Hello, happy people!

Thursday (December 1st) will be the first of the Thirteen Days of Hogswatch, my now-annual "Seanan gives things away for thirteen days because why not" celebration, and I just wanted to issue a few quick reminders. Namely...

1. Each giveaway will have its own rules. Some will be US-only. (Most will honestly be US-only, because I can't afford to pay international postage at this time. More about this to come.) Others will say things like "your comment must include the word 'banana' to be considered a valid entry." Failure to precisely follow the rules of a giveaway will mean you cannot win. There is no wiggle room here, at all. This is partially for my sanity, and partially because when I give things away, the free stuff blogs tend to signal boost, and insisting that the rules be followed means that there's enough of a barrier to entry that I can be reasonably sure things are going to people who actually want them.

2. No, you do not need to follow this blog to win. That being said, each entry will say something like "the winners will be posted at X time, and will have until Y to contact me." Every time I do a giveaway, I have folks contacting me days after the stated time, wanting to know if they can still claim their prizes. I fully understand that life happens—I've been the late one before—but the timelines are firm. So if you don't follow this blog normally, I recommend checking in daily until all Hogswatch giveaways are over.

3. In the instances where I am willing to deal with the cost and complication of international shipping, I may say "you must pay postage to receive your prize." If you'd like to volunteer to pay international postage for a giveaway winner, please comment on that day's giveaway to indicate this. Make sure it's a first-level comment, and not a reply to a specific person. (If you're only willing to pay for a specific person, tell them in private, and y'all can work it out without me.)

4. All prizes have already been selected, but I will not be revealing them until the day that their drawing begins.

5. You can enter all thirteen days if you want to. Winning day one does not bar you from winning again on day eight.

And that is all. First entry goes up tomorrow!

As I've said a few times, I'm using simple questions ("name a favorite song" or "tell me which characters you're curious about," etc.) to try to filter out the "I'm just here because a free stuff blog linked to you" comments. Not that free stuff isn't keen no matter who you are, but since the Thirteen Days of Hogswatch are about getting things to my fans and readers, I want to have some sort of "please don't let me be completely overwhelmed" filtering scheme in place. Don't follow the instructions, which the gimme-gimme-gimme crowd usually won't, don't win a prize.

In the case of the copy of Pretty Little Dead Girl, I asked people to tell me why they wanted to win. A surprisingly large number have said that it's because they've never heard my music/didn't know I had CDs/wanted to start at the beginning. So...

I have CDs! Three albums, currently. Stars Fall Home (the reissue of my first studio album), Creature Feature, and Wicked Girls (currently out of stock at CD Baby, which means the link doesn't work). Two earlier albums, Pretty Little Dead Girl and Red Roses and Dead Things are out of print.

Many of the songs on Pretty Little Dead Girl appear on Stars Fall Home, including "Pretty Little Dead Girl," the girl-group doo-wop story of Rose Marshall. I will be re-stocking Wicked Girls within the next week.

This is not "please don't enter the drawing"; the drawings are there to be entered, and I am thrilled that so many of you are participating. But if you've been curious about my music, I actually consider Stars Fall Home the best place to start, and I would love it if you'd consider picking up my studio albums.

Thank you.

We are deep into the Thirteen Days of Hogswatch now, which means a new giveaway post is going live every day. Starting tomorrow, a new winners' post will also be going live every day. Fun!

Thus far, all of this year's giveaways have been RNG drawings. This means I am using a random number generator to select the winners, and this is where my request comes in. See, I'm seeing a lot of people replying to other peoples' giveaway entries. I need you to stop doing that. Please. Only top-level comments can win; if a reply to a comment grabs the winning entry, I choose another winner. So if I pick, say, #15 to win, and #15 turns out to be a reply to #14, I don't go down a comment. I hit the RNG again. That means that whoever replied to #14 has just caused the "real" #15 not to win.

I do this for a lot of reasons, the most important being that the sub-comments throw off my count, I start second-guessing, I'm doing this manually, and so it's just easier on my peace of mind to draw again. But it's still not fair to the people leaving the top-level comments. Please, please stop replying to other peoples' giveaway entries.

Also, please remember that when I say "the rules of this giveaway are...," that there is no room for negotiation. If I say "name your favorite fruit" and you comment with "I love fruit!," you actually cannot win, because you didn't follow the rules. This is to filter out the free stuff blogs that send their followers here to harvest prizes, but who don't actually have any investment in the things I'm handing out.

Thank you all. Today's post will go live in a few hours.

As stated in this post, I am answering ten questions about Toby's world in preparation for the release of A Red-Rose Chain. Please note that these are questions about the world, not questions about individual people, things which have not yet happened in the series, or what is coming up in the books. I am no longer taking questions in the comments on the original post.

Our tenth and final question comes from heavensgardener, who asked...

"I'm curious about Faerie and trans* people: are there any trans* and genderqueer fae, and if there are, how would this be handled legally/socially/etc? "

This is a great question. This is an important question. And this is a question where I am going to begin my answer with a disclaimer. Namely:

The fae are not human. The reason we have a changeling (Toby) as our primary entrance into the world, with a Cait Sidhe as her main love interest, is because in many ways, the older purebloods of the Divided Courts are so inhuman that they are difficult to explain. Some of them, like the Luidaeg, have spent so much time around humans that they've started thinking like humans do, but for the most part, they are intelligent creatures who are not us. Because of this, when I answer questions about the fae, a) I sometimes need to answer for purebloods and changelings separately, and b) an answer that is about purebloods is not a statement of how I necessarily think things work for real humans, in the real world. Okay? Okay.

So:

There are absolutely genderqueer fae. There are fae, such as the Undine, for whom a human form is a choice, and so they go with whatever they feel. Lily identified as female, so she was almost always female when she talked to Toby; there may have been others for whom she took on a male form, or a completely androgynous one. There are other fae who just don't think it's any of your damn business, and conduct themselves accordingly. The only time anyone will ask them to "commit" to a gender is when it's time to have an heir, which means that if they're not in the direct line of descent, they don't have to worry about it. There have been a few surprises when "Daav you know, Daav, doesn't like pronouns, always sort of assumed they had a penis? Yeah, well, Daav's pregnant," but on the whole, it's no big deal.

It's a bigger deal for genderqueer changelings, who exist at about the same percentage that they do in a human population (maybe slightly higher, as they are more likely to encounter positive genderqueer representation if they're growing up in the Summerlands). Changelings living in the mortal world have to deal with mortal shit. Changelings living in the Summerlands are often being raised by their fae parents, and fae parents can be weirdly gender essentialist about kids. IE, "I have wanted a daughter for three thousand years, you are going to wear that dress if it kills you." Sometimes fae parents do this with no concern for their kid's gender identity, because pureblood parents can be absolute assholes.

Trans fae are somewhat less common than genderqueer fae, and most of them, because they live in a magical world, will just go "well, I want transformation magic now," and have done. The only way to get a permanent transformation spell is to get it from one of the Firstborn, but re-casting once every hundred years can seem like a small price to pay.

Some alchemists have figured out how to make what are essentially the magical version of hormone replacements. This is because alchemists tend to prefer slow, steady, permanent solutions to "wave a wand and it's done."

Fae are very respectful of pronouns and gender declarations. The question of succession is usually handled by either naming a brother or sister's child as heir, or training an heir from a completely different bloodline, or marrying someone with whom a child is possible. (For someone using transformation spells, which would provide a complete biological reweaving, at least in the short term, this is easy. For someone using alchemy, this is harder. For someone who has made a deal with the Luidaeg, this ranges from easy to impossible.)

Trans changelings face many of the issues trans humans do, with the added options of using transformation magic or alchemy (and thus tying themselves more permanently to Faerie).

Selkie skins are interesting, because they transform the wearer from human to seal and back based on what their wearer knows themselves to be. So a Selkie who receives their skin will transform for the first time, and then return to an ideal version of themselves. This can mean a change of visible gender, and a great relief to the young Selkie.

As stated in this post, I am answering ten questions about Toby's world in preparation for the release of A Red-Rose Chain. Please note that these are questions about the world, not questions about individual people, things which have not yet happened in the series, or what is coming up in the books. I am no longer taking questions in the comments on the original post; with just one question left to go, I think we're full up.

Our ninth question comes from marabett, who asked...

"So, this may not be enough of a question to justify a post, but...We've seen a lot of discussion about how low fertility is for non-Firstborn fae, to the point where they'll even take human lovers just to obtain a baby who may later present significant issues of his/her own (the Choice, mortality, etc. etc.). Does this really take precedent over everything else? By which I mean, if you're a Daoine Sidhe having a fling with a rascally Cait Sidhe that you'd rather not have your spouse know about, would you, erm, take steps to ensure that you wouldn't give birth to a baby with a tail? Are there magical ways to block fertility -- after all, there don't seem to be any magical ways to *increase* fertility, or I assume the fae would make use of them...? Or is it as simple as a fae thinking in passing, "A child would be inconvenient," and voila, no offspring? Or...would the spouse in question be delighted at the birth of a child even if he weren't the progenitor, because hey, fae baby!

Are there rules and traditions around the conception of full-fae children totally out of marriage? If two single fae types who are dallying together for fun conceive, do they just start talking marriage without another thought, because it's just a given that proven fertility together is as good a basis for marriage as any other? Or is that so rare that it's just handled on a case-by-case basis? I noticed that we had gotten a lot of interesting information on how full-fae children are viewed in the context of a marriage, and how changelings are viewed, but not a lot of discussion about what would happen if, say, Helen and Raj found out that they were expecting.

Again, sorry if this is too picayune -- as a subfertile member of a species in which fertility is assumed as the default, I end up wondering about a lot of esoteric elements of fertility stuff even in fictional races.

Also, one more question, since we're on the topic of fae fertility...For a fae couple, is there something about managing to conceive one child that triggers increased fertility for a period afterwards? I ask because I've noticed several examples of fae couples who have no children for quite some time, but then have two or more in (relatively) rapid succession. Apologies if this is veering into spoiler territory."

Um, wow. Okay, points for a really detailed question. Also, wow are y'all collectively fascinated by babies. Is this a hint?

Anyway, we're going to break this down. First part:

"Is having a baby, period, more important than what that baby is? Is there birth control?"

Every fae marriage has its own rules. Some include fidelity; others do not. How likely they are to include fidelity is somewhat determined by the rank of the people involved. Two married Daoine Sidhe, for example, hoping for a Daoine Sidhe heir, are likely to practice very strict fidelity until they actually get a kid, because they don't want there to be any question of whether someone else can make a claim to their lands or titles. (Ex: Duchess has an affair, has a child with her seneschal. Child is made heir. Child dies in the absence of any other heir. Seneschal can now claim that their other child, as the sibling of the heir, has a legit claim to the title. Depending on how the local monarch rules, this might actually work. This is the problem with a system of governance wherein the person who wears the crown just does what they want.) Also remember that fae divorce requires the consent of any children; adding a third parent who is not part of the marriage vows only complicates things. Since many fae marry solely for procreation, this doesn't come up very often.

There is birth control, for those times when you really don't want to risk pregnancy. It's usually used right before and during long diplomatic missions. These are thankfully uncommon. (Some fae will also use birth control when they have plans for the next nine months/year that they'd really rather not change, viewing it as not tempting fate.)

Second part:

"What happens with full-fae children totally out of marriage?"

Instant divorce!

No, seriously.

Helen is not a pureblood, so I'm going to shift your example to Raj and Chelsea, as they're purebloods of approximately the same age. (Not that they're sleeping together, as Etienne would straight-up murder anyone getting his sixteen-year-old daughter pregnant, Oberon's Law be damned.) If the two of them had a baby, they would not be considered married, but would be considered divorced. This is the one time that the child does not get to choose which side of the family it will belong to. Raj and Chelsea would both be expected to make the case to their respective lieges for why they should (or shouldn't) have custody, and at the end, the baby would belong to one family or the other. There is no child support. There is no taking it back.

Third part:

"Is there a fertility boost following the birth of a child?"

Yes! No one is quite sure why, but having one baby seems to make it easier/more likely that you will have another, leading to clusters of two to four children born within a decade of each other. Most fae think this is very unfair. They are not wrong.

As stated in this post, I am answering ten questions about Toby's world in preparation for the release of A Red-Rose Chain. Please note that these are questions about the world, not questions about individual people, things which have not yet happened in the series, or what is coming up in the books. I am still taking questions in the comments on the original post.

Our eighth question comes from clodia_risa, who asked...

"How are the bloodlines from the Firsts of the fae passed to their descendents? Did the three have many Firsts (multiple Daoine Sidhe) who bred and created the entire bloodline? Or did the "Firsts" of the different kinds have kids with each other, and each of their kids just happened to be much more like one parent than another? 'Rosey' and 'Pumpkin' definitely have some bloodmixing because of their parentage, despite their mothers being Firsts. Was it a different time? Were the Hope Chests involved? Did The Three have something to do with it?"

Well, first off, "Rosey" (names changed to protect the innocent) is not a Firstborn: she is the daughter of the daughter of a Firstborn. Which is not the same thing at all. "Pumpkin" is the daughter of a Firstborn. Both of them are members of their respective fae races; they don't have the genetic flexibility of Firstborn. Anyone they have children with will be members of their race, and will share the traits of their parents.

"Rosey" is an interesting case, because she's not just a mixed-blood, she's a mix of two types of fae who should never, under normal circumstances, have been able to reproduce. She's probably infertile, at least until something changes. "Pumpkin," on the other hand, is just a changeling. Note that Firstborn + human still = changeling. It's only one of the big Three whose blood is powerful enough to overwhelm any trace of humanity. Their children are always purely fae. There are no changelings among the Firstborn.

That being said, each Firstborn will tend to have children who are of similar, if not identical, races, as long as they stay with a partner who is the same, or at least similar. So a female Firstborn, such as the Luidaeg, would need to stay with the same man/find other men of the same derivation. Six kids with the same second First = six kids of the same fae type. Six kids with different Firsts = six different types of fae. Six kids with random Daoine Sidhe = six kids who are so similar that if their children intermarry, they will become one fae type.

(Yes, there is a lot of generational incest in Faerie. I try not to focus on it, but when you can literally say "100% of us are descended from the same three people," it's inevitable. Most of the time, a few centuries without living as family makes it more palatable.)

The Three have something to do with the Hope Chests, and the Hope Chests were once much more common; remember that Toby thought they were a myth.

Times have changed.

As stated in this post, I am answering ten questions about Toby's world in preparation for the release of A Red-Rose Chain. Please note that these are questions about the world, not questions about individual people, things which have not yet happened in the series, or what is coming up in the books. I am still taking questions in the comments on the original post.

Our seventh question comes from greenhafling, who asked...

"How does one inherit a title or fiefdom in the October-verse? Does blood count more than power?"

This question highlights probably the biggest difference between the Divided Courts (Seelie, Unseelie, and Oberon's) and the Court of Cats. Among the Divided Courts, blood counts. Among the Court of Cats, power counts.

Functionally, this means that changelings can never inherit lands or titles from their parents, regardless of Court. The Court of Cats would absolutely respect a changeling Prince or Princess who challenged for the throne, but the chances of a) such an individual existing (there is no record of such) and b) winning are vanishingly small. Really, a changeling could challenge, but would lose, because they wouldn't have the power for it. The power levels necessary to be called "Prince" or "Princess" are not directly inherited; they can appear at random in a bloodline that has never shown that kind of strength. Most Kings and Queens are not related to their heirs.

But oh, the Divided Courts. There, only blood matters. Not power, not fitness to rule, nothing but blood. And changelings can never, never inherit. In the case of multiple potential heirs, such as September, Sylvester, and Simon, the inheritance can be split up. This is why Simon got a title with no land, September got nothing, and Sylvester got his father's sword and a letter of introduction to King Gilad's parents, so that he could prove himself a hero and get the land that he believed he deserved.

Now, hope chests can make this interesting. Let's pretend, for a moment, that a King--call him King Bob--had a changeling daughter and no other heir. In time, the girl has a child. If King Bob uses a hope chest on his grandson, does his grandson (now a pureblood) inherit?

Yes.

There are a lot of reasons that some people dislike changelings, and like merlins even less.

As stated in this post, I am answering ten questions about Toby's world in preparation for the release of A Red-Rose Chain. Please note that these are questions about the world, not questions about individual people, things which have not yet happened in the series, or what is coming up in the books. I am still taking questions in the comments on the original post.

Our sixth question comes from ceitfianna, who asked...

"I know children are important to the Fae and there have been moments of seeing how children are raised differently among the various races. Does this create problems or arguments when Fae are fostered or for those who aren't noble when they interact together or are there certain things that every child learns? I hope that makes sense, basically I'm really curious about childhood among the Fae and how varied it can be. Thank you."

Fae childhood! Fun times!

Okay, so first, we're going to look at pureblood childhoods here, not changeling childhoods. Why? Because for the most part, changelings will have a human childhood until their Choice, and then a really fucked-up childhood after, unless they are being raised in the Summerlands by a pureblood parent who was so desperate for children that they got themselves a changeling, functionally as a pet. Those changeling children will again have a pureblood childhood, right up until they get too old and are discarded. It's depressing and not fun, and I don't want to focus on it. So I don't have to.

The first thing to remember about fae parents is that there is literally no such thing as an unwanted child. Between the low fertility rates and the existence of magic which can be used for fun purposes like "let's not tempt fate, you know I will get pregnant while my husband is on a seven-year quest, contraceptives for all," if there's a baby, it is because someone very much wanted a baby.

Which is not to say child abuse doesn't exist. It does, sadly, in part because a lot of purebloods haven't been around a baby for decades, even centuries. They get confused. Human nursemaids are common, especially in noble houses. Most of these women will never be seen by their mortal families again. It's gotten better since the invention of the printing press, and What To Expect When You're Expecting is surprisingly popular among fae parents.

From infancy to toddlerhood, there's really very little difference between a fae child and a human child. They want the same things, absorb knowledge at a similar rate, and grow like weeds. As Toby has noted, most fae grow at a roughly human rate until puberty, getting through those pesky "small enough to eat" years as fast as they can. These are the nursery years.

Once the kid is old enough to run around, it becomes important to remember that the Summerlands are essentially pastoral, and don't have many monsters. Fae kids run wild. There are few to no schools, because the birth rate is so low: children are tutored at home, and good teachers are in high demand. There may be small "classes," if enough kids are local. This is most common among noble households, once they start bringing in the etiquette and comportment teachers.

Fosterage either begins at birth, and involves sending one child to the location of another, or begins around the age of ten/eleven (most common for trade and blind fosterages). Once they reach the location of their fosterage, they will be assessed (usually by the seneschal) to find out what the holes in their education are.

There's no "everybody gets this" skill set. A lot depends on how traditionalist the parents are. But fae kids get by.

As stated in this post, I am answering ten questions about Toby's world in preparation for the release of A Red-Rose Chain. Please note that these are questions about the world, not questions about individual people, things which have not yet happened in the series, or what is coming up in the books. I am still taking questions in the comments on the original post.

Our third question comes from seraangel, who asked...

"Do the air and fire kingdoms have their own royalty like the sea kingdom or are they beholden to whatever high king/queen rules in that section of the world?"

Yes. They have their own royalty.

Y'all, I really want to keep answering questions, but I'd say more than half the questions I have remaining are either a) spoilery ("Whatever happened to Bob?") or b) yes/no ("Is there a door?"). I really, really need more questions that will encourage elaborate answers. So please! Go! Ask!

(Note that this is not a slap at the remaining questions. But I need things I want to answer, can answer, and have the existing framework to answer. Please ask me questions on the original post.)

As stated in this post, I am answering ten questions about Toby's world in preparation for the release of A Red-Rose Chain. Please note that these are questions about the world, not questions about individual people, things which have not yet happened in the series, or what is coming up in the books. I am still taking questions in the comments on the original post.

Our third question comes from acelightning, who asked...

"How much Fae ancestry (by percentage) does a person need in order to have magic of their own?"

It's the merlins question! So:

If two fae of the same type have a child, the child is a pureblood. They are fully fae, and will inherit the magic inherent in their type of fae. Quentin is a pureblood, as is Tybalt.

If two fae of a different type have a child, the child is a mixed-blood. They are fully fae, and how well they will be treated is somewhat determined by how noble they are. Their magic will be a mixture of their parents'. January was a mixed-blood. Dean is a mixed-blood.

If one fae parent and one human parent have a child, the child is a changeling. They will inherit magic only through their fae parent. Most will be weaker than their fae parent. October is a changeling, as was Chelsea.

If a changeling parent and a human parent have a child, the child is a thin-blooded changeling. They may or may not inherit any clear magical talents from their fae parent. Some will look sufficiently human as to not need illusions, or be offered the Changeling's Choice. Gillian was a thin-blooded changeling. The polite term for them is "quarter-bloods," but "weak-bloods" is more common.

A thin-blooded changeling who does show signs of magic will still be showing it within the "tree" of their fae ancestor. So if Gillian had any magical talents, they would have been things like minor illusions and detecting medical conditions through the taste of blood (not that she had any reason to go around drinking people's blood).

It's in the next generation where things get interesting.

A person with one-eighth fae blood or less is not considered a changeling: they will not face the Choice, they will die of old age (although it may take a long time), their flesh will decay when they do die. The night-haunts will not come for them. Most will have no magical talents at all. One in ten, however, will be the equivalent of Chelsea: they will have stronger magic than anyone expects. And they will have no innate restrictions. Iron doesn't burn them; oaths don't bind them; and most of all, their magic is formless. They get no starting talents or weaknesses.

All their magic will be of the sort Toby calls "hedge magic," using ingredients and rituals to get the desired effect. They are, essentially, wizards, using their natural talents and the rituals of trial and error to bend the world to their will. Or, as they are called by the fae, merlins.

Merlins usually manifest between one-eighth and one-sixteenth fae descent, but once it's in the line, it's there forever. Someone with a fae parent twenty generations back could, potentially, turn up as a merlin. There aren't many of them left these days, and those that exist rarely learn what they can do. They were one of the costs of the fae/human conflicts, since it left them without teachers.

Merlins are wild cards. Most consider them not to be trusted.

As stated in this post, I am answering ten questions about Toby's world in preparation for the release of A Red-Rose Chain. Please note that these are questions about the world, not questions about individual people, things which have not yet happened in the series, or what is coming up in the books. I am still taking questions in the comments on the original post.

Our third question comes from tylik, who asked...

"How does lineage through firstborns work?

I mean, it seems like it's still sexual reproduction, and sometimes both parents are firstborns, but it seems that descent of record is usually tracked only through one (so, maybe dominant descent? Or are their multiple varieties of offspring any given firstborn may have?) But in at least one case there are multiple firstborn, and while firstborns clearly have children by people who aren't firstborn themselves, logic suggests that at some point the mating population was only other firstborn, their parents, and Something Else Altogether."

And then parcae asked...

"A question that a friend at work and I are both curious about: I know you've covered the way children descend from their parents, and the way races descend from the Big Three, but past that -- how do the Firstborn themselves reproduce? If two Firstborn have children, would those children themselves be wholly a separate race, or would they be half of one parent's race and half of the other? Toby is the child of a Firstborn, but since she's also the child of a human, she's still a changeling. And it's come up that the Tuatha de Danann have two Firstborn, each of whom have their own line, and each of those lines have their own scent as far as magic goes, so they can't have reproduced with each other (as far as I can tell the whole inbreeding thing means slightly less to the fae, but if they had then I don't think there would be the two distinct lines with the distinct scents)."

Since these questions are basically the same thing, I'm answering them together. Hooray!

First up, let's do a little weird science. It's weird science because it's weird, and because it's not really scientific. At the same time, it is an absolute constant of the Toby universe, so it counts. So:

Oberon, Maeve, and Titania are considered genetically unstable, to use words that we probably all agree mean what I want. Any time any one of them has a child, that child will be biologically unique. Think komodo dragons. Female komodo can (and do) give birth to parthenogenically conceived male offspring who are distinct enough from them to breed with, without worrying about inbreeding. Because nature is weird. So when Oberon and Maeve have a kid, while that kid is definitely theirs, and while both of them would be weirded out and disgusted by the thought of reproduction with said kid (Oberon is not actually Zeus), biologically, they could immediately wait for the kid to hit adulthood and then have kids with their kid, without concern about what that would do to the genetics. Gross, but there you go. There have almost certainly been cases of "Maeve gets frisky with one of Titania's kids, after the kid is a couple of hundred years old," because that are immortal, inhuman, and easily bored.

Any time one of the Three has a child, with anyone, the child will be Firstborn. The genetic instability that the Three bring to the table will mean that the kid is effectively not related to either parent. They'll inherit a class of magic from their Three parent; they may get traits from their other parent (if it is not one of the Three). They may not. Faerie does not like rules, and gets cranky when they are applied. Blind Michael and the Luidaeg, for example, have the same parents (Maeve and Oberon), and do not share any physical or magical traits. Acacia is Titania's daughter by an unknown father, but most people figure Titania didn't bang a tree. The beat goes on.

The one exception to the "nothing from their non-Three parent" is repeated reproduction within a relatively short period of time. If Titania were to have multiple children with the same non-Oberon father during a short span, she would get a cluster of Firstborn who were physically extremely similar, and had complimentary magical gifts. Why? No one knows. One theory is that Faerie is actually guiding the creation of the Firstborn, and doesn't change directions quickly. So Faerie says "I need a type of fae that does _______," puts out the order, and doesn't cancel it fast enough to avoid getting four possibles. This is not a bad thing. Quite a few races have multiple Firsts because of this. (Multiple births can go either way. The Tuatha have two Firsts because the mother of their Firstborn had twins. They were almost, but not quite, identical, and when their children intermarried, the two lines became utterly entangled.)

Firstborn are partially genetically unstable. If Firstborn A has ten children with non-First B, they will all be representatives of the same descendant race. They will also not be biologically related. The DNA gets "scrubbed," for lack of a better term. Fae do have taboos against incest, but only among siblings who actually grew up together. If the same Firstborn goes on to have more children with someone else, whether they get members of the same descendant race, a slightly different descendant race, or a totally new descendant race will be determined partially by the non-Firstborn parent. First + First pairings will always result in consistent descendant races.

Your common scenarios are:

1. Firstborn + member of the Three. Assuming that none of the Three has willingly had children with one of their own children, this still leaves one potential mate for each Firstborn child.

2. Firstborn + Firstborn.

3. Firstborn + other fae.

4. Firstborn + mortal.

5. Firstborn + something else.

Assume the same Firstborn decided, over the course of centuries, to try all five methods. First they breed with one of the Three, and become parent to a descendant race which doesn't thrive. Next they breed with another Firstborn, and become parent to a descendant race that thrives, but in a limited form. Then they breed with another fae, and become parent to a descendant race that spreads and becomes what they are known for. They tarry with a mortal, get a changeling child, and because they cannot find a hope chest, go no further. Finally, they breed with a cloud, and become a parent to a second well-established descendant race.

Faerie is complicated, and Mother's Day cards are confusing.

As stated in this post, I am answering ten questions about Toby's world in preparation for the release of A Red-Rose Chain. Please note that these are questions about the world, not questions about individual people, things which have not yet happened in the series, or what is coming up in the books. I am still taking questions in the comments on the original post.

Our second question comes from rymenhild, who asks...

"How did the divisions of kingdoms and territories come about?"

Hooray, land ownership!

As has been stated several times, the fae are highly territorial. It's not necessarily a choice: they become uncomfortable when over-crowded, and while they enjoy the company of their "own kind," it's oddly enough the presence of that "own kind" that will trigger the territorial urge for most fae. (I say "most" because there are virtually no universal generalizations in Faerie. Cu Sidhe don't become uncomfortable when there are more of them. In fact, Cu Sidhe would like it if there were millions of them. Cait Sidhe don't become territorial until there are multiple potential Kings or Queens in a single Court, and even then, their tolerance is higher than that of, say, the Daoine Sidhe, who view a local population of two hundred as unbearably huge.) There are biological reasons for this! Which we will not go into here. So.

Fae territory #1 has been established for a thousand years, and is getting quite full. A group of young nobles, guessing that their parents are not planning to die or step aside any time soon, decides to go off and seek their fortune. Because the Tobyverse fae inhabit a space that is unique in their world, they do not need to worry about someone else owning the land they, er, land on: the Summerlands there will be open, and the humans are a minor distraction at best. They declare themselves the Kingdom of #2.

Someone is now King. Probably either the person who gave up the highest title to come on this little errand (and thus provided most of the supplies), or the person who's best at doing poisonings. The others look around the Kingdom, carve off bits to be Duchies or Marches or whatnot, and settle down. Depending on how big a Kingdom they were able to claim, there will be a certain amount of "open" land. Because, see, the starting size of a Kingdom is determined by your ambition, but the starting size of a Duchy or March is determined by how much land you think you can hold.

(Some fae, even when present at the birth of a Kingdom, will elect for a County or Barony, taking another layer of bureaucracy in exchange for knowing that someone else's army will keep them safe, or that they won't need as much of a standing army.)

The new King/Queen can then make gifts of open parcels of land, along with the corresponding titles, to anyone who does the Kingdom a service. Gradually, this will whittle away at the open land, especially since it's best, due to that whole "territorial" thing again, to leave open space between Duchies/Marches/etc. whenever possible. Having a mile or so of unincorporated space does wonders at cutting down your intra-Kingdom wars.

The hierarchy goes High Kingdom (Ireland, North America, South America, etc.), Kingdom (The Mists, Silences, Angels), Duchy/March, County, Barony, Homestead.

As stated in this post, I am answering ten questions about Toby's world in preparation for the release of A Red-Rose Chain. Please note that these are questions about the world, not questions about individual people, things which have not yet happened in the series, or what is coming up in the books. I am still taking questions in the comments on the original post.

Our first question comes from marooux13, who asks...

"Can you explain how Oberon claims his children?"

I am going to have to expand this question somewhat, since there's no way to answer it without also addressing the Queens, Maeve and Titania. So!

Everyone in Faerie is descended, in some way, from Oberon, Maeve, Titania, or some combination thereof. The confirmed possibilities are O/M, O/T, any of them alone, and any of them with a non-fae party. Because the Big Three are so much more powerful than their descendants, any of their children, regardless of how they were conceived, will be Firstborn. For an easy comparison, think Zeus and the demigods. Zeus bangs a human, demigod. Zeus bangs a tree, demigod. Zeus bangs the air while thinking of Zeus, demigod. Any time one of the three reproduces, their offspring will be fully fae, not human, and Firstborn.

In Faerie, to prevent all power eventually being centralized in a single family or group of families with extremely careful taste in marriages, children can only inherit from one parent, no matter what the circumstances. This is part of why, when fae divorce, the children must choose which parent they "belong" to. If Patrick and Dianda were to separate, Dean and Peter would be expected to decide which parent they were going to go with. Both could choose one, or they could take one each. The child who chose Patrick would then be heir to County of Twycross. The child who chose Dianda would technically be heir to the Duchy of Saltmist (although the Undersea handles some things differently). Neither would be able, under any circumstances, to claim ownership of the other's inheritance.

What this means for the Firstborn is that, when they reach a certain age, they have to choose a parent to "belong" to. Maeve and Titania do the majority of the child-rearing. Oberon's around, and he doesn't try to be disconnected, he just has other shit to do. So a lot of the kids have chosen their mothers without hesitation. Because he has two wives and two enormous families to deal with, he is actually less likely to have extramarital offspring than either of them; there are very few races that only descend from Oberon (and thus get an automatic "child of ________" in his name). Mostly, it's a matter of picking, and he's not top of very many lists.

Also, sometimes, kids go "I want to be yours" and are quietly dissuaded, either by him or by their mothers. Antigone would have claimed his name, but her younger brothers and sisters needed her, and she couldn't have stayed with them as a Child of Oberon.

All descendants of a particular Firstborn are automatically children of the parent their Firstborn claimed. Fae who perform unusual heroics or run headlong into danger will be referred to as Oberon's, but that's not a legal title.

Hi!

I got a ping from Deborah (who monitors the merch account) yesterday, saying that people have been emailing her to go "WHERE SHIRTS?" First, thank you for using the merch account rather than commenting here. I've asked people to do that, and people are doing it, and that's awesome.

Second, shirts are still being mailed. Only not right this second, because right this second, I am in New York, and my mother, who is home with the shirts, doesn't have access to my bank account to pay for the postage. I've indicated several times that shirts are still being mailed, both directly, and by saying things like "I am still mailing T-shirts" in other posts (usually giveaways). As soon as I get home, I will go to the post office again.

The post office, as it turns out, does not look favorably on my bringing more than twenty packages at a time. Ten if they're international.

So please, don't email until I have made a post saying "all the shirts have been mailed, yes, all of them." Until that point, the answer to "WHERE SHIRTS?" is "in my spare room, waiting to go for a ride in the car."

The Toby-universe short I probably get asked about the most often is "Rat-Catcher," a novella which first appeared in the Subterranean Press anthology A Fantasy Medley 2, and later in the 2012 Hugo Voters Packet. Mostly what people ask is "Will you send me a copy of this story?" and "Why haven't you posted it for free?"

Um.

So there are two kinds of short stories around here. There are the ones I write for my own amusement/based on the most recent tip jar, which are posted, for free, either here (as in the case of "Velveteen vs.") or on my website (as in the case of the majority of the Johnny and Fran stories). And then there are the ones I write because someone offers to give me money. I like money. It lets me eat; it keeps my lights on. I know it's considered crass for me to say, flat-out, that I enjoy money, but it's true. I grew up incredibly poor. I know what it's like not to be able to keep the lights on. This is much more fun for me, and hence for everyone who has to deal with me ever.

When someone offers to give me money for a story, it's generally because of the assumption that my presence in a publication will help them sell copies of the publication. I have a good relationship with many of the editors who buy my stuff, which means they think of me early in the process, and I am incredibly grateful for that, but it's not all altruism. They keep buying things from me because I continue to help them sell things. That matters. Which is not to say that y'all have a responsibility to buy everything I am published in! That would be...a lot of things. I have copies of everything I've been published in, and at this point, we're talking about five shelves, between the novels and the anthologies and the collections. Sometimes, you're going to have to make choices about your money that do not include supporting my career, and that is more than okay, that is the correct way to do it. Pay your bills before you pay mine.

That being said, because of that initial "Seanan will help us sell things" assumption, I am not comfortable posting stories from paid anthologies for free until those anthologies have become completely unobtainable. The limited edition of A Fantasy Medley 2 is still available from the publisher. Looking at the ordering system, it appears that twenty-five copies remain.

Basically, until those twenty-five copies are gone, I won't post the story anywhere, no matter how often I'm asked.

I have been reluctant to say this, both because a) I don't want people who have already bought the collection to feel cheated; it's a beautiful book, and if you have the money, it's absolutely worth the price, and b) I don't want anyone to say I'm holding "Rat-Catcher" somehow "hostage" to extort people into buying things. I'm not. I don't make any money from sales of the collection at this point; I've already been paid. Yeah, I'd like to be asked to contribute to books in the future, which does sort of inform my position, but more than that, it feels unethical to take money in exchange for helping to sell a book and then turn around and give the goodies away for free. But the question keeps coming up, so it feels like I need to say something.

For those of you who want to read "Rat-Catcher" and can't afford AFM2: please, be patient. Someday, the book will sell out, and I will be able to consider posting the story on my website. In the meantime, it's not essential to understanding or enjoying the series; it's an extra, it's deep background, and while I love it, it's not going to suddenly change everything. I promise.

For those of you who have already purchased AFM2: thank you so much. Isn't it a beautiful book? It's a beautiful book. All the stories are awesome. I treasure my copy.

For those of you with room in your budgets for AFM2, who have been considering a copy: it's a beautiful book. I highly endorse it.

And that is that.

Since there's always confusion, I wanted to clarify a few things.

Entering contests.

I do not require you to have an LJ account; if you have a Facebook or other ID that lets you comment here, that's fine. LJ may initially mark your comment as "spam." I manually un-spam all valid entries before I do the final drawing. The Random Number Generator I use is located at Random.org, and is as close to truly random as I can get. I manually count after getting the number of the winner. Secondary comments (IE, when someone responds to a contest entry) cannot win. If the number I draw comes up as a secondary comment, I either draw again, or I go to the next valid entry. This means that if I draw 25, and it's a secondary comment on 24, the winner is 26. So it's really, really best not to reply to other people's contest entries.

I make a post identifying the winners of any given drawing, and that's where my responsibility for outreach ends. You'll generally have twenty-four hours to contact me before you lose your prize. Please remember to check this journal on drawing days.

Following rules.

No part of any contest's rules is negotiable. If I say "tell me whether you're US or international and name your favorite fruit," any comment that doesn't contain all those aspects will be ineligible to win. I will draw another number, in that case.

Contacting me.

If you are contacting me to collect a prize, you must use my website contact form. It is located on my website, not on LJ. Contacting me via any other channel (LJ messenger, Facebook, emailing an old address that you think still works, asking my PA over IM), you will not receive your prize. You must email me.

I hope this clears a few things up, and I'm really excited to keep giving y'all fun stuff to have and enjoy.

Hello, happy people!

Tomorrow will be the first of the Twelve Days of Hogswatch, my now-annual "Seanan gives things away for twelve days because why not" celebration, and I just wanted to issue a few quick reminders. Namely...

1. Each giveaway will have its own rules. Some will be US-only. (Most will honestly be US-only, because I can't afford to pay international postage at this time. More about this to come.) Others will say things like "your comment must include the word 'banana.'" Failure to precisely follow the rules of a giveaway will mean you cannot win. There is no wiggle room here, at all. This is partially for my sanity, and partially because when I give things away, the free stuff blogs tend to signal boost, and insisting that the rules be followed means that there's enough of a barrier to entry that I can be reasonably sure things are going to people who actually want them.

2. No, you do not need to follow this blog to win. That being said, each entry will say something like "the winners will be posted at X time, and will have until Y to contact me." Every time I do a giveaway, I have folks contacting me days after the stated time, wanting to know if they can still claim their prizes. I fully understand that life happens—I've been the late one before—but the timelines are firm. So if you don't follow this blog normally, I recommend checking in daily until all Hogswatch giveaways are over.

3. In the instances where I am willing to deal with the cost and complication of international shipping, I may say "you must pay postage to receive your prize." If you'd like to volunteer to pay international postage for a giveaway winner, please comment on that day's giveaway to indicate this. Make sure it's a first-level comment, and not a reply to a specific person. (If you're only willing to pay for a specific person, tell them in private, and y'all can work it out without me.)

4. All prizes have already been selected by me, but I will not be revealing them until the day that their drawing begins.

5. You can enter all twelve days if you want to.

And that is all. First entry goes up tomorrow!

Reminder the first: If you have requested/purchased a tank top from me, I need two things from you. I need payment, following the instructions in my reply to your comment (please, please send it "friends and family," so I can actually afford to ship), and I need you to use my website contact form to send me your mailing address. Putting your mailing address into PayPal does not actually help me. I have a stack of shirts waiting to be mailed, and their information is not in my inbox, my PA's inbox, or my spam filter.

Please, please, help me get you the things you pay for, and if you haven't paid for them, please either pay or tell me you've changed your mind, so that I can release them back into the general stock.

Reminder the second: If you wanted to order signed or personalized books from Borderlands Books in San Francisco, I'm going there on Friday, around five o'clock in the afternoon, to sign whatever's on order. I can't guarantee that I'll get there again before the end of the year, so this is your one shot to get that signed book that will make you a hero in your best friend's eyes!

Please remember that I do not take requests for "send me a book and I'll sign it." Those always pick up around the holidays, and well. I'm just not good enough at going to the post office for things that are not "oh sweet Great Pumpkin get all these boxes out of my living room" to be reliable. Going through Borderlands is the one way to be sure.

And that is all for tonight.

This is your reminder that we will stop taking orders for a new run of Wicked Girls shirts, as well as the first-ever run of "My Story Is Not Done" shirts (for those of you who have asked for something a little more gender-neutral), at midnight PST on Monday, June 30th. So the second it becomes July, we are no longer taking requests.

Instructions on ordering, and what our options are, are all lain out on that initial post. Kate, using the "seananmerch" account, is reaching out now to confirm people's requests. I have no involvement with this part of the process, and emailing me directly (either via my contact form or because you have a contact address) just gets you bounced to Kate.

What does this mean for me?

It means that you must have commented on the original post by midnight June 30th to be included in the order.

But I haven't heard back from Kate!

No one who has commented on the post will be left out. Kate had real life loom on her a bit (as sometimes happens to even the best of us), but she's getting caught up, and everyone will make the spreadsheet. This does mean I won't be submitting the T-shirt order at 12:01am July 1st, but let's be honest: that was never going to happen anyway. For one thing, I was going to be asleep. I like sleep.

Please make sure you have added "seananmerch" to your spam filters.

Kate has been emailing people, but not everyone has gotten back to her to confirm mailing addresses and provide payment. This is a problem, since your shirt will only be printed if you pay for it (that being the nature of this particular ordering process). If you have commented on the original post and received a reply saying that you're on the spreadsheet, that means you should also have received an email. Please check!

We mean it when we say we can't promise delivery before October.

We opened this order period as early as we did because we want to be able to get the shirts back from the printer and shoved into envelopes before I leave for Europe in early August, but there are a lot of moving parts involved, and it's possible the printer will miss the deadline for mailing by as little as a day or as much as two weeks. If the shirts hit while I'm out of the country, they're not going to be mailed until October. We will not give refunds in September because you expected a shirt in August. I'm being really upfront about how long this could take, and this is part of why. Which brings us to...

I am not a store; we are not making any money off of this.

The last two shirt runs have netted cost of shirts + cost of postage and packing materials + one pizza party for the people who pack the shirts to mail. I am not a big shiny clothing manufacturer who prints her own shirts and can afford a shit-ton of extras. Teefury can do $11 shirts because they print their own and have runs well in excess of anything I've ever done. I am fighting to keep from needing to raise prices for these short bespoke runs. This is why I request non-CC PayPal and do my best to avoid transaction fees, which nibble away at the already very narrow overage.

Kate and I are both going to be as open and responsive as we possibly can be; transparency is best in a situation like this one. But please, please don't buy a shirt if you're going to approach it like buying something from Hot Topic. We're not that kind of operation. It'll be a long, long time before we can be.

Thank you.

All right! We are still taking orders for a new run of Wicked Girls shirts, as well as the first-ever run of "My Story Is Not Done" shirts (for those of you who have asked for something a little more gender-neutral). Instructions on ordering, and what our options are, are all lain out on that initial post. Kate, using the "seananmerch" account, is reaching out now to confirm people's requests.

Now, the notes.

Please make sure you have added "seananmerch" to your spam filters.

Kate has been emailing people, but not everyone has gotten back to her to confirm mailing addresses and provide payment. This is a problem, since your shirt will only be printed if you pay for it (that being the nature of this particular ordering process). If you have commented on the original post and received a reply saying that you're on the spreadsheet, that means you should also have received an email. Please check!

We mean it when we say we can't promise delivery before October.

We opened this order period as early as we did because we want to be able to get the shirts back from the printer and shoved into envelopes before I leave for Europe in early August, but there are a lot of moving parts involved, and it's possible the printer will miss the deadline for mailing by as little as a day or as much as two weeks. If the shirts hit while I'm out of the country, they're not going to be mailed until October. We will not give refunds in September because you expected a shirt in August. I'm being really upfront about how long this could take, and this is part of why. Which brings us to...

I am not a store; we are not making any money off of this.

The last two shirt runs have netted cost of shirts + cost of postage and packing materials + one pizza party for the people who pack the shirts to mail. I am not a big shiny clothing manufacturer who prints her own shirts and can afford a shit-ton of extras. Teefury can do $11 shirts because they print their own and have runs well in excess of anything I've ever done. I am fighting to keep from needing to raise prices for these short bespoke runs. This is why I request non-CC PayPal and do my best to avoid transaction fees, which nibble away at the already very narrow overage.

Kate and I are both going to be as open and responsive as we possibly can be; transparency is best in a situation like this one. But please, please don't buy a shirt if you're going to approach it like buying something from Hot Topic. We're not that kind of operation. It'll be a long, long time before we can be.

Thank you.

For those of you who missed it, we opened orders for a new run of Wicked Girls shirts this past weekend, as well as the first-ever run of "My Story Is Not Done" shirts (for those of you who have asked for something a little more gender-neutral). Instructions on ordering, and what our options are, are all lain out on that initial post. Kate, using the "seananmerch" account, is reaching out now to confirm people's requests.

Now, the notes.

We cannot provide any special mailing options.

A few people have offered to pay extra for expedited shipping or tracking, and that's swell, but we can't. We are not a store, and the size of these shirt runs means that we have enough trouble just feeding them through the post office as all-the-same. The only way we would be able to offer other postage options would be to cap the shirt run at something around 50, and a) we've already passed that point, and b) no. I can only handle this about once every two years, and capping things like that would be mean.

We mean it when we say we can't promise delivery before October.

We opened this order period as early as we did because we want to be able to get the shirts back from the printer and shoved into envelopes before I leave for Europe in early August, but there are a lot of moving parts involved, and it's possible the printer will miss the deadline for mailing by as little as a day or as much as two weeks. If the shirts hit while I'm out of the country, they're not going to be mailed until October. We will not give refunds in September because you expected a shirt in August. I'm being really upfront about how long this could take, and this is part of why. Which brings us to...

I am not a store; we are not making any money off of this.

The last two shirt runs have netted cost of shirts + cost of postage and packing materials + one pizza party for the people who pack the shirts to mail. I am not a big shiny clothing manufacturer who prints her own shirts and can afford a shit-ton of extras. Teefury can do $11 shirts because they print their own and have runs well in excess of anything I've ever done. I am fighting to keep from needing to raise prices for these short bespoke runs. This is why I request non-CC PayPal and do my best to avoid transaction fees, which nibble away at the already very narrow overage.

Kate and I are both going to be as open and responsive as we possibly can be; transparency is best in a situation like this one. But please, please don't buy a shirt if you're going to approach it like buying something from Hot Topic. We're not that kind of operation.

Thank you.

A joint statement:

It has become customary in recent years for authors of Hugo-nominated works to provide the members of the World Science Fiction convention who get to vote for the awards with electronic copies of their stories. The ball started rolling a few years ago when John Scalzi kindly took the initiative in preparing the first Hugo voters packet; since then it has become almost mandatory to distribute shortlisted works this way.

Unfortunately, as professionally published authors, we can't do this without obtaining the consent of our publishers. We are bound by contracts that give our publishers the exclusive rights to distribute our books: so we sought their permission first.

This year, Orbit—the publisher of Mira Grant's Parasite, Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice, and Charles Stross's Neptune's Brood—have decided that for policy reasons they can't permit the shortlisted novels to be distributed for free in their entirety. Instead, substantial extracts from the books will be included in the Hugo voters packet.

We feel your disappointment keenly and regret any misunderstandings that may have arisen about the availability of our work to Hugo voters, but we are bound by the terms of our publishing contracts. The decision to give away free copies of our novels is simply not ours to take. However, we are discussing the matter with other interested parties, and working towards finding a solution that will satisfy the needs of the WSFS voters and our publishers in future years.

Finally, please do not pester our editors: the decision was taken above their level. Don't pester anyone else, either. The issue is closed.

Signed,

(Mira Grant (aka Seanan McGuire), Ann Leckie, Charles Stross)

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

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

Anyway, here you go:

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

I get asked, a lot, about what I have coming out. Where can it be found, where is the schedule, has something been published, has something been sold. Which is incredibly flattering, honestly—what author doesn't want to have people beating down her door to find out where they can get more stories?—but can also lead to that thing where I have answered the same question ten times and now it's just upsetting and I'm starting to doubt my own answers. So here is your quick and dirty guide to finding out what I have coming up:

Stop #1: The Bibliography.

The bibliography on my website is located here:

http://seananmcguire.com/other.php

It lists every book, short story, and essay I have published, all curated into the appropriate sections. Note that, for the most part, this only includes things that are already available; upcoming releases are unlikely to be listed, unless they are novels being released within the next three months. The bibliography is updated every time something is released, so it's always up-to-date. Indexing is not currently listed, because there is no "serials" category; I'm still trying to figure out how to deal with that.

Stop #2: Inchworm Girl.

The best place to find out about upcoming publications is here:

http://seanan-mcguire.livejournal.com/tag/inchworm%20girl

This is the tag where I post my rolling "upcoming" list, and includes release dates whenever possible. Some things, especially novels, may appear on this list for some time before they move to the bibliography.

Stop #3: The Lost Children.

"But wait," you cry, "what about...? I saw it on the Current Projects list!"

Sadly, the answer is "if it is not on either the bibliography page or listed in the inchworm girl with a release date, it does not have a release date." That could mean it's out on submission. That could mean it's currently benched while I deal with other things. Or it could mean that it has been sold but not yet announced, which puts me effectively on radio silence. And here's the real problem:

I can't tell you which it is.

If you ask about something that's not in one of those two places, I will not discuss its status with you. I will say "yes, I wrote that," and move on. Pressuring me for details will just frustrate us both, because you won't get what you want and I'll feel like my boundaries aren't being respected. I actively want to publish everything, because let's face it, that's how I pay the bills, but this is a very long game.

I hope this helps; I'd like everyone to be able to find everything. There's a lot of everything to find.

Hey, guys, just a few things:

1. I try to answer all top-level comments on posts that do not have comment amnesty (giveaways automatically have comment amnesty). I will not join an ongoing thread unless I really want to.

2. Please do not edit your comments eight times. This floods my already overflowing inbox, and forces me to wade through duplicates looking for things that need answers. Please don't edit at all, unless you really need to.

3. Yes, LJ marks links as spam. I manually unspam all non-spam links. Please don't report that your first comment got spam-filed, or re-post repeatedly trying to avoid being flagged and hidden. I will manually unscreen you, I promise. But it takes longer when you hit my inbox with the wrath of an angry beehive.

Thanks, all. You're great.

Every year around this time, someone says to me "Gosh, I've never been to the San Diego International Comic Convention before. I don't see what the big deal is. I really don't believe it's as big as everybody tries to make me think it is." And every year, I smack myself in the head and update this guide and pray for their survival.

Since I've been posting these obsessively-detailed Guides to Comicon on a yearly basis for some time now, I strongly suspect these people are being aimed at me. But since I love you all (those of you I know, anyway; I am well-inclined by amiably indifferent toward those of you who just came in out of the cold), and want you to have the best convention experience you possibly can, I have once again updated my Handy-Dandy Survival Guide to the San Diego International Comic Convention. See? It's handy and dandy, and that means it must be good! This guide includes tips on:

* Reaching the convention alive.
* Getting a hotel room.
* Enjoying/surviving the con.
* Things to do at the con.
* Eating food.
* Staying healthy and in a good mental place.
* Not getting killed by your friends.
* Budgeting.
* Bathing.

It is also heavily biased toward my own opinions on all these things, because hello, totally me. But I'm honest about my biases, and I'll be factual whenever it's fact, rather than opinion. (In short, don't expect me to falsify hotel room rates to suit my own ideas of "fair," but don't expect me to recommend a good Thai place, either.)

Ready? Okay!

( Click here for Seanan's handy-dandy Comicon survival guide! Read and be enlightened in all the ways that matter, which is to say, all the ways that Seanan actually thought of. Freshly updated for 2013.Collapse )

Yesterday, the very last of the Wicked Girls T-shirts (a reprint, since the original shirt had been damaged in the printing process) went into the mail. One shirt has been returned to me because the address was wrong (we're trying to contact that person now), and some international shirts may still be in the process of getting where they're going, but apart from that, we're finally finished. (As an addendum, if you have not received a shirt, and you should have received a shirt, please mail the merch address as soon as possible. Right now, we have some overruns and extras, so there's a chance we can make things right. This isn't going to be the case forever, and processing refunds is tedious. And yes, we're going honor system with this, because how the hell am I supposed to prove that you don't have something? I can't afford that many plane tickets.)

As of today, I'm still packaging and shipping Wicked Girls posters. All the signed/numbered posters have been spoken for, although some "normal" posters are still available. I'm going to have to rethink my shipping costs after this batch; at this point, mailing a poster overseas is more than $10 USD. It sucks, because I've been trying to keep costs as low as I can, but there's only so much that I can afford to do. (Everyone who has a poster pending will get it for the originally stated shipping cost.)

Yesterday, I mailed a restock of Red Roses and Dead Things to CD Baby—they should have the disks available for purchase by the beginning of next week—and counted the remaining stock in my home. As of right now, there are 64 copies of this album remaining in back stock, and I am not planning to reprint for at least a year. That means that when these are gone, the album goes to officially out of print, and there won't be any more for quite some time, if ever. This is partially a cost issue and partially a storage issue, and both are connected to the same exciting development:

I'm reprinting Stars Fall Home.

I'm reprinting Stars Fall Home with a new cover and a bonus track ("Continental Divide") and the whole thing has been remastered and oh my sweet Great Pumpkin you guys, it sounds amazing. Like, the remastered "Sycamore Tree" is just heartbreaking, it's so good. The current target for me having albums in-hand is the start of May, and since I'm going to need someplace to put them, it's Red Roses and Dead Things' turn to take a little break.

I'm going to have copies of Stars Fall Home again.

I'm so happy.

The 2013 Hugo Awards ballot has been announced, and is as follows:

Best Novel.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
Blackout by Mira Grant (Orbit)
Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance by Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen)
Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas by John Scalzi (Tor)
Throne of the Crescent Moon by Saladin Ahmed (DAW)

Best Novella.

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Kress (Tachyon Publications)
The Emperor’s Soul by Brandon Sanderson (Tachyon Publications)
On a Red Station, Drifting by Aliette de Bodard (Immersion Press)
San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats by Mira Grant (Orbit)
The Stars Do Not Lie by Jay Lake (Asimov’s, Oct-Nov 2012)

Best Novelette.

“The Boy Who Cast No Shadow” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt (Postscripts: Unfit For Eden, PS Publications)
“Fade To White” by Catherynne M. Valente (Clarkesworld, August 2012)
“The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi” by Pat Cadigan (Edge of Infinity, Solaris)
“In Sea-Salt Tears” by Seanan McGuire (Self-published)
“Rat-Catcher” by Seanan McGuire (A Fantasy Medley 2, Subterranean)

Best Short Story.

“Immersion” by Aliette de Bodard (Clarkesworld, June 2012)
“Mantis Wives” by Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld, August 2012)
“Mono no Aware” by Ken Liu (The Future is Japanese, VIZ Media LLC)

Note: category has 3 nominees due to a 5% requirement under Section 3.8.5 of the WSFS constitution.

Best Related Work.

The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature Edited by Edward James & Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge UP)
Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them Edited by Lynne M. Thomas & Sigrid Ellis (Mad Norwegian Press)
Chicks Unravel Time: Women Journey Through Every Season of Doctor Who Edited by Deborah Stanish & L.M. Myles (Mad Norwegian Press)
I Have an Idea for a Book... The Bibliography of Martin H. Greenberg Compiled by Martin H. Greenberg, edited by John Helfers (The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box)
Writing Excuses Season Seven by Brandon Sanderson, Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal, Howard Tayler and Jordan Sanderson

Best Graphic Story.

Grandville Bête Noire written and illustrated by Bryan Talbot (Dark Horse Comics, Jonathan Cape)
Locke & Key Volume 5: Clockworks written by Joe Hill, illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez (IDW)
Saga, Volume One written by Brian K. Vaughn, illustrated by Fiona Staples (Image Comics)
Schlock Mercenary: Random Access Memorabilia by Howard Tayler, colors by Travis Walton (Hypernode Media)
Saucer Country, Volume 1: Run written by Paul Cornell, illustrated by Ryan Kelly, Jimmy Broxton and Goran Sudžuka (Vertigo)

Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form).

The Avengers
The Cabin in the Woods
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
The Hunger Games
Looper

Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form).

Doctor Who: “The Angels Take Manhattan”
Doctor Who: “Asylum of the Daleks”
Doctor Who: “The Snowmen”
Fringe: “Letters of Transit"
Game of Thrones :“Blackwater”

Best Editor (Short Form).

John Joseph Adams
Neil Clarke
Stanley Schmidt
Jonathan Strahan
Sheila Williams

Best Editor (Long Form).

Lou Anders
Sheila Gilbert
Liz Gorinsky
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
Toni Weisskopf

Best Professional Artist.

Vincent Chong
Julie Dillon
Dan Dos Santos
Chris McGrath
John Picacio

Best Semiprozine.

Apex Magazine edited by Lynne M. Thomas, Jason Sizemore and Michael Damian Thomas
Beneath Ceaseless Skies edited by Scott H. Andrews
Clarkesworld edited by Neil Clarke, Jason Heller, Sean Wallace and Kate Baker
Lightspeed edited by John Joseph Adams and Stefan Rudnicki
Strange Horizons edited by Niall Harrison, Jed Hartman, Brit Mandelo, An Owomoyela, Julia Rios, Abigail Nussbaum, Sonya Taaffe, Dave Nagdeman and Rebecca Cross

Best Fanzine.

Banana Wings edited by Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer
The Drink Tank edited by Chris Garcia and James Bacon
Elitist Book Reviews edited by Steven Diamond
Journey Planet edited by James Bacon, Chris Garcia, Emma J. King, Helen J. Montgomery and Pete Young
SF Signal edited by John DeNardo, JP Frantz, and Patrick Hester

Best Fancast.

The Coode Street Podcast, Jonathan Strahan and Gary K. Wolfe
Galactic Suburbia Podcast, Alisa Krasnostein, Alexandra Pierce, Tansy Rayner Roberts (Presenters) and Andrew Finch (Producer)
SF Signal Podcast, Patrick Hester, John DeNardo, and JP Frantz
SF Squeecast, Elizabeth Bear, Paul Cornell, Seanan McGuire, Lynne M. Thomas, Catherynne M. Valente (Presenters) and David McHone-Chase (Technical Producer)
StarShipSofa, Tony C. Smith

Best Fan Writer.

James Bacon
Christopher J Garcia
Mark Oshiro
Tansy Rayner Roberts
Steven H Silver

Best Fan Artist.

Galen Dara
Brad W. Foster
Spring Schoenhuth
Maurine Starkey
Steve Stiles

John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Award for the best new professional science fiction or fantasy writer of 2011 or 2012, sponsored by Dell Magazines (not a Hugo Award).

Zen Cho
Max Gladstone
Mur Lafferty
Stina Leicht
Chuck Wendig

Those of you with keen eyes may have noticed my name a time or two. So here are my firsts for this year:

First woman to appear on the ballot four times in fiction categories alone.
First person to appear on the ballot five times in a single year.
First person to appear on the ballot with a purely self-published work ("In Sea-Salt Tears," Best Novelette nominee).

Here are some other fun facts: this is the first time Sheila Gilbert, my editor at DAW, or Chris McGrath, who is responsible for the October Daye covers (as well as many, many more) have appeared on the Hugo ballot. As of this year's ballot, every novella or novel-length work in the Newsflesh series has appeared on the Hugo ballot. I have essays in two of the works in Best Related Work. Urban fantasy in any form rarely makes award ballots, and I have two October Daye-universe novellas on this ballot.

Fringe is on the ballot for the first time ever this year. So is Mark Oshiro of Mark Reads, which is just amazing. The whole ballot is amazing.

I have eaten nothing but ice cream today. I have cried a lot.

I am grateful and honored and terrified and fragile and amazed, because this ballot represents the best of 2012 in a very concrete way. I see so many works there that blew my mind, and I look forward to experiencing the rest.

Thank you so much. I will try very hard not to let you down.

So remember when I said that I would answer ten questions about the InCryptid universe? I'm almost done, but here's your ninth answer!

tylik asks...

"How frequently have cryptids attended universities? Have many gone for graduate degrees? How has that worked out for them?"

There's this interesting tendency to treat "cryptid" as a catch-all when talking about this universe, much like we use the word "human" as a catch-all. But cryptids are not a single species sometimes divided by race and geography; they're a hundred, two hundred, a thousand different species, with different needs, wants, and desires. How many frickens have attended universities? None, although some may have been dissected there. How many cuckoos have attended universities? More than you'd like to consider.

Whether or not a cryptid chooses to attend university is influenced by a number of factors. Chief among them are...

1. How human do they look? No male wadjet is ever going to get a degree, unless it's through the mail, because they're basically enormous cobras, and that doesn't go over well with the Dean of Admissions. Cuckoos and lilu, on the other hand, can stroll right through the front doors.

2. How connected to human society are they? University costs money. No matter how much someone like Istas might want to major in fashion design, waheela simply don't have the funds, or the credit scores, to pay for it. Ryan, on the other hand, comes from a family that's been interacting with humans for centuries, and could probably pay for his entire education up-front, if he chose to pursue it.

3. What good will it do? University campuses in the InCryptid world frequently play host to one or more cuckoos, and are one of the safest places to be during a cuckoo encounter. Cuckoos have two big additions, chaos and math, and they go to school for numbers, not destruction. Basically, they're unlikely to fuck with the students because they don't want it to disrupt their class schedule. Very few of them are actually enrolled, however, because the degrees wouldn't do them any good. They're here to learn equations until they get bored, and then go out and smash shit. You don't need a degree to do that.

So let's assume we're looking only at the human-appearing, well-connected types of cryptid. That still gives us dozens of species, with their own racial needs and desires. Some dragons do attend college, because they understand that if you want to make money, you have to spend money; they're the ultimate financial aid students, because while the Nest will pay their every expense, you can be damn sure they'll explain any drops in their grades or unnecessary electives to their sisters. Bogeymen love college, but usually stick to night school, where they won't stand out as much. Tanuki are big fans. And so on, and so on.

There's no single answer to this question, because there's no single "cryptid" that we can use as our poster child for non-humans pursuing higher education. But in this world, there are more non-human students than most people would think.

Maybe that explains Rush Week.

As of today, Midnight Blue-Light Special is officially available from bookstores all over North America, and from import stores all over the world. It's been spotted in the wild from California to New York, with several points between also chiming in to let me know that they've got copies. Hooray!

Since it's release day, I figured it was time to once again answer the wonderful people asking how they can help. So here are a few dos and don'ts for making this book launch awesome.

DO buy the book as soon as you can. Sales during the first week are very important—think of it as "opening weekend" for a movie—but they're not the end-all be-all. If you can get the book today, get the book; if you can get it at my book release party, get it at my book release party. Whatever works for you. Brick-and-mortar store purchases are best, as they encourage reordering. If you've already bought the book, consider buying the book again, as a single copy might get lonely. They make great gifts!

DON'T yell at other people who haven't bought the book yet. I know, that's sort of a "why are you saying this?" statement, but I got a very sad email from a teenager who'd been yelled at for not buying A Local Habitation the week that it came out. So just be chill. Unless you want to buy books for people who don't have them, in which case, don't yell, just buy.

DO ask your local bookstore if they have it on order. If your local store is part of a large chain, such as Barnes and Noble, the odds are 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? (Also, please don't email me my Amazon reviews. I don't read them, I don't want to read them, and I definitely don't want to be surprised with them. Please have mercy.)

DO feel free to get multiple copies. No, you probably don't need eight copies of One Salt Sea 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 check with your local library to be sure they have a copy of on order. If they don't, you can fill out a library request form. Spread the paperback love!

DON'T forget that libraries need books. Many libraries, especially on the high school level, are really strapped for cash right now, and book donations are frequently tax deductible. If you have a few bucks to spare, you can improve the world on multiple levels by donating books to your local public and high school libraries.

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. Finally, a few things that don't help the book, but do help the me:

Please don't expect immediate email response from me for anything short of "you promised us this interview, it runs tomorrow, where are your answers?" I normally make an effort to be a semi-competent correspondent, but with a new book on shelves, final edits due on Half-Off Ragnarok, and The Winter Long in need of finishing, a lot of things are falling by the wayside. Like sleep.

Please don't ask me when book three is coming out. I may cry. Plus, the answer is March 2014.

Whee!

So remember when I said that I would answer ten questions about the InCryptid universe? I'm still taking questions, but here's your eighth answer!

vixyish asks...

"What is bogeyman society like? So far on paper we've only met them singly. Are there bogeyman communities, do they live in family groups, that kind of thing, or do they prefer to live alone, each with their own territory? And how do they find mates?"

Bogeymen! Now, remember, that "bogeyman" and "bogeymen" is considered gender-neutral as a species term, much like "human." So while all bogeymen are people, there is no such thing as a "bogeywoman," and you will in fact be gutted stem to stern if you try to use the term. "Bogeyboy" and "bogeygirl" are likewise incorrect, unless you're talking to a bunch of teenage bogeymen who want to piss off their parents. It's a phase. They generally grow out of it. "Bogeydude" is never correct. "Bogeybabe," sometimes correct during courtship, because it's just wrong and naughty enough to be attractive. I do not recommend you try it unless you're dating a bogeyman who has already shown herself to enjoy dirty language. Now, onward to the actual question:

Bogeymen live in a culture of commerce. Everything is based on purchase value and exchange rate, even though much of their commerce is done via barter. Maybe especially because most of their commerce is done via barter. When getting a cookie requires an hour's labor, or two dead rats for the dinner menu, you know the value of a cookie a lot more than you would if it only cost you a dollar. Bogeyman parents begin teaching their children about commerce by the age of two, to prepare them for exiting the family unit and entering society. Note that there is no "hard and fast" line for leaving said family unit: a bogeyman who proves to have no nose for commerce may be kept permanently at home, considered a functional child but protected from the realities of the world, or else sold as a servant to a larger family unit (assuming said bogeyman is a skilled enough laborer to do the work, and is just lacking the skill set necessary to be a free-living, independent member of society).

Family units will generally consist of a "head of household," IE, "whoever put down the most collateral toward purchasing and furnishing the living space," his or her spouse or spouses, and any unmarried siblings with no interest in having children or households of their own. All adults are expected to work for their keep, but this work can include maintaining the house and caring for the children. Anyone who chooses those jobs will be paid by the rest of the household, fairly for their labor, and is thus considered to be contributing fully. Despite being a primarly barter-based economy, bogeymen do covet money, which they will put aside to sustain them in case of illness. Should an adult member of the household fall ill, they will pay their family to care for them. This may seem cruel, from a human perspective, but the bogeymen have spent a long time being hunted, hated, and hurt: they want to know that they are never a burden, and that any time lost caring for someone who should have been able to care for themselves will be repaid. It's a matter of pride. Note that, should someone run out of money, they will go into debt; they will not be turned away. Bogeyman funerals often involve the symbolic laying of debt upon the coffin, releasing any descendants from the burden, and it is considered the height of ill manners to try to enforce minor debts incurred by the dead, unless those debts were incurred in bad faith.

Bogeyman communities can be quite large, and almost entirely subterranean, due to the nocturnal nature of bogeymen as a species and the "kill it with fire" reactions that many humans tend to have. The bogeyman community in Manhattan is numbered in the thousands, as are the communities in Seattle and Chicago. Smaller cities will usually have smaller bogeyman communities, and they will sometimes resort to buying apartment buildings, turning them into "special communities for graveyard shift employees," and then colonizing the individual units. This can result in someone being the only human in a building full of bogeymen, which rarely ends well.

When a bogeyman comes of age to marry, they will sit down with their parents and fairly and logically assess themselves. Skills, appearance, medical history, it all goes into setting their price. Everyone has a price. It's not men buying women; it's couples buying each other. Sometimes parents will make a wedding gift to the couple by making up the difference if one of them can't afford the other. ("But Mom! Daniel costs twice what I do and I really love him!" "Okay, okay, instead of a cake, we'll buy you a husband.") If there's no one local that somebody wants to buy, they may take their assessed value and go traveling, working their way through the local communities while they search for a spouse. Offers of purchase can be refused; some couples are committed but apart for years while they earn the necessary money to start their lives together. It's customary for the parents on both sides to gift the young couple with part or all of their mutual purchase price at the wedding, allowing them to buy a home and begin establishing themselves. In this case, the head of household will almost always be the one with the higher initial cost.

Bogeymen love their children, and will do virtually anything for them. They're very human, in that regard. This does mean that same-sex couples will buy and sell their favors to each other—essentially, "if you get me pregnant, and forswear the child, you can also get my wife pregnant, and keep the child." Bogeymen who don't want children are not treated poorly, as they can add value to other households by providing additional adults to help keep things running smoothly. The population is high enough at this point that some loss of genetic diversity can be endured.

I like bogeymen. They're dishonest with outsiders and very honest with each other, and they take care of their own.

So remember when I said that I would answer ten questions about the InCryptid universe? I'm still taking questions, and actively need questions that follow the "big, about the world" model as described in the original post, but here's your sixth answer!

rianax asks...

"If they can't interbreed with humanity, how to these different species met up and have children in the modern world? Is there a cryptid Cupid.com?"

Yay, cryptid breeding! We're going to restrict ourselves to a very anthrocentric approach, for the sake of answering the question as posed: we're only looking at cryptids that can, for one reason or another, live in human settlements. The ones who can "pass," in other words. They're both the ones who are most likely to have issues with humans seeming attractive, and the ones who will have the most "I need to know your species before we can hook up" problems.

Some of these cryptids get around the "accidentally dating humans" issue by not being mammals. For the most part, humans smell "wrong" to them, and are hence not attractive. You do get occasional perverts who like mammal boys or insect girls instead of sticking with good, honest reptile people like their siblings, but for the most part, people are attracted to things they have half a chance of being biologically compatible with. (Science supports me on this.)

A few species of cryptid are cross-fertile with humans. A very few species, and most of them will still choose not to crossbreed, because there's a very good chance their offspring will be infertile, which doesn't help keep the family line going. Lilu, which includes both incubi and succubi, are cross-fertile, and their offspring have a fifty percent chance of being infertile. Fertile crossbreeds will usually have children that are indistinguishable from the species of their mate. So if Elsie, who is half-succubus, were to visit a sperm bank and get some human sperm, she would have a baby who was effectively a very sexy human, rather than a succubus crossbreed. Jinks and leprechauns are similar, and many family links have a little jink or leprechaun blood.

Tanuki are the only known species of therianthrope to be cross-fertile outside of other therianthropes, and they manage this partially by having lots and lots of tanuki babies. As with certain types of frog (no, seriously, science again), they have evolved extremely dominant DNA. If Ryan were to mate with Istas, you wouldn't get half-waheela babies, you'd get unusually colored tanuki. Even when there were more of them, they would often seek out-species mates to get hybrid vigor back into the community. Sorry about what that does for your family line, dearest.

There are dating services for some species of cryptid, ranging from the very communal "let me introduce you, he's a nice boy" social dances of the bogeymen to the more formal courting rituals of the gorgons. There are very few true solitaries, and almost everyone knows where everyone else is. And yes, some of this happens on the internet, although it has to be very carefully masked and monitored; the Covenant can log on, too.

So remember when I said that I would answer ten questions about the InCryptid universe? Well, I'm still taking questions, but here's your fifth answer!

ladymurmur asks...

"I'm not asking for calendar of holidays, but instead have a logistical ponderment - For how many generations to the Aeslin keep their holidays? when the colonies branch off, and begin creating their own new holidays, do the new holidays begin overwriting or supplanting the old holidays so that there is only one or just a few on any given day? Or do they stack, becoming almost an "on this day in history" sort of situation? If there are multiple celebrations on one day, are the celebrated concurrently? consecutively? Do colonies ever rejoin each other, or cross-pollinate in some fashion (an Aeslin exchange program?) and thus share holidays? or are the new colonies more like religious schisms, and ne'er the twain shall meet?"

I decided that I would answer one question about the Aeslin mice this round, because while I love them, they're sort of like bacon: a little bit can go a very long way, and we're way too early in the series to be risking mouse burn-out. This one offered the most opportunities to stick knives into people, so...you're welcome, I guess.

First off, there's a major underlying assumption buried in this question: the assumption that colonies branch off. They used to, but that doesn't happen anymore, because branching really happens only when the population gets too large for the space and resources available. The colony of Aeslin mice currently living with the Price family is the last known Aeslin colony in the world. The elders control birth rates and expansion very carefully, and pray for the younger generation of Prices and Price-Harringtons to marry and settle in homes of their own, because they're trying to avoid an actual schism; they know very well that any groups that leave the family home are extremely unlikely to survive. At the same time, if a schism becomes unavoidable before a new attic or basement or guest bedroom becomes available to them, the schisming mice will no longer exist from the perspective of the colony. Reject the colony, you reject the colony's gods. Reject the colony's gods, reject the colony's way of life. Reject the colony's way of life, you are no longer my child.

Aeslin mice are pathologically religious. They can't fight the urge to worship. It's tied to their survival instincts; while a colony that worships a cat is likely to be eaten, a colony that worships a tree will have a stronger tendency to stay together and stay safe, because they need to be healthy to properly tend to the needs of their god. They're capable of teamwork and very complicated thought, but they're still mice. Talking mice. The Covenant wiped them out easily as sports of nature and demonic imps. People who found them in their homes captured them and sold them to circuses or traveling shows. Cats, dogs, foxes, snakes...it's a big, scary world for an Aeslin mouse, and it's entirely possible that the colony found by Caroline Davies, mother of Enid Davies (later Enid Healy), was the last one there was. She saved them. She gave them something to believe in.

She gave them her family.

Now, on to the more time-based questions. "For how many generations do the Aeslin keep their holidays?" For as many as they keep their faith. If they worship a tree, then hundreds of generations could pass before their god withers and dies. If they worship a mayfly, they'll need a new god by the end of the summer. The Price family Aeslin still celebrate the Sacred Ritual of I Don't Care What You Say, They're Harmless Little Things and They Need a Home, They're Not Monsters, They're Mice, better known to the family as "the day Great-Great-Great-Grandma Caroline found the mice in the barnyard." Nothing is ever forgotten. Nothing is ever forgotten. To forget anything would be to shame the gods, and to be less than Aeslin.

The Aeslin calendar does not exactly match the human calendar; it has more months, for one thing, and the number seems to increase periodically, although no one human understands how or why that happens. While the feast days and celebrations will always match up to their original places on the human calendar, how often they are observed is determined by a number of factors, including their place on the Aeslin calendar, how resource-intensive the observation is, and how much they like the festival. (The Festival of Giving a Mouse a Cookie, way more popular than The Remembrance of the Violent Priestess, Who Never Learned to Be Careful.) They can, and will, perform any liturgical rite on request, but when they come around naturally doesn't follow a human logic pattern.

The mice who travel with Verity, Alex, and the others aren't considered new colonies; they're still part of the central colony, and will remain so for as long as they share gods. The mice very much enjoy coming back together to consolidate their observances of the family, share rituals, and remind themselves that they are still united.

As long as there are Prices, there will be Aeslin.

The same is not quite as certain in reverse.

So remember when I said that I would answer ten questions about the InCryptid universe? Well, I'm still taking questions, but here's your fourth answer!

geekhyena asks...

"A clarification of my earlier comment (since I realized I didn't word it as clearly as I had intended): Why do some cryptids from very reclusive/rural-oriented and/or endangered species (such Waheela/Gorgons/etc) choose to live in cities, as opposed to others of their species? Herd immunity (so to speak)? Cultural reasons? Genuinely curious here. (As to how Istas got involved with the Goth and/or Lolita subculture(s) )"

Well, first off, I'm not going to tell you how Istas got involved with the Goth and/or Lolita subcultures. If you look at the original post (which I'd like you all to do, since I need to do six more of these Q&A posts before the book comes out), you'll see the bit where I said "no spoilers." That applies to "how did character X wind up in situation Y" questions, since hey, I may want to write that someday. You'll like it better if I'm allowed to think about it longer, I promise.

Which brings me to the core question of "why do some cryptids who aren't considered specifically urban, like bogeymen (who hate living in the country), sometimes choose to live in cities?" Well!

First off, we have to remember that sapient cryptids, while not human, are still people, and every person is different. Istas is a serious social butterfly, for a waheela. Ryan is considered a little stand-offish, for a tanuki. Sarah is remarkably pleasant and non-destructive, for a cuckoo. And so on, and so on. You can make blanket statements about a species, like "waheela are generally territorial" and "tanuki generally live in family groups," but those will never be universal, any more than "humans are often suspicious and aggressive" applies to every single member of the human race. For someone like Istas, who actually likes things like fashion, cooked food, shoes, and having conversations with people she's not about to eat, living in the frozen Canadian tundra is just this side of hell. For a normal waheela, living in Manhattan would be just as bad.

Secondly, we have to remember that cities offer some opportunities that country living just doesn't, especially now that the world doesn't really believe in barter economies. If you belong to a species that can "pass" for human during part or all of your life, spending a few years in Orlando working at Disney World and sending money home to the rest of the family is just the sensible, responsible thing to do. Think of it as the cryptid equivalent of the popular interpretation of the Amish rumspringa: go to the city, live and work among the humans, figure out how dangerous and frightening they are, come home where no one's going to skin you and wear you as a fashionable coat.

It's surprisingly easy to be reclusive in the big city. In a small town where everybody knows your name and notices if you don't show up to check your PO Box on Wednesday afternoon, you're going to have a lot of trouble explaining where you went for those two months when you were hibernating. In San Francisco or Chicago, as long as your bills are paid, you can probably get away with it. Also, just like some humans don't like people but do like tigers/alligators/gorillas/whatever, some cryptids don't like their own species, but do like humans, regarding us as adorable and bizarre at the same time, and hence enjoy spending time with us, while still considering themselves "isolated" and "alone."

Finally...where else are they supposed to go? It's increasingly hard to live in a little house in the middle of a deep, dark forest without worrying that you're going to have a Wreck-It Ralph eminent domain situation on your hands. Much like most humans can't imagine going back to living with outhouses and no electricity and shoes only on special occasions, most sapient cryptids aren't overly excited by the "go live in a cave already" concept. There are rural cryptids, and cryptids who survive quite happily in places that humans still regard as uninhabitable, but for all the ones who evolved and adapted to climates similar to the humans around them, it's cities or suckage. So they choose cities. It's not their favorite option; thanks to us, it's the one that they have.

So remember when I said that I would answer ten questions about the InCryptid universe? Well, I'm still taking questions, but here's your third answer!

professor asks...

"Given that the Covenant is a centuries-old organization that worships tradition and conformity, how do gender and racial identity politics within the Covenant work?"

I find it interesting that when we hear the phrase "hide-bound" or "traditional" in reference to an organization like the Covenant, whose stated mission is killing monsters, we immediately assume that they must be an organization completely dominated by white cisdudes. And I'm including myself in that "we": when I first started working on the organizational structure of what would become the Covenant of St. George, it was extremely old white cisdude-centric.

At one time, that was probably an accurate view of the organizational makeup. While they are no longer particularly religious in nature, or sanctioned by any major church, they did start out with strong church ties, and the church in the Middle Ages was pretty firm on its whole "gotta be a dude with a penis to come to the party." Add in the fact that large portions of the Covenant's leadership settled in Italy, France, and the United Kingdom, and you'd get a very white cisdude party. But here's the thing: the Covenant was good at their job. They still are, as much as they can be; remember that today's cryptids are the descendents of the ones who learned to hide from the raids and the cleansings. One by one, the big flashy monsters were killed off or driven into the shadows, and it got harder to be picky.

There was a time when any village in Europe would have been proud to have a son chosen to work with the Covenant of St. George. By the late 1500s, most of those same villages considered the Covenant a fairy tale, and would never have dreamed of giving away their sons. The Covenant began doing their recruiting from people who had actually encountered cryptids, who could actually see the value in fighting against them. This meant dropping virtually all restrictions against girls serving active roles, because sometimes, it was the girls who survived.

Most of the Covenant's early female recruits provided backup and support for the field teams, having not been trained to fight before they came to the Covenant. At the time, it was not standard within the Covenant for all recruits to receive field training. This changed in the mid-1600s, following the last successful attack on a Covenant stronghold. Half the support staff were killed, as were most of the children currently being housed in that location. After that, it became a prerequisite that all recruits learn to fight, even if they were not constitutionally equipped for field positions.

Resistance to women in the field continued for quite some time, although it had less to do with "women can't handle it," and more to do with "we're not really a powerful political or religious force anymore, and we don't want our male operatives arrested for traveling with women they're neither related to nor married to." Field team marriages became very common, because it was a way for women to get "out of the office" and out doing what they did best. Killing stuff. By the mid-1800s, women had a completely equal voice in Covenant activities.

If this seems like it took a really long time, please compare it to real-world history. The Covenant was surprisingly enlightened, largely out of necessity.

But that only addresses female equality, not race or gender identity. Race was actually addressed somewhat earlier, when the Covenant followed the various explorations, Crusades, and invasions of the rest of the world, either forming or making contact with similar groups around the world. Most local groups were sadly largely absorbed into the Covenant, because the Covenant had the resources and the manpower to make joining forces seem appealing. Those who weren't absorbed are still considered part of the Covenant today, and are not spoken of much outside the regions where their methods dominate. And here's the thing: since the Covenant, and its sister organizations, focused so strongly on "humans first," they didn't bother as much with racial divides. There would be time for those later, when the monsters were all gone. To be fair, if the Covenant had successfully wiped out the monsters in the 1600s, they would probably have turned around and started ethnic cleansing. But they didn't, and they didn't, and they wound up a fully integrated organization by the mid-1800s. They understand racism, and will use it to their advantage when possible, but the Covenant as an institution does not tolerate racial discrimination. Humans gotta stick together.

Sexuality and gender identity are harder, in part because the Covenant relies on "legacy children" for so much of its membership. You're really expected to have kids if you possibly can. While this isn't a law or anything, you'll get a lot of the "Have you tried not being a ________?" routine, especially if you were already slated for inclusion in the breeding program. But at the end of the day, again, they need trained members more than they need to be prejudiced, and have been QUILTBAG inclusive since the early 1900s.

Seriously, there was a time—a long time—where if you were a strong-willed woman who wanted to make your own choices, a gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transsexual teen, or of any race that didn't match the locally dominant racial type, the Covenant was your best route out of that life. If you heard about them, if you heard that they could save you, you took that chance. And the people who took that chance tended to become very loyal, because they were given lives that they could otherwise have only dreamt of.

The modern Covenant is very enlightened, except for the part where anything that isn't human is a monster. There's no room for discussion on that front. And really, that's the problem.

So remember when I said that I would answer ten questions about the InCryptid universe? Well, I'm still taking questions, but here's your second answer!

ashnistrike says...

"I'm going to deviate from all the Aeslin obsession above and admit to a cuckoo obsession (much less healthy). When I see something like this—a species that has almost all gone mad around their basic biological set-up—my assumption is that at one point they were more sane and adaptive, and something changed in their environment so that once-adaptive characteristics led to problems. And yes, I realize that they are still adaptive in the purely biological sense in spite of being sociopaths. But it still seems likely that they haven't always been that way. So, question—what's the original environment in which their parasitic telepathy evolved? What changed? Were they ever less completely destructive to their hosts? Symbiotic? Have they ended up, as parasites often do, in biological/telepathic arms races with other cryptid species?"

YAY I GET TO TALK ABOUT JOHRLAR YOU'RE ALL GOING TO BE SORRY!!!!

...ahem.

So the cuckoos are more properly called "Johrlac" (species name Johrlac psychidolos), and they are not from around here. I would call this a spoiler, since it hasn't come out in the series proper yet, but it's something that I talk about on panels, and it's something that anyone who's performed any sort of physiological examination of a cuckoo has probably guessed. Still, your personal perspective on spoilers may make this sensitive information, so I'm going to cut-tag.

( Here be dragons. Worse yet, here be cuckoos. Proceed at your own risk.Collapse )

So remember when I said that I would answer ten questions about the InCryptid universe? Well, I'm still taking questions, but here's your first answer!

ebartley asks...

"Why hasn't the Covenant squashed the Prices? They aren't that well-hidden."

Normally, this is the type of question that would get a raised eyebrow and a somewhat disappointed cry of "Spoilers!" But in this case, the answer ties so closely into the family history that I've been unpacking for you, one short story at a time, that it seems like a reasonable place to start.

Understanding the Covenant of St. George requires taking an almost denialist viewpoint on the universe. Absolute truth: Humans are the best thing. Like, no matter what else there is in the universe, no matter what wonders we may eventually come to discover, humans are the best thing. Conclusion: anything humans think is cool is pretty much guaranteed to be totally cool, because humans—remember, the best thing—thought that it was cool. Anyone or anything trying to tell you that this line of reasoning is flawed and contains several internal logical fallacies is lying, and a stupid-head, and probably an enemy of the human race. You do not need to feel bad about hating them. And if you don't need to feel bad about hating them, you don't need to feel bad about anything your hatred eventually leads you to do.

Second absolute truth: anything that harms humans is bad. It doesn't matter what the thing is, or why it's harming humans. It doesn't matter if the humans who are being harmed brought it upon their own heads. If something is harming humans, it is bad. It is evil. The world is black and white, and you are on the side of white, because humans are the best thing, and all you're doing is stopping things that would hurt humans.

Third absolute truth: you are always right. Because if you were wrong, if it were possible for you to be wrong...well, then, maybe all those "monsters" that you chased down and slaughtered in cold blood were actually people who just didn't look the way that you had arbitrarily decided that people were supposed to look. Maybe you've done bad things. Maybe you're a murderer. And if you're a murderer, well. That sort of calls your whole "humans are the best thing" philosophy into question.

That's the starting point for the Covenant: they are a bunch of arrogant absolutists who have, over the course of centuries, locked themselves into a pattern of thought that allows for absolutely no deviation. To deviate, even in the slightest degree, is to no longer be truly Covenant. Once you start questioning things, there's every chance that the entire house of cards will come crumbling down.

(This isn't to say that all members of the Covenant are idiots: they're not. They're just trained and drilled and schooled very firmly on one specific method of thought, and it's one that happens to come with a clear and easy "us vs. them" that can be demonstrated using flash cards. There are a lot of very smart people in the Covenant. That's what makes them dangerous.)

Now we must travel back three generations in the family history, to a time when there were only three Prices standing: Thomas Price, who had defected from the Covenant when his personal house of cards got knocked over, rather decisively, by his own experiences, as well as through extended contact with the Healys; Alice Price-Healy, who may well be the single most bloody-minded scion of the Healy line, which is saying something if you've met anyone with Healy blood in them; and Kevin Price, who was too young to be a factor in the actual fight, but whose presence spurred his parents to win by any means necessary.

The Covenant numbered in the thousands. The Prices numbered in the threes. There was no way for them to win a fair fight.

"Fuck a fair fight." —Alice Price-Healy

Without going into excessive detail (because I really do intend to write this one day, and a girl has to keep some secrets), the Prices basically pulled a con on the Covenant, and left them firmly convinced that yes, they had killed three people on that day, and yes, there was no possible chance that anyone could have survived. Now, remember our third absolute truth: the Covenant is always right. The Covenant rode into righteous battle, the Covenant killed three people, the Covenant won, and the Covenant is always right.

The current Price family is still recovering from that specific instance of the Covenant always being right. Alice and Thomas would have one more child before Thomas himself disappeared; both Kevin and Jane were largely raised by friends of the family, because Alice, the only remaining recognizable member of the Price-Healy clan, was off trying to find her husband. Two small children being shuttled around the country didn't attract much attention, and it was only the intervention of more friends of the family that Kevin and Jane didn't wind up growing up completely unaware of the complicated network of blood feuds and favors their ancestors had constructed to protect them.

The Covenant, which is always right, did not go looking for these children. Those children could not possibly exist.

Kevin and Jane grew up, got married, and had children, always holding to their new guiding law: Do Not Get Found. Because now, their existence would be an insult to the Covenant, as great a deviation from the laws of nature as any cryptid that had ever existed. Yes, they stayed in the family business, but they did it in ways that the Covenant wasn't looking for. The Covenant, by nature, is overt. The Price family, in their current incarnation, is covert, and they use whatever means necessary to keep themselves that way.

Why hasn't the Covenant squashed the Prices?

Because the Prices don't exist. It doesn't matter how well-hidden a thing is or isn't; when you refuse to let yourself admit that it could possibly be real, you're not going to find it.

Heaven help us all if the Covenant ever stops lying to itself.

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

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

Anyway, here you go:

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

Reminder the first: If I say a giveaway has rules, it has rules, and those rules are absolute. If my mother, who lives with me, enters the drawing and doesn't say "US address," she is not eligible to win. It's the only way to be fair, since otherwise my personal knowledge of some people's situations would mean that they had an advantage.

Reminder the second: I do not answer questions posed on giveaway posts. It confuses the random number generator by distorting the signal to noise ratio. If you're trying to ask me something directly, either comment on another applicable post, or send me an email.

Reminder the third: I try to answer all comments and emails which are not directly tied to a giveaway post or posted under comment amnesty. This is not an instantaneous process. I have 500+ comments currently waiting to be answered, and no one knows how many email messages. Please don't email AGAIN asking where your reply is. It doesn't make me faster, it just makes me sad.

These have been your friendly reminders for today.

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

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

Anyway, here you go:

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

I have once again promised to make five posts answering questions about Toby's world to celebrate the release of an upcoming book. This is the last time I'm going to do this for Toby: the questions are getting too character and book-specific, which trends into spoiler territory. So if you had a burning world question, now would be the time to scroll back to my original entry and ask it.

This is post #4. I will make post #5 tomorrow.

enigmoid asks, "How do the fae remain hidden from the human world from cameras recording devices, and satellites? It only takes one mistake."

Ah, but you see, there are two assumptions here.

1) That fae illusions do not work on recording devices. They do.
2) That anyone would believe what they saw.

Mistakes have been made in the past, and I mean the recent past, not the old, dark, pre-hiding past. Illusions have slipped, things have been seen that shouldn't have been seen...and you know what? People shrugged it off. For every "I WANT TO BELIEVE!", there are ten "I do not want to live in a world where that is possible, and thus it is not possible." Consider the zombie walks, LARPs, comic book conventions, real-world superheroes, and Bigfoot seekers in our real, known world. Consider how few of those are reported as proof of the supernatural.

Now consider what an excellent source of camouflage they are.

Satellites are a different can of worms, and one with potentially more issues, since if the military spots a pod of Merrow, they're likely to respond...badly. But at the same time, that's where the fae predilection for hanging out in the Summerlands comes in handy. Most fae, if they're not indoors or playing human, are in knowes or the Summerlands. Why? Because they feel safer there, where there are no satellites.

So yes, it's a concern, and a good one. But willful blindness and basic caution do a lot to minimize it.

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

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

Anyway, here you go:

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

(As always, this was written by Deborah, who is awesome and amazing, and can answer all your questions.)

Alright, guys, here we go:

YOU NOW HAVE FIVE DAYS TO PLACE YOUR ORDER FOR A WICKED GIRLS SHIRT.

Orders close this Friday, May 18th, 2012. At 11:59 PM PST, just to make it all official.

Now, to crib from my earlier announcements:

Everyone who has confirmed their Wicked Girls shirt order has been sent a final invoice with payment instructions.

There are currently a few people who have not confirmed their orders; you have until May 18th to do so.

Everyone who placed an order for a Wicked Girls shirt—and had that order acknowledged—should have received an order confirmation email.

If you did not receive a confirmation email, please do the following:

1. Check your spam filter. (Related, please make sure seananmerch at gmail is on your approved senders list.)
2. Check your comment on the original post and make sure I didn't need more information from you.
3. Check your comment on the original post and make sure there are no typos in your email address.

If you're missing the email and I need either corrected or more information from you, please respond in the comments on the original post. (Not this post. The original post.)

DO NOT send unsolicited email to the seananmerch email address. Unless we are already in contact, it will get lost in the shuffle for quite some time.

Thank you!

It's today's helpful shirt update! With an addendum: we have received a few notifications of missing batch-one shirts, and I will be dealing with those as soon as I get home. Since I'm in New York right now, I can't do anything to find out what's up, or whether your envelope has been returned to me. So please continue to be patient, and I'll get on it ASAP. International folks, please continue to wait before reporting a missing shirt, as we asked for a delay of up to May 18th to allow for customs.

And now, Deborah...

Everyone who has confirmed their Wicked Girls shirt order has been sent a final invoice with payment instructions.

There are currently a number of people who have not confirmed their orders; you have until May 18th to do so.

Everyone who placed an order for a Wicked Girls shirt-- and had that order acknowledged-- should have received an order confirmation email.

If you did not receive a confirmation email, please do the following:

1. Check your spam filter. (Related, please make sure seananmerch at gmail is on your approved senders list.)
2. Check your comment on the original post and make sure I didn't need more information from you.
3. Check your comment on the original post and make sure there are no typos in your email address.

If you're missing the email and I need either corrected or more information from you, please respond in the comments on the original post. (Not this post. The original post.)

DO NOT send unsolicited email to the seananmerch email address. Unless we are already in contact, it will get lost in the shuffle for quite some time.

Thank you!

The lovely and charming Deborah, who is handling the administrative side of the current Wicked Girls T-shirt batch, has two very important announcements for everyone who has ordered, or is thinking about ordering. Namely:

1. Invoicing will start on Sunday, so no inquiries necessary until after we say they've been sent out.
2. People should check the comments for queries about their orders—there are a couple of people who have been queried without responding, but LJ may be being a tool and not delivering comments.

So basically, you haven't been asked to pay yet because no one has been asked to pay, and you should check your original comment to be sure that Deborah isn't asking you important questions which might delay fulfillment.

And that is all for now.

As of about fifteen minutes ago, the last of the first run of Wicked Girls shirts has been packed for mailing. As of this afternoon, the last fifty or so have gone out into the wild. They should be received over the next three to thirteen days or so, allowing for international postage. On Monday, when I get back from Texas, last ten will go into the mail. And then I will be done, except for the inevitable cleanup and sorting out of the last few issues.

At the moment, there are five shirts, belonging to three people, that haven't been packed. This is because three of those shirts appear to either a) be missing, or b) not exist. We're not sure which it is. Mom will be cleaning the entire shirt staging area over the weekend to figure out which is the case; considering that it was a total print run of almost three hundred shirts, three misprints is actually really good...unless one of those misprints was yours. On Monday, I'll be emailing anyone whose shirt still hasn't shown up to see how they want us to proceed.

(The options, if you're morbidly curious: refund, replacement with one of the shirts we still have, or replacement shirt printed in the next batch. Which yes, we are going to do. Now that we know where the pain points and delays are, we should be able to achieve the whole thing much more quickly, from initial order to final receipt.)

I have not, thus far, heard from anyone who received the wrong shirt, and I'm hopeful that this means nothing was mispacked at any stage during the entirely manual shipping process. "Hopeful" doesn't mean "certain." If you receive the wrong shirt, please let me know ASAP, as we only printed what was requested, and we'll need to figure something out.

Thanks again to everyone for your patience during this long, slow experiment. You've been awesome, and I really hope you like your shirts.

Pre-ordering books.

I've seen some people going "Oh, no, I pre-ordered! I'm sorry!" and variants on this theme. I want to state, for the record, that pre-orders are awesome. Pre-orders are the rainbow sprinkles on the delicious sundae of a new book: not always necessary, but always an improvement. Pre-orders tell bookstores that there is a demand for something, and can increase initial on-shelf orders. They also tell publishers how many copies of a physical book are likely to be needed. Pre-orders rule.

The issue here is not pre-orders: it's that some retailers started releasing books early. Normally, your pre-orders do count against week one sales, because normally, that's when the pre-orders are charged and delivered. In this case, due to no fault of my publisher or anyone who ordered a copy ahead of release, those pre-orders will be counted two weeks ahead of week one. My sales for week -2 are going to be awesome!

Calculating bestseller lists.

I want to say this plainly: all sales count. Period. If you buy a book, your sale is counted. That said, not all sales count for purposes of making bestseller lists, because those lists are snapshots of certain measures of time. In the case of the NYT list, it's calculated on a weekly basis, and a new book's best shot (not only, but best) of making the list is week one, when all the pre-orders are delivered and all the bookstores have the book on their "new releases" shelf.

Not making this list doesn't mean your book is a failure. I'm pretty sure Feed is my best, steadiest selling book, but it didn't make the NYT. It's simply continued to sell, week after week, and that demonstrates good long-term health for both book and author. But that's long-term. In the short-term, making the list is a good way for publishers to know that they have something worth holding onto. That's why authors hope to make it; because they want that position of "see? People like me" to support them when they try to sell the sequel.

Early sales are still counted against your overall "my book sold this many copies." They just don't count against snapshots of release week.

My publisher is awesome.

My publisher rules. They did not release my book early; some online retailers did that. They are not dropping me if I don't make any bestseller lists; they've already bought the second InCryptid book, and the next two Toby books. I worry about my sales partially because I want my publisher to be happy with me, and partially because I want to be able to sell them the next three books in both my series, but also because I love them and want them to benefit from everything they've done for me.

To recap: DAW rules, DAW did nothing wrong, DAW is standing with me, DAW is very annoyed about people calling me names.

You are awesome.

All the support and kind words have been just amazing. Thank you so, so much. I really appreciate it.

I feel a little better because you're here.

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

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

Anyway, here you go:

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

So periodically, someone will ask me "why haven't you posted about _____?", where "_____" is everything from "my charity auction" or "this award" to "the new episode of Glee" or "your pedicure (I saw a picture on Twitter)." And then I tend to look tired and wander away. This isn't actually an answer. Here is an answer, in three parts.

1. Time.

A post like this takes no research; it just takes the time to think the thoughts and write the words. I don't need to fact check, find the links, explain the rules, justify my thoughts, or be funny. I just need to type. Sometimes, that's honestly all that I have the brain, or the bandwidth, to accomplish.

2. Backlog.

My current file of links to post, talk about, or use for reference is so long that it scrolls my screen three times. I've started deleting the really old ones, because they've literally aged out of relevance. But there's a new link, or two, or three every day, and I'm not removing them at nearly that rate. So something that shows up and is cool today probably is in that link file. It's just that unless it's super time-sensitive, it isn't anywhere near the top.

3. Variety.

You know what's boring? An author blog that's all BUY MY BOOKS BUY MY BOOKS BUY MY BOOKS all the time. I have what I consider the "advertising posts," which are things like the review roundups, convention announcements, publication or sale announcements, and so on. I have the "administrative posts," like this one. And then I have the "content posts," which actually say things other than "BUY MY BOOKS" or "please don't spit on the cat." I try to maintain a good mix, but it means that sometimes, things have to wait. Since I considered both the entry on where to buy my books for the holidays, and the entry about Shaenon's party, advertising posts, I needed to do some content and administration before I advertised again. Which meant certain things needed to wait.

And that is why I do not post everything that happens the second that it happens. There's no hard and fast rule dictating what gets posted when, but time, effort, and maintaining a decent level of variety are all factors.

Shamelessly, I have stolen a very clever idea from John Scalzi at the Whatever, who has posted an excellent, and quite thorough, guide to obtaining signed books from him for the holidays. He has some really spiffy books available right now. You should check them out.

Anyway, I, too, have been receiving emails for about the last month, asking where people can get signed copies of my various books. Since I already have a bajillion shirts to mail (still mailing), "from me" isn't a viable answer. So...

Want a signed book? Signed by me, I mean, and not by that guy who always looks at you sort of funny on the bus? Borderlands Books is here to help. They're located in San Francisco, on Valencia Street, and they see me a lot. Like, a lot. Anyway, they'd be totally happy to take your order, and I would be totally happy to sign and/or personalize those orders. Here's what you have to do:

1. Contact Borderlands. You can send an email via their website (link above), or call their toll-free 888 number, at 1-888-893-4008.

2. Tell them what you want, and how you want the book signed. I will do inscriptions, but they need to be short, as those title pages don't leave me a lot of room to work with.

3. While you're at it, you might want to consider picking up a few books other people have written, since you're already paying for postage, and isn't getting a big box of books always better than getting a small box of books? I'll be posting my holiday recommendations soon, none of which have a damn thing to do with the holidays, but in the meanwhile, there are lots of books out there looking for a home.

3b. I won't sign those books. Unless you really, really want me to.

4. Give them your mailing address and billing information. You must be prepared to pay for inscribed books when you place your order. It's a logic thing. Once I write your name in it, they can't sell it to anybody else.

5. Your books will magically appear at your home! It's amazing!

If you want your books in time for Christmas, I seriously suggest ordering by December 12th. The mail will be insane by that point, so sooner is probably better. I'll visit the store for the last time this holiday season on December 19th (Alice's third birthday!), but I'm leaving for Orlando after that, so any orders placed beyond that point definitely won't reach you before 2012.

Borderlands can ship internationally, but postage will be spendy, and you need to work it out with the bookstore.

In case you need a recap on what's currently available:

TOBY BOOKS (in order): Rosemary and Rue, A Local Habitation, An Artificial Night, Late Eclipses, One Salt Sea.

MIRA GRANT TITLES (in order): Feed, Deadline.

ANTHOLOGIES I AM IN: Home Improvement: Undead Edition (hardcover, Toby story), Tales From the Ur-Bar, Zombiesque, The Living Dead 2 (as Mira Grant, Newsflesh story), Grants Pass, Human Tales.

ESSAYS AND NON-FICTION: Chicks Dig Time Lords, Whedonistas.

If you have questions, let me know...and if you do decide to order, thank you so, so much for helping to support both my endless quest to feed the cats and my beloved local independent bookstore. You are awesome.