pieces of fabric that you can stick to yourself. (Some people say that ribbons are over. I say that these are people who never played Halloweentown fairy princess when they were kids. We shall love our accessories until we die.)

So what do you think I should put on ribbons for this year? Suggest anything you like, from the silly to the sublime, and we'll see where things wind up going. Suggest a ribbon that I actually make, and I'll send you one, even if you're not attending the convention. Keep in mind that we're trying to drum up interest and attract attention, but should still make a vague amount of sense while we're doing it.

Game on!

We've done music. We've done (and are still doing) horror. Writing is pretty solid. Now here's the amorphous one:

Who has questions for my GENERAL FAQ?

Be creative, but also ask what you'd like to know that isn't directly tied to music, horror movies, or writing. Thank you all so much for your help!

So when I originally approached the readership of this journal and said 'lo, what should I include in my site FAQ section?', roughly half the people who responded said 'horror movie survival.' So yes, there's an actual section on getting out of a horror movie with your skin and sanity reasonably intact.

Feel proud of yourselves.

So now that the horror FAQ is underway, I ask you...what all should be included? What burning questions do you have about the things out there that want to make you die -- and maybe more important, what questions do you have about staying alive? Remember, only you can defeat the crawling terror from beyond the stars. Unless, y'know, it eats you first.

So, in an effort to distract myself from being sad...

I'm setting up the FAQ Pages over on my website, since it's a good way to keep my hands busy. One of the pages is, naturally enough, going to be questions about music and filk. I have three CDs, I attend a lot of filk conventions, it seems like a good thing to do. Now, I know that I have many non-filk readers on this journal. So I put forth this query:

What questions do you have about filk?
What questions do you have about my music in general?

Please let me know what it would help you to know, so that I can put all the pieces together coherently!

Hey, all you Twitter-enabled peoples out there. Ever wanted to really know what was going through my mind? (Hint: it does not involve the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota.) Well, you can now stalk me all over Twitter, as...

seananmcguire

I know, I know, it's not that creative. But I'm lonely all shouting into the Internet void by myself! Come keep me company?

So as I sit here, a safe seven months from my release date, I'm watching various friends and acquaintances as they madly dance through the steps required to promote and advertise a new book. It's important, especially for newer authors, to do something beyond just saying 'I have written a book and my mommy says it's awesome' when they have something hitting the shelves. (Although 'I have written a book and Seanan's mommy says it's awesome' seems to carry a surprising amount of weight for everyone but me. Does anybody else out there have a tattooed, foul-mouthed mother who'd be willing to fill that particular role for me?)

So the question becomes, what works? Book giveaways are obviously good things, but also somewhat self-limiting, as I sort of want people to buy things. (Oddly enough, I don't feel like earning back my advance all by myself.) Competitions are also good, providing the prizes are interesting -- and heck, prizes are just lovely things to offer. So what do you think would be a good idea? What kinds of promotion would you like to see? We have seven months to put even the strangest of plans into motion, so sing out!

Operators are standing by.

* Busier than God.

* Remember, this is a paid LJ, and emailing me is way more likely to get a response than sending something to my LJ inbox.

* If you do send something to my LJ inbox, please make sure you haven't turned on the privacy options that prevent me from replying? Because seriously, I'm very blonde, I wind up sitting here, clicking and looking confused, for hours. And that's just no fun at all.

* Siamese cats + the shower = hysterical win.

* I broke my glasses while I was in Ohio; today, I went and had an eye exam to get new ones. Monday, I go to the doctor. It's like medical adventure-land over here, and normally, that's only fun when someone else gets to be the victim.

* Washing your flash drive is scary but entertaining afterwards.

...and that's the news. More later, when I'm breathing again.

So Mary and I have found this poem:

Spos'n the witches began to witch,
And you didn't know which witch was witch?
Well, spos'n?

Spos'n a h'ant appeared to you,
An' an old black rooster up and crew?
Well, spos'n?

Spos'n a pump-kin pumped hot flames,
From a place, you know, what nobody names?
Well, spos'n?

Spos'n a great big bug-a-boo
Reached out his long sharp claws for you?
Well, spos'n?

We both believe that we've seen it before, and that it is thus probably traditional, or a very close variant on something that is traditional. Lo, I beg of thee: can you find the source of this poem? We've sought. We've searched. We've...mostly told bad jokes and eaten candy corn.

Help!