Every time I confirm a publication date, I write it in my dayplanner. This is both because my planner is my secondary brain (I would be lost without it, and probably homicidal), and because that way, I never forget to post when something new hits shelves. I don't like going "buy buy buy" all the time, but a certain amount of promotion comes with the job, and I like letting people know when things are available.

When I opened my planner to today, I found a note from myself, written months upon months ago, letting me know that today was the release date for Wicked Pretty Things.

Well, damn.

For those of you who may have missed the whole sordid mess, Wicked Pretty Things was a YA paranormal romance anthology in which I was supposed to have a story. I withdrew my story, as did many other authors. You can see my original post on the situation here, which includes links to various other posts on the topic. As you can probably guess (if you don't already know), it was a big mess. Eventually, so many people pulled out of the book that it was canceled. It's not coming out today; it's not coming out ever.

I hate that this book had to die. I hate that withdrawing my story was necessary. I am so very proud of our community of authors and readers and bloggers for standing up and saying "no, this is not okay; no, this is not that time; no, this is not that place; no, we will not say that we're against bullying and discrimination, and then sit passively by while we bully through exclusion, while we discriminate against teens who need literary escape as much, if not more, than anyone." We said no. We said no, and because of that, things changed, even if it was only a very little bit.

I'm sorry that I'm not celebrating this book's release day today. I'm sorry that I'm not running a contest and babbling about how wonderful it all is. But I am very, very proud of everyone who was involved with this project and stood up for what they thought and knew and believed was right. Things are getting better.

We're making them a little bit better every single day.

I am currently trying to transform my place of residence from a welter of stuff* into something halfway functional. I have a lot of motivation. I not only want to have a viable idea of what I have, thus telling me what I need to acquire if I want to finish various collections, I want to get rid of things that I don't really want. That way, I can pack with more assurance. Every move is focused on that sweet eventual goal: Seattle. I want to get out of the Bay Area, and after co-habitation with The Housemate for over a decade, my extraction has to be slow and careful, lest we wind up going to war over who owns that battered old paperback book.**

Some of the de-cluttering efforts are obvious. For example, I am putting books in boxes, indexing their contents, and putting the boxes in a big stack of boxes (also filled with books). I am putting things I have no emotional attachment to/desire to keep in other boxes, and sending them away on a regular basis. I am freely giving things to strangers. Other efforts are less obvious. I bought two new cat trees, because cats knock stuff over, thus creating more mess than they will when given places of their own. I've been saving boxes, which makes more mess, at least until the boxes are filled and put away. And so on.

My brain is no tidier. In trying to clean up my link list, I found things that have literally been waiting for their shining moment for up to two years. Will I ever really get around to some of these? No. No, I will not. That makes me sad, but I'd like to see the floor in my rotating "to do" file someday, just like I'd like to see it in my kitchen, and so away they go. Farewell, sweet links. I hardly knew ye.

Still. Once, Feed was a best-selling title in an Australian bookstore. I was nominated for a Romantic Times award. Apex put out an anthology with my wacky Fighting Pumpkins alien invasion story in it. And I needed to take a nap.

I will probably do some really random review posts in the next few days, just to clear out some links that have waited long past their best-by date. This has never been a judgment on those reviews in specific; it's just how out of control the file has gotten. I need a maid to go with that nap, I swear.

Anybody want to come over and help me index stuff?

(*Let's be clear here: most of it is good stuff. That's why it's there. But not all of it is good stuff. Some of it is bad stuff. Some of it is the kind of stuff that seemed like good stuff six years ago, when I was a different person, or when I really thought that someday I, too, would be a world-class guitarist. And some of it, sad to say, is crap.)

(**If you don't think this is something worth going to war over, you're either not a bibliophile or have never had someone try to take one of your best-beloved books away from you. Not being in the mood to start global thermonuclear destruction, I am doing my best to avoid this.)

1. It is now twenty-one days to Deadline. I am scrambling to catch up on "Countdown" (the series of little in-universe snapshots has a name!), and writing ahead so as not to get caught flat-footed by my next convention adventure. I'm not certain I'll have internet while at Wiscon, so the last few pieces may be posted a little late, but they will be posted.

2. The cats responded to my going to Leprecon by magically acquiring giant felted mats which should have taken them well over a week to create. Last night's brushing adventure was a lot of fun for everyone involved, let me tell you what. Also, ow. Also, I am so saying "screw this noise" when I get home from BEA/Wiscon, and just taking the pair of them straight to the professional groomer for trimming and mat removal. I am not going through that again if I don't have to.

3. My whole house is clean! Why is my whole house clean? Because my mother is awesome! Why is my mother awesome? Because she cleaned my house! The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.

4. I get a Cat this weekend! Cat Valente is using my house as her base of operations during the San Francisco Bay Area branch of her tour for The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She'll be at our best-beloved Borderlands Books this Saturday; there will be cupcakes, and carousing, and all the usual wonderful things. You should totally come.

5. There will be another, probably photo-heavy post about this later, but...I got an Evangeline Ghastly doll! More precisely, I got two; the one I bought, and one that mysteriously appeared on my doorstep in a big-ass box from Wilde Imagination. My squealing, it was vast. Of course, now I have entered the dark realm of the ball-jointed doll, from which there is no returning. Which leads us to...

6. I am allowed to do one fiscally silly thing every time I do certain things, career-wise. As I have done a certain thing (more on this later), I get to be silly, and I've decided that this time, for silly, I want a resin Evangeline doll. They fit more of the clothes, and can wear all the shoes. Specifically, I want the Cemetery Wedding Evangeline, since she has the best face. If you know anyone who might be selling part of a doll collection, please let me know?

7. The new season of Doctor Who continues to delight me.

8. I have finished the Tybalt short! "Rat-Catcher" is 10,000 words long, and has been officially submitted to the market it was written for. If they buy it, I'll announce when and where it will be appearing. If they don't, I'll start looking for something else to do with a story full of Cait Sidhe. Whatever I do, it will probably need to involve gooshy food.

9. Zombies are love.

10. I am hammered enough right now that my response time is slow, and the amnesty on replying to comments on the "Countdown" posts endures. I'll still answer comments on all other posts; it may just take me a little while. Thank you for being understanding.

1. I have been blazingly ill since Sunday afternoon, and spent most of yesterday and Monday in a cold medication haze. I am thus behind on LJ comments, email, snail mail, passenger pigeon mail, Facebook mail (well, I'm always behind on Facebook mail), sending out the mail, opening the mail, and anything else that required actual effort on my part. If you're waiting for a response from me, please, be patient. If your request is urgent, please, mail again. If I do not consider your request to be actually urgent, like you're asking for kitten pictures or something, I reserve the right to delete your email and scowl in your general direction.

2. Despite being blazingly ill, I managed to make my word counts on Blackout both days, and am on track to hit 100,000 words on April 23rd. This is good, since it means I may actually finish the book, you know, on time. I love finishing things on time. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy and slightly less completely deranged.

3. Saturday night was GP's birthday party! I did not come home that night, as it was late and we were all exhausted and sort of drunk (and yes, this may have dealt my immune system the fatal blow). Thomas showed his disapproval by climbing onto my computer desk, gently nudging aside the dolls on the second shelf, pulling down the jar in which I store my earplugs, opening the jar, dumping out the earplugs, and eating half of them. I do not know why he is so obsessed with eating the damn things, but he's why I bought that jar in the first place. Now he shits little pink bullets, and looks smug.

4. My vet has confirmed that this won't hurt him, but is also sub-optimal. I have moved my earplugs.

5. The first draft of "Crystal Halloway, Girl Wonder, and the Terror of the Truth Fairy" is finished and being hacked at by the Machete Squad. This is seriously the most depressing, nihilistic story I think I've ever written. Which makes it appropriate that I wrote it while I was sick even unto death. This thing reads like the prologue to a Vertigo comic series.

6. I am not writing a Vertigo comic series. Unless, of course, DC asks me to.

7. I also got started on the first draft of "Rat-Catcher," a Tobyverse story set in London, in 1662 (yes, only a few years before the Great Fire, and the Great Plague). In it, a young Prince of Cats named Rand must stop playing theater cat at the Duke's Theater long enough to find a way to deal with his father, keep his sister from doing something monumentally stupid, and oh, right, maybe save the Cait Sidhe of London from a fate worse than death. Is this Tybalt's origin story? Why yes. Yes, it is.

8. Things already pulled from my research shelf in service of "Rat-Catcher": The Writer's Digest Guide to Character Naming (second edition), London: A Biography, Sex and Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, and The Wordsworth Dictionary of Shakespeare. Make of this what you will.

9. Being sick did allow me to catch up on some of my cache of SyFy Original Movies, including the second half of Meteor with Marla Sokoloff. This was a disturbingly good, surprisingly high-budget feature, especially for a SyFy Saturday. Also, not only were women competent and realistic characters, they didn't all die. Well done, SyFy. Keep up the good work.

10. Zombies are still love.

What's up with you?

LJ appears to be vaguely stable again, which is a nice change. I missed you, LJ! I know that blogging is dead, and it's the age of Farmville or the Tweet or whatever, and I'm on Facebook (technically) and Twitter (avidly), but my heart's true home is here, in Blogland, where I can write full sentences and punctuate them properly without worrying about the number of commas I use. I LOVE YOU, OXFORD COMMA.

Ahem. Anyway...

We're in a vague lull right now, which is nice, since it's letting me catch up on my word counts. I knocked out 2,000 words of Blackout last night, and then turned around and wrote almost as much on "Crystal Halloway, Girl Wonder, and the Truth Fairy's Curse," which sounds like a fluffy cross between Nancy Drew and every Harry Potter knock-off ever, but is, no shit, the most depressingly nihilistic thing I've written in years. Possibly ever. I made a giant spider cry. I have no regrets.

I do have a book event at the Borders in Roseville, California scheduled for next Saturday, and if you're local, it would be awesome if you could drop by. Borders events are much more low-key than the Traveling Circus, and sometimes it winds up just me, sitting at my little "in-store author" table, working on art cards and pretending that I'm not lonely. Help me not be lonely!

Speaking of being lonely, there's been, like, a hugenormous influx of people recently, and I honestly can't tell why. There was a little bump last week, when I posted about my decision to withdraw from Wicked Pretty Things, but since then, it's just been like, WHOA HOLY CRAP I DON'T HAVE THIS MANY PLATES. So if you're new here, hello! Welcome! Can you please tell me who you are and how you got here? I'm totally thrilled to have you, I just like to have some vague idea of what's going on. (Yeah, right. Like that's ever going to happen.)

In other news, water is wet, zombies are love, Jean Grey is still dead, and Thomas is rapidly approaching an improbable size.

What's new with you?

So, um, hey.

Basically, I spent the last weekend at Wondercon, starting every morning when the van came to collect me from my house (door-to-door service!), and ending every night when I collapsed into bed, too tired to think about anything more complicated than convincing the cats to let me have half of the pillow. I had a fabulous time—I always have a fabulous time at Wondercon—but this has left me somewhat behind on silly little things like "keeping up with my blog."

Things I did this weekend:

* Gave a copy of Feed to James Gunn (and did not pass out immediately afterward, although I did feel rather dramatically ill).
* Hung out a great deal with Kaja Foglio, and introduced her to Valencia Street.
* Took Amy Mebberson and her husband, Scott, to Borderlands Books, where they could meet Ash. Ash was incredibly affectionate (especially for her), and provided them with their first real life Sphynx encounter. Jude was charming and gracious, as always, which was especially impressive when you consider that she was also feeling under the weather and suddenly beset by people demanding access to her cat.
* Bought way too many of Amy's fun-size art cards. I have a Rapunzel/Emma Frost mash-up!
* Chatted with Carla Speed McNeil, and Layn, whom I hadn't seen in way too long.
* Donated prizes to the California Browncoats, which they gave away as part of their charity chopstick pull for Equality Now. (I also discussed the Rising, and the fact that, during the outbreak at SDCC, the Browncoats were probably one of two fannish groups that managed to survive without major casualties. May have been the losing side. It's still the one that gets you home alive.)
* Attended the Doctor Who panel, and got an awesome new shirt courtesy of BBCA!

Things I did yesterday:

* Answered lots of email.
* Bought lots of plane tickets.
* Wrote lots of words on Blackout and "Velveteen vs. the Secret Identity."
* Watched Being Human after my orgy of productivity caused me to collapse.

Things I will do today:

* Answer lots of email.
* Buy lots of plane tickets.
* Write lots of words on Blackout and "Velveteen vs. the Secret Identity."
* Prep lots of mailing.
* Start working on my taxes (shudder).

So that's what's consumed my world and time for these last four largely silent days. What's new and strange with all of you?

1. If you want to reach me, please, email. Not Facebook messenger; not LJ messenger; email. If you don't have my email address, the "contact" form on my website is extremely easy to find, I promise. I get those messages.

2. That being said, I am not the world's fastest email correspondent. I do my best, I really do, but I have a) email from my day job, b) my personal mail, c) my business mail, d) Mira Grant's mail, and e) all my other mail to deal with. Expect at least a seventy-two hour delay on anything that's not urgent.

3. Unless you're my agent, my publisher, or my boss, I decide what's urgent when it's in my inbox.

I'm as slow as I am because, in addition to all the things above, I'm trying to write three books, keep up with the comments on this blog, make new entries on this blog, update my website, and two or three dozen other things at any given time. The only way I could answer every email I receive in a swift and satisfying way is if I stopped doing anything else. My publishers would not be okay with this decision. Honestly, neither would I, as I think my head would explode.

So please, if I am not swift in answering your email, be patient. I understand wanting a reply now now now—I do it too; I'm doing it right now, waiting for answers on some really cool website graphic possibilities—but I just can't. Not if you want me to stay on top of everything else.

Thanks for understanding.

1. I have done mailing! Very nearly all the mailing, in point of fact; the only things that are a) paid for/contest prizes, and b) still in my possession are Lu's posters (trying to make sure I didn't double-pack them) and seawench's ARC (returned by the post office, only just got confirmation that it was safe to ship a second time). So there is no mail waiting for me to do something with it! I dance the dance of joy.

2. Since this weekend is the Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling Show's fourth appearance at Borderlands, my mother's been cleaning my house from stem to stern, to get it ready for company. This, naturally, upsets the cats. Thomas has been expressing his displeasure by sulking in the kitchen and knocking over the trash can. He doesn't seem to understand that neither of these behaviors is going to do anything beyond getting him scooped and scolded.

3. Having assessed my current stress levels and their effect on my ability to get things done, I have taken a major step toward reducing them. Namely, I have set aside the to-be-read pile, turning my back on all those beguiling new stories and unfamiliar authors, and have picked up my dearest, most faithful literary companion: I am re-reading Stephen King's IT for the first time in well over a year. This is seriously the longest I have gone without reading this book since I was nine. So yes, it will be sweet balm for my stressed-out soul.

4. Safeway has two-liters of Diet Dr Pepper on sale for eighty-eight cents this week. This, too, is sweet balm for my stressed-out soul, but in a different way. A more hyperactive, I CAN SEE THROUGH TIME, kind of a way.

5. Still on the New York Times bestseller list. I check every day, just to see if I'm still there. Call it part of my monitoring routine against dimensional slide, and let it go. I feel like I should do something to celebrate, like another round of book giveaways or something, but that's going to have to wait until my capacity to cope catches up with the rest of me. Say around next Tuesday, at the current rate.

6. I am the Rain King.

7. Last night's episode of Glee made me happy the way the show used to make me happy in season one, and that was a wonderful thing. I'm glad I bought the soundtrack before the episode actually aired; it let me get used to the original songs the way I am to the covers, and assess the performance on the show based on the actual performance, not on "WAIT WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY SINGING." It's a thing.

8. Last night I dreamt a detailed remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, updated for the modern era, without sucking righteously. It was scary and strange and really awesome, and it says something about my psyche that I still don't think it was a nightmare. Sadly, I woke up before the end. Stupid alarm clock.

9. The bigger my cats get, the more I realize that I need a bigger bed. Which means I need a bigger bedroom. Which means I need a bigger house. Anyone know where I can find Dr. Wayne Szalinski's shrinking/enlarging ray?

10. Zombies are love, be excellent to one another, and party on, dudes.

Friday night, I was chilling at my computer when an acquaintance of mine congratulated me. On what?, I wondered. A link was provided. I clicked the link. The link took me to the New York Times Best Sellers, which seemed like a bit of a cruel joke, since I would have known if I had made the list. Right? Right?

I scrolled down the list.

Late Eclipses, the fourth October Daye adventure, held the #32 slot.

I stared at it for a few minutes before calling Vixy and asking her to click the link. I didn't tell her why, because let's face it, I wanted to know if she could see it, too. She made inquisitive noises as she scrolled...and then she started shrieking. Okay, so yeah. She could see it.

Lots of screaming and flailing followed, as well as a phone tree that managed to double back on itself about seventeen times. Oxygen was not a priority. The Agent eventually returned my call, and then we spent a lovely half-hour or so going "Oh my God" a lot, which is basically what I was hoping she would do (sometimes, being coherent is for other people). The cats watched all of this with disdain, thus proving that the essential laws of reality had not changed, and eventually, I watched Fringe and went to bed.

I'm a New York Times bestselling author. Me.

I still can't believe I'm not asleep.

So wow. February is more than halfway over, and I'm trying to clean everything up on my end of things, in the hopes that doing so will enable me to, you know, accomplish something for a change. Because I've just been sitting around doing nothing up until now. So...

1. All the damaged Wicked Girls CDs have been claimed, although some are still pending payment. It's highly unlikely that any more damaged CDs will show up; Mom and I have checked the boxes thoroughly at this point, and it looks like the unpleasant surprises are over. Thank the Great Pumpkin.

2. I am mailing the last of the paid-for "Wicked Girls" posters tomorrow. This means that, if you are waiting for a poster, you should have it in approximately a week (all the posters being mailed are going to US addresses). If you have requested a poster but not yet paid for it, you have ten days before I delete your name from the list, and release any held numbers back into the wild. If you're not sure whether you've paid or not, you can always contact me.

3. I'm going to be setting up my final pre-release giveaways over the next week or so. Finances are forcing me to restrict them to US addresses/international addresses only if you're willing to pay for postage. I'm really sorry about that. It's just that it costs me approximately three dollars to mail a book inside the US, and outside gets very spendy, very fast. Specific rules to come.

4. I'll doubtless be saying more about this later, but as we're getting into the period where people start getting excited about Deadline: I do not have ARCs. I am not going to have ARCs. Please don't ask me for them, please don't comment on other giveaway posts saying you'd take an ARC of Deadline instead of the stated prize, just please, please, don't. There are no ARCs of this book. I'm not holding out on you, I just don't got the goods.

...and that's our administrative junk for the night. Join me next week, when "administrative junk" will probably include port and drunkenly yelling at my rambunctious kitten.

Officially, for the current dominant culture of the country where I live, the new year begins on January 1st. I don't really remember when I started celebrating the new year on November 1st, as dictated by the Wiccan calendar; it's just the time that feels right to me. Harvest is ending. We're sliding into the long winter, time for contemplation, renewal, and preparing to face the spring. I like the idea that we can start the year with a nice, long, blanket-swaddled nap. So happy new year, from my calendar to yours.

This past year has been an absolute roller coaster ride. High points have included my first-ever visit to Australia (and winning the CAMPBELL AWARD OMG), publishing not one, but three books, under two different names, a good half-dozen conventions, ranging from the massive (San Diego forever!) to the small and intimate (Spocon rules!), winning my third Pegasus Award, and finishing three more books. I never said I was all that fond of sleep. Low points have included exhaustion, travel woes, illness, and throwing my back out. On the balance, I'm calling it a win.

Whether today is the beginning of your year, the beginning of your holiday season, or just another Monday, I wish all the best to you and yours. May your days be sweet, your fires be warm, and your skies be filled with stars.

Happy New Year.

I am too tired to brain today. Here; have an open thread. Ask anything, bring up anything, whatever makes you happy (although I ask that you avoid detailed book spoilers—I have forums for that).

I will brain later, but right now, I have the dumb.

Today is the official North American release date for Feed [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy]. The Kindle edition will be released on May 1st; if you just can't wait, this is a great opportunity for you Kindle-lovers to pick up a physical copy, read it, and give it to your local library. The UK edition will be out sometime in May (exact date not available to me at this specific moment in time).

This is my third book. This is my first book. This is my second series (although this one is actually a trilogy). This is, at least for the moment, my longest book, and in some ways, my most complex. I am terrified and elated, and, because this is What We Do Around Here, I present our resident little dead ghoul, Mel, all dressed up for the occasion. This is the first time I've cut her hair for the purposes of a pin-up. It's also the most elaborate set of lighting effects I've yet used, and I like it, even if it does leave her looking a little gray (only appropriate).

But yes, it is my release day. I have eaten a cotton candy-flavored cupcake, and tonight I will have dinner with Kate. Amy arrives this weekend. I have not shoved anything into my eye. Now help reward my publisher's faith in me by rushing out and bringing the Masons home with you!

1) I find it really interesting how many people, when presented with a time travel thought experiment, will proceed to do things that result in their original timeline being immediately and irrevocably destroyed. Time paradox is not a cuddly kitten that you want to bring home and play with! Time paradox is bad! Remember, kids, friends don't let friends mess around with the laws of time.

2) Books I have read and loved lately: I Am Not A Serial Killer. Saltation. Freaks: Alive On the Inside (which I found at the used bookstore, signed!). Unshelved: Volume I.

3) Books I have written and loved lately: Deadline. The Brightest Fell. This is a much shorter list, and that's a good thing, because it means I probably haven't actually sold my soul to the devil. Much.

4) I love superheroes. I love Disney. I love these Disney heroines presented in glorious super-heroic style. I especially love the zombified Snow White. This is because I am, in many ways, predictable, and I am not ashamed of that fact. Not in the slightest. Nor do I think I should be, really, as my predictability makes me easy to shop for.

5) Lilly and Alice have figured out that, together, they now possess sufficient mass and surface area to prevent me from moving when they don't want me to move. This is fine when I have a book with me and nothing in the oven, but other times...not so fine. In other news, the house did not burn down, although it was a somewhat close thing. And it wasn't my fault.

6) What he said.

7) This looks like it's going to be an amazing season for movies. My favorite so far this year are How to Train Your Dragon and Kick-Ass, with The Crazies coming in as a close third, but oh! The glories ahead! Nightmare on Elm Street, Iron Man 2, Prince of Persia, Shrek Forever After, and Letters to Juliet! Splice! Even Resident Evil: Afterlife, because my love for the franchise outweighs my scars from the third movie. What a wonderful thing a movie ticket can be.

8) I appear to be thinking in almost purely short fiction terms right now, as I recover from finishing Deadline and tackle the trickier bits of The Brightest Fell. So far this week, I've finished two Toby shorts, started a third, finished an InCryptid short, and started my story for an invite-only anthology. I'm hoping I can even get a Vel piece shoved in somewhere, before the steam runs out.

9) Guess what I get tomorrow. I get a Vixy. Do you get a Vixy? No, you do not. I am not much of a gloater, but right now? Right now, oh, I'm gonna gloat. Because I get a Vixy. Of my very own.

10) Jean Grey is dead, James Gunn needs to call me, and zombies are love.

So let's review, shall we? I started this week a) exhausted from a comic book convention, b) with my back doing its best to murder me in my sleep, c) under deadline, and d) with the announcement that I am on the ballot for the 2010 Campbell Award. The first two have been sorting themselves out—I've had time to sleep, and my back is recovering, since I'm taking things relatively easy—but I'm still under deadline, and I'm still on the ballot.

(This whole thing feels a lot like when I first sold the Toby books. All I wanted to do was go up to strangers and be like "I just sold my first series!" All the strangers wanted me to do was leave them alone. So my friends wind up with a lot of really random-ass interjections. "What do you want for dinner?" "A tiara in Australia!" "Yes, but other than that, what do you want for dinner?" "I'm on the ballot!" "So we're having Baja Fresh again?" I try to keep this as non-offensive as possible, but really, it's like a constant GOTO loop at the back of my brain right now.)

Last night, I sat down with the goal of banging out 2,000 words on "Through This House," a Toby short set between Late Eclipses and The Brightest Fell. It's potentially for an anthology, and I wanted to make some definitive progress before I allowed myself to watch this week's episode of Castle. When I came up for air 4,000 words later, the first draft was done, and I felt vaguely as if I'd been hit with a brick. Tonight, I'm going to try to pull the same trick with "Build a Better...," an Alice/Thomas/colony of over-excitable pantheistic demon mice short (being written as the other option for the same anthology). Then, this weekend, I'll try to get three out of three by whipping through "Last Dance With Mary Jane," the Sparrow Hill Road story for June.

Sleep is for the weak and sickly.

In the cracks between the rushing, I've been dealing with taxes, trying to clean my room whilst entirely incapable of bending (it's a good thing I have flexible toes), and revamping both my websites, since the whole "on an internationally-published ballot" has been shoving a lot of traffic in my direction. It's fun like hysteria! And to be honest, I really am loving every minute of it. I am a sad, sad bunny-girl sometimes. So sad.

Next up, a webcomic endorsement, a Feed giveaway, some weird monkey noises, and a funky little dance. Whee!

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

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

Anyway, here you go:

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

Well, we're two days out from official release, and I'm sleeping a little better at night, which is nice, especially since being two days out from A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] means I'm now fifty-eight days away from Feed [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy]. This is basically guaranteed to be a fun year, if you consider the distant sound of chainsaws and hysterical giggling to be the soundtrack of fun. I...kinda do, really. So that's all right.

As an author, it's natural and expected that I'll go a little crazy right around release day. I tell people it's less like having a baby and more like planning a wedding. You sink your heart and soul and resources and time and energy into this one day, and you just pray it'll be perfect, and that you haven't slipped into a horror movie (since weddings are basically catnip for demon serial killers). And then, whether it's perfect or not, you go to bed, you get up, and you carry on.

As a professional, it's also expected that I'll do my best to keep the majority of my crazy off the Internet. I'll twitch and flail and make little gasping noises about the pandemic, but at the end of the day, I won't scream at people, throw things, or threaten to have you all tracked down by my elite army of dinosaur commandos. (Well. Maybe the dinosaur commandos. They get so bored when they just sit around the barracks all day...) The Internet, as I have said before, is forever, and the fact that I'm having the release day crazies right now doesn't mean you won't be able to find my hysterical meltdown in black-and-white (or whatever your screen is set to) six months from now. As I do not want my crazy preserved for all time like fossilized mosquitoes in amber, I try to have more sense than that.

So if I've been overly crazy in the march toward release, I apologize, and hope that you'll forgive me. If I haven't been overly crazy, then, in the words of London Tipton, "Yay me!" You have all been wonderful, and I appreciate you all being here. I'll be running a few more contests in the weeks to come—as a hint, if you've already purchased A Local Habitation, you may want to say your receipt. I'll also be continuing to wind back down to my usual levels of madness, which has more pandemic, and less panic.

Life is good.

We are now officially entering release week for A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy]. Yes, I know that the book has been unpredictably available for the last week and a half or so, but as of tomorrow, we're really and for truly in the realm of "this is your release week," and I will become prone to bouts of random twitching.

I don't know, honestly, whether release week trauma is a thing I'll ever fully get over. When I look at my saved email, the earliest mention of Toby Daye is from January 6th, 1998. That's officially more than twelve years ago. For a decade, Toby was just this weird girl who lived in my head, and who I sometimes claimed to be writing a novel (or novels) about. Some of my friends read those early drafts, and gave me useful critique, and I kept writing...but for a really long time, she was practically my Mr. Snuffleupagus, the protagonist of a series I kept saying existed, yet could never produce.

It is constantly strange to me that people I don't know have met Toby. She's not my secret friend anymore; she's everybody's, and they get to have their own ideas about her, about the things she does and the places that she goes. People send me letters thanking me for writing. How weird is that? Writing is that thing my friends yell at me for doing when they're having parties, not something that I get thanked for. It's bizarre. So when release day rolls around, I get a little twitchy, waiting to find out that it was all just a dream; I didn't get to kick the football, nobody went to Oz, and Jean Grey isn't dead after all.

So. Weird.

Thank you all for reading, and for being here, and I'll do my best not to rip a hole in the fabric of reality, allowing the black hounds of the unreal to pour through and devour all that lives or dreams on this plane of existence. Promise.

So I'm existing on a diet of Diet Dr Pepper, canned peas, and plain-baked chicken breasts with way too many mushrooms, and I'm waking up earlier every morning (new record: 5:02 AM). I thus figure it's time to give the general status updates, before I'm too fried to think straight.

Books. I have three coming out in 2010: A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] and An Artificial Night as me, and Feed [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] as Mira Grant. I have one currently due in 2010, Deadline (the sequel to Feed).

In addition to the books that are already sold/slated for publication, I have one finished October Daye book, Late Eclipses, and one finished InCryptid book, Discount Armageddon. I am currently working on The Brightest Fell (Toby five), Midnight Blue-Light Special (InCryptid two), and Sit, Stay, I Hate You (Coyote Girls two). In 2010, I'm planning to finish all three of these, start on Blackout (Newsflesh three), start on Ashes of Honor (Toby six), and start on Hunting Grounds (InCryptid three). I am not planning on a particularly large quantity of sleep.

There's currently a contest running to win an ARC of A Local Habitation. Drop by and give it a shot!

Short Stories. I'm one of the 2010 universe authors for The Edge of Propinquity, which is running my Sparrow Hill Road series for the rest of the year. The second story, "Dead Man's Party," went live earlier this week, and I'm working on the fifth story, "El Viento Del Diablo," which should be finished in a week or so. After that comes "Last Dance With Mary Jane," which will answer a lot of questions people have been asking for a very long time. This is a series heavily influenced by the mythology of the American highway, and with a very strong soundtrack accompanying every story. There will be playlists! Much fun.

I have various other short stories out on secret missions, including two Fighting Pumpkins adventures ("Dying With Her Cheer Pants On" and "Gimme a 'Z'!"), my first-ever steampunk piece ("Alchemy and Alcohol," which comes complete with cocktail recipes), and an actual Mira Grant short story ("Everglades"). I'm noticing a high level of dead stuff in my recent short story output. Somehow, this is not striking me as terribly surprising.

Non-fiction. My essay in Chicks Dig Time Lords [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] will be available later this month, along with, y'know, the rest of the book, which includes an essay from my beloved Tara O'Shea. So if you've ever wondered why I love math and have trouble with linear time, you should probably pick up a copy of this book. (You should do that anyway, because the book is awesome, but that's beside the point.)

My introduction for jennifer_brozek's In A Gilded Light will also be available with the rest of the book, sometime in mid-2010. I plan to finish the "On Writing" series by the end of 2010.

Albums. Work on Wicked Girls is proceeding apace, and beginning to pick up speed as we get deeper into the process of mixing and arranging songs. I'm scheduling my various instrumentalists to come into the studio and get their parts recorded, and some of the arrangements are just going to be incredible. I still need to confirm the covers for this album, and start thinking about graphic design, but I'm still really, really pleased. There's no confirmed release date yet, and there's not going to be one until we're a lot closer to done: as I've said a few times, as soon as there's a deadline, this ceases to be fun and relaxing, and right now, we're too far from finished for that to be a good idea.

I'm within a hundred copies of being entirely out of Stars Fall Home (my first studio album), and right now, I couldn't tell you if or when there's going to be another printing. I'm doing a little better for Pretty Little Dead Girl, but at the current rate, I'd estimate that I'll be out (or very close to out) by this time next year. Red Roses and Dead Things, being my most recent release, is also the one with the most remaining stock (paradoxically, it's also my fastest seller, since a lot of folks don't have it yet). In summary, if you're missing any of my first three albums, you may want to consider whether you're going to want them, because when they're gone, they're gone.

Cats. Alice continues to steal mass from the very center of the sun, growing at a rate usually seen only in big green dudes who have been exposed to Gamma radiation. She's pissed at Cat Valente, who keeps showing pictures of a very enticing kitten, and then not sending the kitten through the screen. Lilly, meanwhile, has taken to jangling her bell right next to my ear in the middle of the night to express her displeasure with the state of the food supply. Lilly wants to be mittens.

And that's the local weather report. Back to you, Ken.

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.

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.

So here's the basic thing: I grew up below the United States poverty line. Way, way below the poverty line. "I really thought yellow boxes meant it was food" and "let's have government cheese sandwiches" levels of below the poverty line. One thing you don't get when you're below the poverty line in America? Dental care. Combine this with a dental phobia (brought on by the rare occasions when I actually saw a dentist, as the dentists assigned the charity cases were often shouty) and an adulthood spent largely temping, and, well. Nothing good can come of this.

Because I am a working author with a day job and good dental insurance for the first time in my adult life, I thought "hey, I'm finally in the position to actually pay to have all the necessary work done." Not "the cosmetic work." The "chewing is fun and awesome and I enjoy being able to do it" work. I found a dentist, I organized my finances as responsibly as I could so that I would be able to pay for everything...

...I got slapped upside the head with self-employment taxes, which, as anyone who's ever looked at the forms can tell you, is obscene. They don't adjust for your situation, either. There's no box to check for "I need lots of medical work, I am employed by a non-profit, and I live in one of the highest cost-of-living regions of the country, so please, don't assume I can afford what you're asking me for." If you make ten dollars income that can be hit with the self-employment taxes, the government wants between three and five dollars of that, even if you're not going to get any more money that year.

Why am I bitching about this now? Because I finally got my full estimate for the rest of my dental work. And that, combined with my final quarterly tax payment for the 2009 tax year, will basically kill my savings account, which I have worked so very hard to build. A lot of my expenses for the year have been deductible—including a lot of my medical, given the level of extensive that it's achieved—but the bills still have to be paid now. If it weren't for the sheer scope of the taxes I've had to pay this year, I'd be fine. Instead? I'm crazy irritated.

Screw you, too, Uncle Sam.

This is National Invisible Chronic Illness Awareness week, which is something I consider to be genuinely important. We're an appearance-based society, to a large extent, and "you don't look sick" is a far-too-common statement. talkstowolves has posted about her experiences living with temporomandibular joint dysfunction (TMJD), as well as a variety of other conditions. It's very eye-opening. Meanwhile, jimhines has posted about the frightening financial realities of diabetes.

I don't have an invisible chronic illness. What I have is an invisible chronic disability. At some point during my early to mid-teens, I managed to severely herniate three disks in my lower lumbar spine (L3-L5, for the morbidly curious). Because I was extremely overweight at the time, every doctor I saw for more than ten years said "lose weight and the pain will go away," and didn't look any deeper to see why a twenty-three year old woman was staggering into their offices screaming whenever she put her foot down and unable to straighten without vomiting.

Because the body learns to cope with things, I eventually recovered enough mobility to decide to do what the doctors were telling me, went on Weight Watchers, and lost over a hundred pounds. This wasn't as hard as it might have been, because I am a) a naturally picky eater and b) naturally really, really, "was walking a mile every morning to the convention center at the San Diego International Comic Convention, because that calmed me down enough to move calmly through the crowds" hyperactive. So "here, eat lettuce and do aerobics," not exactly the most difficult thing I'd ever heard.

Sadly, it turned out that the doctors were wrong. Being severely overweight may have made things worse, but it didn't cause the injury, and a year and a half of hard aerobics definitely made things worse. In the fall of 2007, I began experiencing numbness of my right side, culminating in losing all feeling in my right leg and nearly falling into traffic when I suddenly couldn't walk. That's when a doctor finally slapped me into an MRI machine, went "oh, crap," and started dealing with my actual injuries.

I look totally healthy. I walk quickly. I move sharply. I am 5'7", reasonably young, and apparently able-bodied. But sometimes I sit in the "people with disabilities" seats, because I literally can't stand on the train for the duration of my commute. Sometimes I glaze over while I'm talking to people, because my sciatic nerve has started screaming like my leg is full of fire ants, and I'm trying to figure out a polite way to excuse myself to go take painkillers. Sometimes I keep walking at a crazy death-march pace because I can feel the numbness creeping back, and if I don't get to my destination before I lose the temporary use of my leg, I'm going to be stuck. That's just how life is.

We may eventually pursue surgical solutions—right now, I'm doing physical therapy, restricted forms of exercise, and trying to work out a detente with my own limitations. They aren't bad enough to qualify me for full-time disability, just bad enough to be inconvenient, invisible, and keep me off roller coasters. Sometimes I meet people who blow off my limits as "whining" or "being lazy." They don't stay part of my life for long.

So please, this week, and every week, remember that appearances are deceiving; like books and their covers, you can't judge a person's health by how fast they're moving. They may just be outrunning the collapse.

There was a link going around this morning to a blog post about things authors really want their readers to know. One of the items on the list was, essentially, "I'm so glad to be accessible, and I love talking to you, and I love that you're excited by my work, and I swear I'm not ignoring you, no, really."

My desire to have this made into a T-shirt and wear it every day is enormous. Because here's the thing: if I have not answered your email, responded to your Facebook comment, or answered your Twitter, it's not because I'm snubbing you, or because I don't think you're totally awesome and mad cool. It's because I am so out-numbered that I'm feeling like the last surviving player in the Teenage Zombie High School scenario, only I don't have any plastic explosives, and I'm not allowed to blow up the building. (Kate says so, and we trust Kate in these things.)

Right now, everything I do spawns something else that must be done. If I put "write thank you cards" on my to-do list, it's followed with "buy thank you cards," "buy stamps," and "mail thank you cards"—all small, silly things, but all things that absolutely have to happen in order for the thank you cards to go out. I am doing my best to tame things by breaking them down into smaller and smaller items, which results in more things that need to happen (bad), but also results in things being easier to achieve (good). My daily to-do lists are solidly booked out through mid-October, and my weekly overviews are complete through the end of the year. Everything that comes up from here until January 1st is getting shoved in around the lists that came before it.

Please understand that I am not complaining. I'm like a shark; I keep moving, or I sink to the bottom of my tank and die. For me, "writing an essay series" and "drawing two dozen art cards" qualify as "taking a break to recharge my batteries." I genuinely enjoy being this busy, and I love the things I'm doing that make me as busy as I am. I just don't get a limitless number of hours in the day, and sometimes, those hours have already been promised to something else when the daily bucket o' email comes rolling in.

Have patience with me? I'm climbing uphill just as fast as I can.

1) A lot of new folks have been wandering in over the past few days, probably because of this wacky thing I did called "releasing a book." Hi, new people! If you're wondering just what the hell you've gone and gotten yourself into, I recommend either hitting the "welcome post" tag, which leads to my semi-regular welcome posts, or wait until next Wednesday, when I'll be putting up the September welcome post. Yes, I really am that organized. The alternative is hysterical flailing, and that thread is useless without pictures.

2) Tangentially related, I have my 2010 Franklin-Covey planner pages! There was very nearly hysteria in the Franklin-Covey store, as the clerk who was helping me responded to my request for the Simplicity 2010 daily pages with "Oh, that's been discontinued." When I started to hyperventilate, he mysteriously located my pages in the stockroom. Perhaps he should consider that when you take a job in the OCD porn store, it's not nice to taunt the people who shop there. We're likely to flip out and beat someone to death with a hole punch.

3) The invasion has begun! Amy has been at my house since last week. Over the next few days, Brooke, Vixy and Tony, Betsy, Sooj and K, Rebecca, and Mia and Ryan will all be arriving. (No, they're not all staying with me. I have insufficient house for that sort of invasion.) Alice and Lilly have handled things well so far, what with the pre-invasion cleaning and the imported fiddler. Alice is especially fond of the imported fiddler, and has abandoned me heartlessly to hang out with Amy.

4) When looking for details on upcoming appearances, please remember that all confirmed appearances are listed in great detail on my website Appearances Page. I don't mind answering questions, but especially right now, there can be a pretty lengthy delay between you saying "hey, are you going to be...?" and my actually getting a chance to answer you. Since appearance questions are innately time-sensitive, please, please check the website first. It may save you missing a really awesome party.

5) Again tangentially related, since it's been asked several times: the raffle is Saturday night, at Borderlands. There isn't a raffle scheduled for Friday night, because it wasn't arranged ahead of time (we weren't aware of how many raffle prizes we'd actually have available to us until very recently). So if you want to participate in the raffle, you need to come to the Saturday book party.

6) If you're planning to come to the Saturday book party, remember that you can get an extra raffle ticket by bringing delicious baked goods to share with the rest of the class! Mmmmm, delicious baked goods.

7) Yes, I'll be at OVFF and World Fantasy. No, I won't be at ConChord or Orycon. I have no conventions in 2009 after World Fantasy, and that's a wonderful thing, because I'm intending to take a nap. I miss sleep. My cats miss me sleeping, since they don't have an electric blanket, and without a warm human, they're forced to rely on sunbeams and each other for warmth. Think of the kitties. (Even if Alice is the feline equivalent of a down comforter, she still likes snuggles.)

8) Here's some fun news for you short story and Velveteen fans. First off, I'll have new pieces appearing at the Book View Cafe soon (I had to take a week off, due to book release crazy), including more horror, and maybe even a look at the little town of Rush's Bend, Minnesota. Secondly, "Velveteen vs. the Blind Date" is finally almost finished, and your regularly scheduled dose of superhero strangeness will be rolling into town any day now. I just need to work the last of the bugs (and bears) out before I release it.

9) The turtle couldn't help us.

10) September is only three days old, and already it's been awesome and exhausting and exhilarating and generally terrifying in ways that I've been dreaming of for my entire life. Thank you all for being here, and for not shooting me for all the flailing I've been doing lately. I promise we'll return to normal levels of flail soon.

Now we must rinse.

My flight from Montreal (technically from Boston, since it was a two-stage trip home) touched down in San Francisco last night at approximately nine-thirty, safely reuniting me with the state of my birth. Hooray! My mother collected me from the baggage claim area, shortly before we collected my suitcase from the baggage carousel, and we took off for the East Bay.

The trip itself was somewhat more...exciting...than I tend to prefer, involving as it did a twenty-minute connection that required me to sprint most of the way across Boston Airport. I was crying and hyperventilating by the time I hit the security gate for United Airlines, which, thankfully, caused security to be very nice to me, and got me to my plane on time. (Also, it exhausted me enough to spend most of the six-hour trip to California totally unaware of the world around me.)

Mom and I stopped for dinner at Denny's, since the particular structure of my trip home had denied me the option to eat. I miss the days of bad airplane meals that at least contained calories...

WorldCon was fabulous, and I'll post about it later, when I leave the "fire bad, tree pretty" stage of cognition. Big thanks to my fabulous roommates, Merav, Jon, and Susan; to John, for picking me up from the airport; to Deanne, for giving me a place to crash for a few hours before the fun really got started; and to the entire DAW Mafia, without which I would have been entirely lost.

Next year...AUSTRALIA.

Lilly and Alice have figured out that I'm leaving.

This always happens. I try and try to change the obvious signs of impending departure, packing in different rooms, hiding the suitcases, but let's face it: I went and got myself cats from two of the most intelligent breeds of domestic feline, and they know what it means when the cosmetic bags disappear from the bathroom and Mom starts coming around a lot. They put two and two together, come up with five, and devote themselves to making my life a living hell, because if I'm going to leave them, they're going to make me pay. Last night's method of making me pay involved waking me up every twenty minutes. Lilly does this by licking my eyelids. Alice does this by punching me in the face.

I love my cats.

At midnight, I was too tired to cope with any more feline interference, and got up, locking them out of the room. I went back to bed. At one, I was too tired to cope with any more feline interference, and got up, locking them out of the room. I went back to bed. At one-thirty, I was too tired to cope with any more feline interference, and got up, locking them out of the room. I went back to bed. At two...

...I realized that Alice is now long enough to turn the handle on my bedroom door, and that Lilly has understood handles for at least three years. They are conspiring against me to punish me for leaving them.

I am doomed.

I have just been informed that my ride from the Montreal airport won't actually be available until about eight hours after I arrive.

Neither will my hotel room.

1) Can anyone fetch one dizzy, jetlagged blonde from the Montreal airport at 7:15 AM on Thursday morning?
2) Can anyone give me a space to nap?!

Oh, God, I'm gonna die.

10. I will be on a plane for San Diego in a little over twenty-four hours, on my way to the San Diego International Comic Convention. The SDCC is one of my favorite conventions, because it is, for all the chaos, really remarkably relaxing. I go, I smile, I speak, I shop. And shop, and shop, and oh, yes, shop. I love flea markets, and the SDCC dealer's hall is like the world's best combination of "the comic book store" and "the indoor flea market." Only this flea market has an artist's alley. Life is good.

9. As part of my preparation for San Diego, I took my mother for a pedicure last night. (There's logic here, I swear. The logic is largely "I didn't want to walk home after getting my nails done.") Neither of us is much of a pedicure girl, but sometimes it's nice to just let somebody attack your heels with a pumice stone. Besides, I have super-cute shoes for the parties in San Diego—kitten-heeled green Italian leather—and they require having super-cute toenails to go with them.

8. Alice woke me up five minutes before my alarm by kneading the hell out of my hip, and then throwing herself down across me like a fuzzy blue blanket possessed of most imposing puffiness. This was far, far more pleasant than being woken by the actual alarm could possibly have been, and made hauling my carcass out of bed much easier. After the Blue Team decided to let me get up, that is. Between the two of them, I really don't get to do much that my cats don't approve of.

7. Next up in my reread of the collected works of Stephen King: The Stand. This is one of my five favorite books of all time. Just having it in my purse makes me happy. (Not as happy as IT, which is why IT is slated for rereading at the end of August/beginning of September, but surprisingly close.)

6. According to this week's new releases list, the next volume of the collected hardcover Creepy comes out tomorrow. (Ironically, I won't be able to pick it up until next week, since, well, San Diego, but just knowing that it's on the trucks makes me happy.) These books are basically my childhood in handy, easy-to-shelve form, and their very existence enhances the universe incredibly. I am a happy girl.

5. Rosemary and Rue comes out in forty-one days. Forty-one is the thirteenth smallest prime number. (The next is forty-three, with which it comprises a twin prime.) It is also the sum of the first six prime numbers (2 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13), and the sum of three primes (11 + 13 + 17). I love forty-one for being prime, and I love Wikipedia for knowing all this crap.

4. I have a hula hoop! And when I get home tonight, I get to use my hula hoop! I get to stand in the front yard and hula like I've never hula'd before. Well, actually, just like I hula'd last night, only maybe a little bit better, because I've had more practice. I can't take my hula hoop to San Diego, so I have to get my hula in now, while I still can.

3. Rebecca has BPAL waiting for me in San Diego. Specifically, Rebecca has a fresh bottle of Bad Luck Woman Blues (basically my signature aromatherapy calm down Seanan, you can't unleash the pandemic perfume) and a bottle of the new Zombie Apocalypse scent. I am a lucky girl.

2. I have season one of Leverage on DVD. Tonight, I will sit on my couch, ink art cards, and watch con men, thieves, and grifters as they do their con man, thief, and grifter things, and my cats will purr, and the DDP will be cold, and the tomato sandwiches will be incredibly drippy and get all over the damn place, probably causing at least one incident with my art supplies, and life will be good.

...and finally...

1. I am healthy, I have a cute haircut, I have orange toenails, I have a book coming out in less than a month and a half, I have wonderful friends, I have beautiful cats, and I'm about to take off for the world's biggest comic book convention. Life doesn't suck.

How's by you?

Did you know that a Microsoft Word error can not only crash your file, it can delete it?

The whole file?

The whole four hundred page novel file?

The whole four hundred page, no backups from this week file?

Pardon me while I go non-linear.

I appreciate my privileges, really I do, but right about now, the idea of expressing myself in an entirely coherent and cohesive manner is pretty much entirely beyond me. Conflikt was wonderful, magical, and completely exhausting, in the way that a good working convention essentially always is. There was music, there was laughter, there was passing out in the con suite and complicating the judging of the songwriting contest...the usual things.

(Having now been a Guest of Honor, as well as a Toastmistress -- which is a much more common gig for me -- I have to say that I was right all along; Toastmistress is a far more tiring position. Although all those laps around the hotel probably contributed a lot to my end condition.)

Last night was a post-convention gathering for fire-spinning, fondue, cuddling with kittens, and generally existing as happy people in a happy people world. I was prompted to tell the story of my crazy uncle and his ravens, since Batya and Merav went and wrote them into a parody; Sooj and Betsy did their version of 'Tam Lin' for a deeply appreciative audience; we broke out 'Wicked Girls' and rocked the house. The usual assortment of wonders. And then I spent essentially the entire day in transit, resulting in me hauling my broken, battered carcass over the threshold to be mugged by Siamese cats.

All but one of the pre-orders designated for at-con delivery actually got delivered (I'm going to mail the last one). Only about half the chapbooks were complete by the con, due to unexpected issues with chickenpox, and they sold out with astonishing speed; the rest will be made available when they're finished (thus actually allowing people who got the first chapbook, but weren't there this weekend, to have a shot). I have bunches of new art cards in need of coloring; right now, I doubt I could stay inside the lines if you paid me.

Bed now. Coherence later.

Six months ago today, my agent called me while I was at work to tell me that I was getting everything I wanted for Christmas, because we'd just sold the first three October Daye books to DAW. This was right after we finished putting book one, Rosemary and Rue, through a really torturous revision process -- seriously, it was like taking a machete and a staple gun to a classroom full of kindergartners -- and started the revisions on book two.

A month later, book two, A Local Habitation, was ready to be turned in to my publisher, and a month after that, in July, I went to New York to turn myself in to my publisher. It was the most surreal summer of my life. It hasn't really gotten less surreal since then.

In September, I turned in my final author-draft (distinct from the final 'my editor has had time to review and request rewrites' draft) of book three, An Artificial Night, to DAW, and started working seriously on book four, Late Eclipses of the Sun. (No, it's not under contract. Yes, I believe in being prepared.) And during that time period, I finished Newsflesh and Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues, and started on The Mourning Edition and Discount Armageddon.

It's been a busy six months.

We don't have a publication date for Rosemary and Rue yet (obviously); my new website has yet to launch; all the frantic writing and revision has done a number on my social life and my recording schedule; we haven't even started shopping the next few books. 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 six months ago today, we sold my first novel.

I am still the happiest blonde there is.

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

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

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

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

My week so far has looked like this:

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

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

Life is good.

My writing has just been compared to early Stephen King.

I can now die happy, content that I have actually done what I always wanted to do with my life.

So, y'know. And stuff.

I've been sick for over a week now. There have been a few flashes of feeling better, but they've been short-lived, and always seem to be followed by things like last night, where I woke up at one o'clock in the morning feeling like I'd been gargling flesh-eating alien spiders. (I wasn't. At least, I don't think I was. If I'm wrong, I suppose we'll find out when they hatch. Also, it should be noted that Brooke supports my theory that alien spiders are responsible for many of the ills of mankind, although this may be because she thinks it's cool. She's right.)

Sadly, the ongoing construction of a tiny viral empire inside my body has left me with the laser-like focus of an eight-week-old cocker spaniel puppy. I can focus on small things, like peeling an egg or inking a single line. Larger things, like folding my laundry or excavating the bedroom floor? Not so much. My room has achieved a level of trashed previously known only in myth and legend. I simply lack the energy to deal with it. All I've eaten today is a cup of sugar-free Jello and some egg whites, because nothing else has any real interest in staying down. I am, in short, being punished for my sins by an angry plague-based god.

Despite my illness, I've been industriously processing edits, which is good, since otherwise, I think they would crush me beneath their weight. I think there may be a ground war over my opinions on comma usage sometime soon. I support this notion, because it would be funny. We've hit the stage where they're almost entirely pedantic things, like 'you have broken another obscure rule of grammar whose existence you never really considered before, but which will be used to sentence you to an eternity of torment if you don't fix it right now' and 'you spelled 'Rayseline' wrong.' This is the most pleasant stage of editing. The stage where I can actually fix things with relative ease.

I managed to get a good start on one of the drop-in chapters for Newsflesh on Friday, to my surprise and delight. Georgia Mason is one of the easiest point-of-view characters I've ever worked with -- most of them take a few pages or even a chapter to come all the way 'on', but she was there, and absolutely herself, from the very first paragraph. She's not the easiest person to live with, mind you, but she's an absolute ball to write for. Even if I do need to regularly restrain myself from going off on six-page rants about the state of virological research in her version of modern America. Depending on the density of editing to be done, I may be able to finish the first drop-in chapter tonight, get it all integrated with the rest of the text, and start in on drop-in chapter number two. Progress is exciting!

Of course, it's also likely that I'm going to crawl home tonight, fall on my head, and not acknowledge the world again until Tuesday morning. Because Martian Death Flu is also exciting.

Wheeeeeeeeeeee.