The night before New Year's Eve, Thomas stopped eating or drinking. He was listless, and had no interest in being snuggled or engaging in favorite activities, like playing with the water. The morning of New Year's Eve, we called around until we found an open vet who could see him right away. They diagnosed him with constipation and a mild obstruction, gave him laxatives and anti-nausea drugs, and sent him home.

He got worse.

New Year's Day, we went to a vet closer to home, where he received an enema, more anti-nausea medication, and a second examination. By this point, he had lost quite a bit of weight, and was visibly unwell. Still, he rallied after treatment, and was sent home.

He got worse.

Yesterday, we were finally referred to the emergency vet, where an ultrasound revealed a mass obstructing his small intestine. Surgery happened that night. There was no necrosis, and the mass (a congealed, compressed hairball) was successfully removed. He ran a fever for some time afterward, but this responded well to antibiotics, and went down. He was not sent home.

Thomas is currently hospitalized for recovery. His digestive system is not working properly; he has not had any food in four days, although he is able to receive subcutaneous fluids. He is not out of the woods. The woods are dark and deep and full of wolves, and I am so scared, and he is so sick. My baby boy is so sick. I don't have children: I have my cats. They are the world to me, and I am so afraid right now. So please. If I am quiet, if I am slow, if I am a little off from what you expect, be kind to me.

I am waiting for the sky to fall.

I am currently too sick to die. I picked up a cold in Minnesota, which slammed down on me hard enough and fast enough that I thought it might be strep (it's not strep). I currently have a bone-rattling cough, so much snot in my head that I think my brain may be liquefying, and a general sense of full-body malaise.

This is where you come in.

Please, please, do not prod at me for the next few days unless you have something that absolutely will not wait. Let me rest and recover, because this is slaughtering me, and I have a book release next week, which means I need to rest more than I can say.

Thank you.

To the woman who made nasty comments about my "turning radius" when I had to move my electric scooter in front of Big Thunder Mountain; to the person who let their children sit on the ground with their hands pressed against my wheels, and scowled when I said this wasn't safe; to the people who stood on curb cuts and glared when asked, politely, if they would let me pass; to the man who snickered and murmured about lazy bitches when I drove by at Typhoon Lagoon; to everyone who sighed and rolled their eyes when a bus had to be lowered to load me on:

I do not wish you my experience. I do not wish you injury or handicap, however temporary. I do not wish you pain. I do not wish you the soul-bruising frustration of being limited by a body that refuses to listen to your commands, or the salt in the wound that is knowing you did nothing to deserve this: that you didn't injure yourself running a marathon or rock-climbing, but instead fell prey to something that can strike anyone, at any time, for any reason. I do not wish you years spent sedentary, watching your friends rush by able-bodied and healthy, and struggling not to resent them for it.

Instead, I wish you empathy.

I wish for a future where you can look at someone using an assistance device, whether it be a cane, a wheelchair, or a motorized scooter, and think "isn't it wonderful how we live in a world where this person can have the same experiences I do."

I wish for a time where you can see someone using a motorized scooter to enjoy something as large as Disney World and think "isn't that person kind, to spare their friends and family the effort of pushing a manual wheelchair around this huge place, just so that they don't have to experience the nerve-racking stress of navigating something so large and potentially dangerous through a crowd."

I wish for a society where you can listen to simple, necessary requests and hear, not an inconvenience, but a leveling out of a certain small imbalance in the world.

I wish for a place where you can see a wheelchair user sitting to watch a parade and not think "great, let's stand in front of them, that's open space," but instead "isn't it lovely how we can all get a good view."

I am not asking for special privileges. I am not asking to go to the head of the line just because my left foot doesn't work sometimes.

All I am asking is to be allowed, unjudged and unresented, to join the line at all.

Thank you.

Katharine Kerr is a nice lady, a fellow DAWthor, and a really great storyteller. She needs our help.

I started the first draft of this post with some personal stuff, and then realized it didn't matter; this is a nice lady who tells great stories, and needs us, maybe now more than ever. Take a look.

http://www.youcaring.com/medical-fundraiser/help-author-katharine-kerr-care-for-her-husband-howard/278370

Thank you.

It's almost over, but October is, was, and will be Disability Awareness Month. We all know someone with a disability, whether visible, invisible, or undiagnosed. I've been dealing with back issues and walking issues for most of my adult life, in addition to my OCD. I am always aware of these things. It's nice to have people stop once in a while and talk about how disability impacts them, the people around them, and their lives as a whole.

We need to be compassionate. We need to be understanding. And most of all, we need to be kind to ourselves and others. We're all we've got here.

Teal Sherer is an awesome actress (and appears in my upcoming Mira Grant novella, "Rolling in the Deep," as a professional mermaid). She has written and produced a comedy about being an actress with a disability, and you can watch it on YouTube now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR0E4DVtNEw&feature=youtu.be

Take a few minutes and check out My Gimpy Life. It's fun, it's funny, and it's eye-opening.

Happy October, everybody.

It's no secret that I love Disney Parks more than is strictly normal. While my friends start saying "maybe we could vacation somewhere, you know, else," I am still going "HAUNTED MANSION WOO HAUNTED MANSION LET'S GO." So when I had the opportunity to go to Paris, it was pretty inevitable that I would actually be going to Disneyland Paris (still often referred to as "EuroDisney" by people who haven't gone alone with the name change).

Problem the first: the cost of the Disneyland hotels was so high that it seriously made more sense to go in on a very nice, very expensive apartment on Rue Rambuteau, which is like saying "it cost so much to get a manicure that I decided to buy a new car." These things should not even be in the same discussion. But they were, and so we decided to stay with our friends and have some wonderful non-Disney experiences to go with the wonderful Disney experiences that we were already guaranteed.

Problem the second: we didn't actually know how many days we wanted to spend at Disneyland Paris. I mean, there's the quick and easy "all of them," but that didn't really address the fact that we had no idea how my foot was going to have held up during Loncon (surprisingly well, as it turns out), or how much walking we'd have to do to get to the Parks (annoyingly large amounts), or even how much there'd be to do inside the Parks, which are more spread out and still slightly sparser in some ways than their California equivalents. In the end, we decided to buy our tickets when we got there, since that would give us more flexibility.

Monday, we went down and wandered around Disney Village, and I started my multi-day campaign to collect all the pins I'd never had the opportunity for before.

Tuesday dawned bright and (relatively) early, considering that we were all sort of sleeping with no concept of time or how long things would take. Vixy, Amy, and I departed for the train station, and were basically the annoying giggly tourists all the way there, since "We're going to DISNEYLAND!" was continually appropriate.

Upon arriving, we joined the first mighty queue we found: the bag check. This took a dauntingly long time, and was followed by an even mightier queue, where we bought tickets. All three of us got Park-hopper tickets, two-day for me and Vix, one-day for Amy. I was already almost out of steps by the time we got through the gates and entered Disneyland Paris, so Vixy and Amy parked me on a bench while they went and got me a wheelchair.

This is where I say "we fell prey to thinking that because it was a Disney Park, it would be like all the other Disney Parks, and nothing could possibly go wrong." I had looked at the website previously, trying to figure out what we needed to do in order to have me in a chair without a problem, and had not realized that we would be banned from the main queues of even rides where I could physically go through the queue in a wheelchair. Instead, we would have to use the back entrances for everything, and would need to have an Access Pass. Why would this be a problem? Because at Disneyland Paris, unlike at Disneyland California, you need a doctor's note to get an Access Pass. Even if you clearly cannot walk. So...

Amy and Vixy returned with a wheelchair, and we proceeded into the Park. Being long-time Disney Park people, we immediately beelined for the Phantom Manor (the local equivalent of the Haunted Mansion), using the Frontierland signs as our landmarks. I admit, I teared up when I saw the Manor for the first time.

The queue area involved stairs. Amy followed the wheelchair signs to the back entrance, where we learned about the Access Cards for the first time. Oh, we said, and made our way back to City Hall...which is where we discovered that we were supposed to have a doctor's note. Which was a problem, since a) we didn't have one, b) my doctor was in California, c) we were in Paris, and d) my doctor was not going to get up at local 3am to fax over a note saying "her foot is messed up, she cannot walk." Vixy, as our main French speaker, tried to explain that we hadn't known before we got there and was there anything we could do. Amy looked distressed. I tried not to cry, while wishing I could sink into the floor. I hate this, I hate it, I hate having to do research on lifts and where I need a doctor's note and not knowing, day to day, whether I'm going to be able to walk. And sitting there not knowing what was being said, just that it was being said about me, made me want to die.

I can say "it was all my fault, I didn't dig deep enough into the website," and that is true. I can also say "spending a day confined to a wheelchair for the privilage of using the back entrances, not seeing the queue areas, not getting on the ride any faster, and being sneered at for taking up space, is not fun; it is not something I do for shits and giggles," and that is also true.

Eventually, Vixy was able to get across that my injury was temporary, rather than being a permanent disability which was why we didn't have a placard or anything. The very nice man in City Hall basically went "Americans" and gave us an Access Card that was good for me and one other person to use the back entrance (again, not priority access: we had to wait for the length of the line before we could get on the rides, which was totally fine by us).

We returned to the Phantom Manor, where Vixy went through the line while Amy and I waited in the back. Multiple people checked my Access Card to see if it was legit, which...we were not getting priority access. We were not "cutting" or getting a special magical show. We were, instead, fighting across cobblestones in a manual wheelchair, having people run into us, and basically being treated like we didn't deserve Disney because I had the audacity to be in an assistance vehicle. I was miserable. I was sitting in the Phantom Manor, feeling like a cheat and a fraud and a liar, because everyone was treating me like one. The Cast Members I usually count on to be on my side were acting like we were trying to pull something over on them.

I have never felt more like a burden to my friends and loved ones.

But the line moved, and we got on the Phantom Manor, and Vincent Price laughed for me, and I gradually reclaimed my Disney spirit. It was not easy. It hurt, and that was new and strange and awful. But I did it. Amy and Vixy and I proceeded to a BBQ place, where we ate lunch, and then enjoyed the Park.

Alice's Curious Labyrinth! Space Mountain Mission 2! The Nautilus! The Tower of Terror (across the way in Disney Studios)! The new Ratatouille ride, which used the trackless 3-D ride format from Mystic Manor, and was splendid! And so so so so so so so so so so so so so many pins. Oh, the pins. AN INFINITY OF PINS. I traded constantly, and got glorious pins from cast members, and it was wonderful.

Space Mountain Mission 2 was jerky and weird, but it was a coaster Amy had never been on, and we loved it so. We hit the Ratatouille ride just before closing, and the Cast Member on the door kindly let us ride together, even though I still had to use the wheelchair entrance. Dinner was at a little cafe on Main Street, and included the best ham and cheese sandwich I have ever had. We returned home tired but okay.

The next day it was just me and Vixy. We had already decided that our main objective would be a) pins and b) trying to eat lunch at Cinderella's Enchanted Table, so Vixy could meet the mice (Suzie and Perla). I decided not to get a wheelchair. It just wasn't worth it, and I knew I could turn back at any time; we didn't need to close out the Park.

It was my first day on foot in a Disney Park in more than two years.

To say that I was nervous would be an understatement; so would to say that I was overjoyed. I could climb stairs (slowly). I could step up curbs (also slowly). I could do anything I fucking wanted and it was magical and I only cried a little from the pain. I really am getting better. (Note that this would not have been possible had I not been in a wheelchair for the whole previous day.)

Vixy and I started by going to see the dragon that sleeps beneath the castle. It was a glorious piece of animatronics, and leaving put us right near Cinderella's Enchanted Table, where lo and behold, they had just started service, and we were able to get a table. She was ecstatic. I was amused. We spent two and a half hours eating a very slow lunch, ending with flaming ice cream balls, and she got her picture with the mice. She then declared that it was ANYTHING YOU WANT O'CLOCK, since I hadn't stabbed her with a fork during the very slow dining experience. Yay!

I elected for Pirates. Their queue led through a smuggler's tunnel into Tortuga, and it was a glorious piece of ride design (the ride itself was pretty awesome, too). From there, we went to Indiana Jones (totally different from the California ride; this is a single-track roller coaster with a full inversion), Phantom Manor, and then out, marking a day with very few rides, but with a lot of pins. So many pins.

On the whole, Disneyland Paris was gorgeous, and I wish I had been able to take more time to really drink it all in. But I couldn't have done any more time than I did on foot, and being there in a wheelchair was so unpleasant and dehumanizing that I don't think I could have loved the Park if I had spent any more of my time in an assistance vehicle.

Glad I went; may go back someday; will not go back until I am absolutely sure I can spend the whole trip on foot.

Next up, Ireland, and Eurocon!

I flew Virgin Atlantic to the UK, as is my wont: when I can stay within the Virgin family of airlines, I am a happy rabbit. I had a window seat on the Lady Penelope. I also had my housemate's cold, which he had handed off to me as a thoughtful parting gift. (Given the length of the flight, I am sure the people around me also had my housemate's cold by the time we landed. I am so sorry. I thought I was done with the cold, until we got into the air and the cabin pressure said "ha ha have some snot.") Lastly, I had Kate's old iPad, which she has kindly loaned to me for the duration of the trip. Loaded on the iPad, I had all of Leverage and all of Fringe.

I slept a little. I read a few pages of my book. I ate the airline food, which was surprisingly excellent. But most of all, I watched Leverage. Ten and a half hour flights leave a lot of room for television. Big, big thanks to Meg, whose clever little portable charger allowed me to top off the iPad every time it started yearning for a bigger battery. I drained that sucker dry, and I have no regrets.

So before I flew, I had been a sensible girl, and booked a car service to take me and Vixy from Heathrow to our temporary hotel in Crawley (near Gatwick). Only it turns out that we hadn't been that sensible, as Vixy called me before I got to the airport in San Francisco to tell me that she was flying into Gatwick, a fact that we had both forgotten. Oops. I wound up in the car alone, and had a lovely chat with Colin, the driver, about spiders and New Zealand and the wildlife of England. A+ car service, would screw up booking again.

Vixy had already landed by this point, about an hour and a half before me. Her name was not actually on the hotel room, but she had a copy of the Expedia booking, and the front desk let her into the room, where she gloried in the presence of a decent bed. I showed up, and we summoned Amy before having a wander and dinner in the (overpriced, under-qualitied) hotel restaurant. Then we went to bed, and when I woke up the next morning? I had become the plague queen.

Amy went to the Boots and bought a bunch of cold remedies, including a cough syrup which turned out to contain, no shit, chloroform. It tasted funny. (Brooke was quite distressed when I told her about it.) Amy spent the next few days looking dreamy and saying "I chloroformed my girlfriend." Of such simple pleasures is the world made. I, on the other hand, spent the next day in bed, yearning for death. The day after that, my fever had broken, and it was time to decamp for LonCon3.

Wes met us at the train station and carried our bags to the hotel. Wes is a god among men.

Vixy and I were in the Aloft, the hotel nearest to the convention, while everyone else was in the Novatel at the other end of the convention center. Oops. Such is the consequence of lottery booking. And as this takes us to the end of the pre-con travel and the start of the convention, I shall continue later.

England!

10. I'm getting ready for the Parasite tour. In the local parlance, "getting ready" means "busting ass on book two, so I don't feel bad about essentially taking a week off while I jet around being fancy." I'm making a lot of progress, although the book is, as always at this stage in the composition, a hot buttered mess.

9. I am also getting ready to do a few more Parasite giveaways. I'm very conflicted. On the one hand, I like the ease of "comment and RNG" giveaways, but on the other hand, I really appreciate it when people put out a little bit more effort, since I have to do a lot of effort on my end, and then I feel like I get to have fun too. I'm still deliberating.

8. Since a few people have asked recently: the tip jar is currently closed, but will be opening on October 1st, since I figure that once every six months is a good way of doing things. I'll make a post clearly stating the situation and what your tips will do when we get to next Tuesday.

7. No, funding a second "season" of Velveteen vs. is not currently on the table. I may be doing something else about that. We shall see.

6. Ryan and Amy are visiting! Ryan and Amy are incredibly tolerant humans who understand that time and deadlines wait for no house guest, and thus allow me to retreat into my room and actually get stuff done while they amuse themselves. Best Amy and Ryan are best. Also...

5. I remain too sick to die, although I'm breathing a little better, so a lot of "company" thus far has consisted of "I want soup no not that soup different soup oh gods above and below why is air so hard?" and whining piteously. I hate the human body sometimes.

4. I am super excited about Frozen, but am amused by the fact that—thanks to the current trend of "gender neutral, non-evocative, mentioning no characters, single word" titles—it's hard to sort news about the movie from news about a remarkably wide assortment of books. Disney, perhaps it is time to reconsider your titles...

3. ...says the girl who wrote Feed.

2. Jean Grey is currently not dead and my mother refuses to come into the comic book store because she's afraid I'm going to develop telekinetic powers and burn the place to the ground.

1. Zombies are love.

10. I haven't been posting much recently, and I'm sorry. I could make a lot of excuses, but at the end of the day, it boils down to one thing: I'm tired. I had a lot of deadlines hit all at once, and I've been spending the time that would normally go to blogging trying to "recharge my batteries" by doing things like cleaning out my inbox and re-dressing my many, many dolls. And on the one hand, I feel sort of like I'm failing you guys through my radio silence. But on the other hand, I feel like you'd rather have me alert and peppy than gloomy and drooping, so it'll all come out in the wash. Right?

9. Vericon was lovely; Boston was not, so much, since New England observes this season called "winter," and they celebrate it by leaving huge heaps of snow everywhere. Ev. Ery. Where. There were literally heaps of snow all over the place, and since I am a California girl, my tolerance for snow is basically non-existent. People kept asking me where my coat was. It's adorable how they assume they own one, isn't it?

8. But an old friend of mine showed up at my book signing, and brought me a PAX East scarf and several hugs, and that was lovely. Really, Boston was awesome for people: I saw Shawn, and Dave, and Nora, and Tammy, and Katy, and it was all splendid, and I have no regrets. So many hugs. I love hugs.

7. Oh, and then I found Carrie at the airport, as we were on the same flight home from Boston. She was quite ill. I fed her Pepto Bismol chewables and made her feel better. This is why I carry such things.

6. The cats are done being furious with me over my absence, and are now trying to love me so enthusiastically that I will never leave them again. For Thomas, this means a lot of flinging himself at me and trusting that I'll catch him. I have some really interesting scratches from where one of us misjudged the distance he was going to need to travel. Kitty love is pointy love.

5. My podiatrist has given me a prescription for...running shoes. Because that is the next rehabilitational step, after the walking boot that I've been in for the past month. Basically, they have the support and cushioning that I need, and they'll allow me to continue healing while also walking more normally. I have never been so excited about the prospect of putting my jeans back on, you have no idea.

4. I have so many deadlines in 2013, and some of them have been moved by other people, and it makes me pull my hair and whimper. But! I am triumphant thus far, and thanks to my compulsive list-making and passion for organizing my life, I am confident that I will be able to stay on top of them. As long as I don't get sick or distracted or forget to come home from Disney World in May (which is a genuine risk, let me tell you; Disney World is like a black hole for Seanans).

3. Jean Grey is no longer dead and I am not happy about that fact.

2. Zombies are, however, still love.

1. You all make me very happy, and I am glad that you're still here. I promise to try to be better about staying on top of things. I can't promise to succeed, but everything begins with trying.

Many of you probably know that I've been having severe issues with my left foot right now, which make it difficult for me to walk normally. Sometimes I can't walk at all. It turns out that this is because I've developed an internal bone spur. So I'm going to the podiatrist, who's going to refer me to a surgeon, who's going to cut me open and make things better. "Better" is a word that lives on the other side of surgical recovery and more pain, but at least there's a clear road from here to there.

I keep joking that I'm a mermaid now, since I get to walk on knives everywhere I go. Damn, do I feel bad for Ariel.

It's not fun, being basically in good physical form and ready to resume my normal exercise regime (now that my back injury has finally recovered enough to allow me to do so), only to have my foot decide that I don't need to be independently mobile. It's been making me snarly and a little more short-tempered than usual, because constant pain does not a happy blonde make, and for this I apologize. Hopefully, surgery will resolve things neatly, I'll spend a few weeks sitting around hating everything while I recover enough to start physical therapy, and then I'll be better.

I am excited to be better.

Comment amnesty on this post: I really appreciate your support, silent or vocal, but I have a massive comment backlog, so I can't promise to answer everything.

I have been talking about this a lot on Twitter, to the point that I figured everyone knew, but apparently, I was wrong. So:

I am sick. Like really, really sick. Like "missing a week of work, barely getting out of bed, too exhausted to deal with anything" sick. I caught the flu. And yes, I got my flu shot. It's not a magic bullet; it just increases resistance and sometimes decreases the severity of the flu itself. Well, if that's the case, I'm damn glad I got it, because I think I'd be dead now without it.

This is a bad, bad flu season. Take care of yourselves. And please, please, don't pressure me for fast responses to anything. I am too sick to die, and you may have to wait longer than usual for an answer.

A wonderful fundraiser has been put together in the name of my beloved friend, Jay Lake, who is currently battling a recurrence of his cancer. The fundraiser is at http://www.youcaring.com/medical-fundraiser/Sequence-a-Science-Fiction-Writer/38705

To quote the description text:

"Jay Lake is an award-winning American author of ten science fiction novels and over 300 short stories. He is also one of more than a million Americans who have colon cancer. Diagnosed in April, 2008, Jay's cancer has progressed from a single tumor to metastatic disease affecting the lung and liver, recurring after multiple surgeries and chemotherapy courses, and multiplying from single tumor presentations to multiple tumors presentations. Jay is now in his fourth round of chemotherapy, but it's not clear that it's working, and his doctors have little to go on in terms of advising further courses of treatment for him. In short, things are not looking good for Jay. Not at all.

However, a new technology is becoming available—one that may offer his doctors a better option for treating the cancer. We're trying to raise funds to allow Jay to have whole genome sequencing. There is a small possibility that the results of such a test, which is more comprehensive than conventional genetic testing of tumors, may suggest a treatment path that Jay's doctor's may not have considered, and that could be life saving. It's a really small chance, and Jay knows that.

For this fundraiser, we have asked some science fiction and fantasy writers to donate an "Act of Whimsy" which they will share with the community as we reach milestones in our fundraising."

My act of whimsy? DISNEY MAGIC, BITCHES. I have promised an undisclosed act of filking, and here it is: I, and an assortment of the ever-rotating members of my mix and match band, will perform and record a cover of the Disney song of your choice in honor of Jay Lake. Animated movie? Musical? Live action classic? Phineas and Ferb? The possibilities, and the horrors, are endless. "Wreck It Wreck-It Ralph," "Age of Not Believing," "Rollercoaster," "That's How You Know"...whatever.

But first, we gotta pick a song. So! If you have donated ANY AMOUNT, go ahead and comment here with the name of the Disney song YOU want to hear. If the song you want has already been commented, do it again, as I will be using the random number generator to pick a song tomorrow afternoon at 5pm PST. I will NOT tell you what song has been chosen. ONLY TERROR WILL TELL. (Actual recording will have to wait until this cold gives me back my voice.)

This is honor system, guys; please only comment if you've donated, but I won't chase you down demanding proof.

GAME ON!

We have survived the great beast 2012! Hooray and stuff! So here is my post-game commentary.

First, the bad, since there was actually less of it by weight, but what there was colored a lot of things. I did not move to Seattle in 2012. I'm trying really hard. Banks are difficult, and my day job is difficult, and it's all still a work in progress. This doesn't change the fact that by the end of the year, "so when are you moving?" became a question that was guaranteed to make me start a) yelling or b) crying. Sometimes it's really hard to live in a fishbowl, and when I don't have something I really, really want, and people keep asking about it...that's one of those times. So until I say "this is a thing that is happening, it has worked out with the bank and with my current housemate and with my job," please don't ask.

I developed a severe issue with my left foot in 2012. It's called "plantar fasciitis," and it basically means "screaming pain every time I put my foot down." This is a problem, especially since I walk both for exercise and for recreation, which has had to be cut way, way back, due to the whole "screaming pain" thing. This is negatively impacting my fitness, which I don't like. I'm doing what my doctor tells me and I don't need help, but it's bad, and it means that sometimes, I walk on a cane or not at all.

Now, the good. I went to Disneyland twice! I saw the largest intact Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton in the world! I went to Maine! Basically, through these things combined, it was a damn good year. I got Vixy into pin collecting, which gave me someone to collect pins with (always good). I saw amazing movies and watched a lot of TV, and I don't even know how many books I read. So many books. Truly we live in a magical time.

Oh, and I won a Hugo for never shutting up. I make a wish on it every night. (Yes, sometimes I wish on my Hugo to win a Hugo for Blackout. I never said I was reasonable.)

Publishing-wise, I couldn't tell you how much I wrote in 2012, because I seriously lost count, but I released five books: Discount Armageddon, Blackout, Ashes of Honor, Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots, and When Will You Rise. I had my first reprint, "Lost", and my first reprint-in-a-book, "Crystal Halloway and the Forgotten Passage." It was a pretty slow year for me with short fiction, but there were some pieces I'm really proud of, like "San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats", and "In Sea-Salt Tears." I finished nine Velveteen stories, which is three more than the six I promised in 2011. It was a good writing year.

I'm excited about 2013, in all the ways. I'm going to spend my birthday in Disneyland. Wreck-It Ralph is coming out on DVD. And we're spinning our way around the sun again.

Whee!

Parasite is the first book I've written largely in secret. Not because I was ashamed of it, but because first it wasn't sold, so I couldn't say anything about it. Then it was sold but unannounced, so I couldn't say anything about it. Then, when it was finally announced, I was so far into the writing process that I couldn't force myself into the normal flow of word counts and benchmarks and all the other things I use for motivation.

Pro tip: I work better with word counts and benchmarks. I know this now.

Friday I wound up staying home from my day job, thanks to an inability to breathe that was only resolved when I had another of my amazing fire hose nosebleeds, or, as I like to call them, "blood vacations." (It's not high blood pressure, it's a weakness in one of the blood vessels that runs through my sinuses. My doctor and I have discussed it. So please, no medical advice.) And once I mopped up the blood and got some clean clothes on, I got to work, and quietly, without any real fanfare, passed 500 draft one pages.

It's not a perfect book, by any means; for one thing, it's missing about 8,000 words still, and for another, it hasn't had any editorial, which means that all the Mira Grant "tics"—repetition, over-explanation, Joss-y dialog—are in full display, with no mitigation. But I can see the shape of what will be a good book, once we finish kicking the crap out of it, and that's very reassuring to me.

It will be awesome.

1. So I have been forced, by the technical limitations inherent to LJ, to change my Friending policy. Specifically, I am now at MAXIMUM FRIENDOCITY, and adding any more Friends will cause me to be instantly sucked into a horrifying shadow dimension where demons will feast on my delicious bones. Read also, "LJ won't let me Friend any more people." So while I am still a Friend/Unfriend amnesty zone, I will no longer be automatically Friending back. Also, I have now typed the word "Friend" so many times that it has lost all meeting. I shall have to Foe some people.

2. You know it's summer when the Maine Coons felt their bellies by sleeping in their water dish, and you have to take them back to the groomer to be shaved. Again. In other news, guess who gets to take forty pounds of cranky kitty to the groomer? Good guess.

3. I've been scarce recently because a) I've been trying to catch up on some things, and b) I have 600+ comments to answer and it scares me. I will endeavor to post more, if y'all will be understanding about it taking me a while to answer you. S'good? S'good.

4. Disneyland was awesome, except for the part where I twisted my ankle and spent Sunday in a wheelchair. It turns out that I'm still surprisingly good at navigating myself when I need to, and Vixy pushed me when we weren't in spaces that required fine cornering and control. Neither of us died, but wow, was that not an experience that I am in a hurry to repeat.

5. I will, however, say this: if you see a girl pushing a manual wheelchair down a hill, maybe stepping right in front of that wheelchair is not the world's best plan. Especially if that wheelchair contains a person larger than the girl doing the pushing. Because you know what neither of us was able to do in that situation? Stop. In other news, I ran over some idiot-ankles, and I am not sorry.

6. The Hugo Voter Packet has been updated, and now contains the files for Best Related Work. That means that, for the first time ever, a full length filk CD is included in the Hugo packet. So. Cool. It's not too late to register and get your voting rights into the bag! Check out https://chicon.org/membership.php for details.

7. The new season of So You Think You Can Dance has started, and that means that my urge to write InCryptid is returning to normal. This show is totally restorative, in the best, weirdest way possible. I am a happy bunny.

8. Other things that make me happy: the San Diego Comic-Con exclusives have been announced for this year, and they include a new Monster High doll (Scarah Screams) and a new My Little Pony (Derpy Hooves/Bubblecup). I am a sucker for toys.

9. Other things I am a sucker for: Australia. My Mira Grant Q&A on Saturday was the most marsupial-centric Q&A I've ever been a part of. It was sort of impressive, in a "why are we talking about this again?" sort of a way. It may have had something to do with the fact that I had a plush Perry the Platypus on the podium...

10. Jean Gray is still dead.

1. To clarify a point from all the shirt posts: please don't email now asking if your shirt has been mailed. Your shirt has been mailed. I don't know where it is anymore. The post office does what it will do, but as we have not, thus far, had anything vanish while in transit, I am relatively confident that your package will get to you. It can take up to a week within the US, and up to three weeks outside the US. If you are in the US and don't have a shirt by April 15th, or outside the US and don't have a shirt by May 1st, that's when we should become concerned. (That's a lot of time on purpose. I want to give the post office the chance to find things.)

2. Texas was gorgeous, and College Station was amazing. I realize the state's unusual weather meant that it was basically all dressed up for my West Coast eyes—it rained for several weeks before my arrival, so everything was green and covered in wildflowers—but first impressions matter, and my first impression was "This place is gorgeous." Definitely an E-ticket of a state.

3. Midnight Blue-Light Special has been turned in to The Editor, which means I can focus on all the other things that I'm supposed to be writing right now. No, it never ends. Which is also kind of awesome, even if right now, all I want to be working on is InCryptid. Stupid muse and her stupid laser focus. Oh, well.

4. Thanks to trusting the travel gods to see me safely home on Sunday, I managed to upgrade my two flights in coach to a single through flight in first class. Let me tell you, first class is a nice way to fly home. Also, there was free digital cable on the flight, so I watched Jennifer's Body, Zombieland, and Pandorum. Awesome, even more awesome, what the fuck were these people thinking.

5. Also on the topic of first impressions, thanks to this lingering cold, College Station's first impression of me was "scratchy-voiced, foul-mouthed, evil pixie." I can definitely settle for that.

6. Tonight, I do laundry; tomorrow, I pack for Emerald City Comic Con. Because it never really ends once it begins around here. I'm super-excited to see my Seattle family, go to my first ECCC, and hug Amy Mebberson lots and lots. My life is empty if I don't hug an Amy once a month. True fact. And my beloved Amy McNally went home after Consonance.

7. The cats are filled with hate, because the suitcases will not go away. I begin to fear retribution. On the plus side, their "retribution" usually takes the form of sleeping endlessly atop the objects of their annoyance.

8. The new Monster High characters are starting to ship, and my local Toys R Us is once again seeing me two and three times a week as I check in, looking for Rochelle Goyle and the basic Jackson Jekyll (he previously appeared in the beachwear line, Gloom Beach, which means this is the first time he's been available with all his accessories). Luckily, I have a tolerant mother, and tolerant friends.

9. For those of you in the UK, I have a column in this month's issue of SFX Magazine! Or, well, Mira does. I wrote an article about why The Stand is a classic and you should read it. US folks, you'll be able to pick up the issue next month. I'm really pleased with it.

10. Jean Grey is still dead, zombies are love, and the Great Pumpkin watches over us all.

I have been home, dead of sick, for two days. We're talking "deep, rasping chest cough, I sound like a Batman villain, spent eleven hours on the couch yesterday, watched all of The Number 23 because changing the channel seemed too much like work" levels of sick. (PS: Maybe the number-obsessed OCD girl shouldn't watch movies about being driven to increasing levels of paranoia by numbers when she's already sick. Luckily for me, the movie made no damn sense, and just triggered nice little daydreams about prime factors and pi. What? I don't judge what helps you feel better.) So here is some stuff from my link file that I have been unable to find context for.

First off, no matter how bad a cover your book gets, it will never win the bad cover lottery. That prize has already been claimed by this not-safe-for-work edition of The Princess Bride. What is that I don't even. Flesh-snakes are attacking her lady bits with the intent to burrow their way into the promised land. Presumably the promised land has a cover that makes sense. Also, I do not remember Buttercup using a falcon as a cunning hat. Maybe somebody was hitting the cold meds a little too hard when they approved this one? I don't know.

The next time I go to the UK, I am totally visiting Hoxton Street Monster Supplies, which promises me "bespoke and everyday items for the living, dead, and undead," and is the only shop I've ever seen that was polite enough to request that angry mobs douse their torches before entering. Hell, forget visiting; I want to live there.

This is Alton Brown's Fanifesto. It makes me happy, even as I am sad that it needed to exist.

Disney Princesses have their issues, and I am the last person to pretend that they don't, but they have their good sides, too. This is a lovely collection of moments to illustrate that. (And while I'm pointing you at Princesses, why not swing by Amy Mebberson's Tumblr? Her weekly "Pocket Princesses" cartoons are a real treat.)

Finally, for now, cuckoos are in a biological arms race to continue their egg parasitism ways. So maybe there's hope for humanity. If the cuckoos don't figure out a better way...

I'm going back to bed.

...or at least, dealing with person with OCD.

It's no secret around here that I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder; I manage it on a daily basis, and I do a pretty good job. It's why I can accomplish as much as I do, given how little time I have. But it does mean that some things are non-negotiable for me, even as I politely tell people that they don't have to do them.

One of those things is responding to comments.

Sometimes, when I get overwhelmed, kind and concerned and loving people try to grant me comment amnesty. "You don't have to answer this." BUT I DO. I answer comments because I have to answer comments, or I literally cannot forget that I have left them unanswered. It may take me a long time. I may answer so far in the future that you've forgotten commenting. But unless I was the one who said "comment amnesty" (and sometimes not even then), I can't leave the majority of comments unacknowledged.

(This came about, ironically, because someone got very very very angry at me for not answering comments, and left me with a terror of being screamed at again.)

So please, don't tell me I don't have to answer you. That will just stress me out more, and move answering your comment to tell you that I do so have to answer higher up my priority list.

This has been another day of Seanan, living with OCD. Have a cookie.

ETA: Because I apparently wasn't clear: I love comments. I enjoy answering them. What stresses me out is other people trying to declare comment amnesty on my behalf. I can't process that, and so it just makes me unaccountably tense and unpleasant. So please, comment as normal. Just don't try to tell me I don't have to answer you, 'cause really, I do.

"Can I promise you that I'm going to get better? No. This is what you get, you know. This incomplete person, with toothbrushes, and with rubber gloves, and with so much love for you. But if that's not what you want, then you need to be honest with me, and with yourself. And the sooner the better." —Emma Pillsbury, Glee.

"When I was a kid, I always imagined I'd be normal by now." —Hannelore, Questionable Content.

Before I begin, I want to make it clear that this is not the first time I have talked about my OCD, and the way it impacts my life. I don't talk about it in depth all that often, because it's a daily thing for me. I'm not "normal" five days out of the week, and OCD on Mondays and Thursdays. I'm not cyclical. I am programmed in a way that doesn't quite fit the currently defined human median, and that's how I function all the time.

I started displaying signs of OCD when I was nine, although I didn't get formally diagnosed until I was nineteen. Because I'm not germaphobic (if anything, I'm virophillic) or a "cleaner," it was easy to write my insistence on following patterns and maintaining routines off as just one more aspect of me being a weird kid. And I was a weird kid, with or without the OCD. It's impossible for me to know who I would have been with a differently wired brain, but I like to think that I would have been a version of the self I am now. Just maybe one with a little less stuff, and a little less esoteric knowledge about bad B-grade horror movies.

My diagnosis was almost accidental. I was depressed; I went to see a doctor about my depression; one thing led to another; we arrived at a place that we both agreed matched up with the contents of my brain. (OCD is sometimes connected to depression. Hell, OCD sometimes causes depression, either because you can't keep up with your obsessions, or because your compulsions make you sad. I've had both these experiences. Neither is particularly fun.) I promptly told absolutely no one, because the OCD jokes were already common within my social circle, and I didn't want to deal. But I did start putting some basic coping strategies in place, and things got better. I didn't fly into a towering rage over people being late if we didn't set a start time. I learned to eat food without mashing it into an indistinguishable slurry. The beat went on.

As I've gotten older, my symptoms have matured with the rest of me, as have my coping strategies. I've finally reached the point where I can be less than two hours early for my flight, providing I have a printed boarding pass and priority boarding. I can travel with people who are more laid back than I am (although, to be fair, that's everyone). I can even go for dinner without having a pre-memorized menu (I don't get credit for this one; it turns out you can, with time, memorize a wide enough range of food combinations to be safe within a number of specific cuisines). And I mostly don't take it out on other people when things go wrong.

One in fifty Americans lives with OCD. I won't say "suffers from," because not all of us are suffering; I am not suffering. I am no more or less normal than anyone else. It's just that I start from a different position on the field. Some people with OCD do suffer, because it can be a crippling condition. It's the luck of the draw, the same as anything else.

The dominant idea of OCD is still Adrian Monk or Hannelore, or Emma from Glee. I've been in tears over her twice this season, because it breaks my heart a little when I see her struggling to control something she never asked for, never did anything to earn, and has to deal with all the same. Most people with OCD aren't these stereotypes. They're your friend who always has hand sanitizer, or your cousin who never leaves the house until seven minutes after the hour. They're the guy you went to college with who has a collection of lawn gnomes in his bathroom, and buys a new one every six months. They're your favorite football player. They're that composer you like.

They're me.

I made a comment on Twitter earlier today that I was an "odd duck," because I wanted to dance to a Ludo song at my wedding (no, one isn't planned, I just like to plan ahead). Celticora replied, "You're not an odd duck, you're a normal platypus." I think I'm going to roll with that. So the next time someone wants to be early, or can't leave the house without checking that the toaster is unplugged, or does something else you can't understand but that doesn't actually hurt you, remember, it's a big ecosystem. We have room for ducks and platypi.

Everybody loves a semi-aquatic egg-laying mammal of action, right?

So last night, my body decided it was time to hit the shiny red STOP button on my life, by bringing on a bell-clanging migraine of the sort that I only have once or twice a year. I went to bed at six o'clock, figuring I'd sleep until eight or nine, and have trouble going to bed, but feel much better. Instead, I slept until seven the next morning, and woke up groggy, dehydrated, and feeling faintly like I'd been hit by a truck.

Needless to say, I did not go into the office today.

Instead, I have done ALL THE WORK here at home, and written ALL THE WORDS, in-between unplanned naps and episodes of Criminal Minds. I'm on season three now, which is very comforting and reassuring. By season three, most shows have found their feet, settled in for the long haul, and stopped shifting their perspectives without warning. It's a nice place to be. And serial killers make me feel better.

I'm hammering away on Midnight Blue-Light Special, hoping to buy myself Sunday as a free day for processing edits on Ashes of Honor, since every little bit counts. I'm also working on the page proofs for Discount Armageddon, and writing another John/Fran story set decades before the start of the series. Literally decades; they're the parents of the POV character's grandmother. It's one of my favorite universes, because it's both very open and accessible, and very close and snug. I love that sort of narrative contradiction.

The cats have loved this last day. Thirteen hours in bed, followed by hours and hours without leaving the house? Feline bliss. They'd be happier if I would feed them more than twice, but right now, they're taking what they can get, and what they're getting is my total attention. I'm a little vexed about today being a no-mail holiday, since I wanted to both send and receive mail. Since I didn't make it outside, I should probably let the vexation go.

And that's my Friday. Hope you're all gearing up to an amazing weekend!

Things are insane around here (which is ironic, given that I'm finally between conventions), so here are the updates and events du jour, presented in convenient bite-sized fashion.

Science Crawl.
Tomorrow night (Friday, November 4th) the Bay Area Science Crawl will be at Borderlands Books from 7:15 until 8:15 PM. Quote: "The Bay Area Science Festival is proud to present the first ever Sci-Crawl, a coordinated takeover of venues throughout San Francisco’s Mission District, showcasing the science inherent in the neighborhood." I'll be appearing as Mira on a panel discussing the Science of Science Fiction, along with Jeff Carlson and Scott Sigler, and moderated by Brian Malow. The event is free, and should be super-fun. Come and join the geek!

Dental horrors.
Yesterday, I had dental surgery. Yes, again. This time, I managed to somehow break a titanium post inside my mouth. SUPER FUN. Without going into details, largely because they would freak me out, I shall simply say that I am rarely given that many pharmaceuticals during a twenty-four hour period, and I can still taste colors. No fun at all. I basically lost a day and a half to a great gray pit.

T-shirt mailing.
According to my spreadsheet, there are still over a hundred shirts that have not been introduced to envelopes. Over a hundred means that one in three, roughly, has not been mailed. Unless you have reason to think that gnomes have stolen the contents of your mailbox, please don't email yet asking where, specifically, your shirt is located. I'm packing and mailing them just as fast as I possibly can, and this being such a manual process means that it's very hard to track specific list items. Also, because there is such a variance of colors and styles, sometimes the only way to find a shirt is to remove all the shirts around it, which makes it impossible to go "oh, you mean this one? Yeah, it's right here." So I plead for patience. All you do by poking without good cause is make me, and Deborah, sad and grumpy.

Cats.
We're coming up on the one-year anniversary of Alice getting so very, very sick, and she has realized that this means she can basically get away with anything, just by doing while Not Being Sick. This morning, she hit my abdomen like a fuzzy bowling ball, shoved her wet feet up my nose, and trilled happily, only to receive hugs and love, because She Wasn't Sick. Am I setting a bad precedent? Yeah, probably. Do I care? Not one damn bit. Alice isn't sick, and that's really what I need out of life.

Television.
All the shows are coming back on the air. ALL THE SHOWS. Bones starts up again tonight, and I'm gamely plugging through season two of Criminal Minds, which means I may be catching up to watching it live before too much longer. It may seem counter-productive to watch this much TV while also trying to get writing done, but it actually speeds me up, by giving me something to finish for. Speaking of which...

Writing.
Ashes of Honor is done, and I'm getting ready to go into draft two. Midnight Blue-Light Special is finally moving at what I'd call a reasonable pace, and I'm about a quarter of the way through the projected text. And there are various other projects kicking around, including the second installment of the latest Vel story, which will take us to four for the year I can so make my goal. Hah.

Zombies.
Are love.

1. I am sick, yes, even unto death. It's this stupid cold. I've been fighting it off since I got home from Conclave, and then yesterday, it just walked up behind me, hit me over the back of the head with a plank, rifled through my pockets, and took all my stuff. I spent all of Sunday on the couch, sniffling, drinking orange juice, and watching Criminal Minds. Oh, and sleeping. I slept a lot. I feel better today, but that's like saying I'm happier now that the lizard has been removed from my ear. Still miserable, just less lizard-y.

2. Yes, I am watching Criminal Minds. But as I have now seen the first three episodes of the first season, please don't ask me if I was crushed when character A died in season three. I haven't been able to be crushed yet, and I'd like the opportunity to mourn when I get there.

3. Assuming this cold backs the hell off, I am still going to be at OVFF this coming weekend. If you're waiting for a shirt from me, and are going to be at the convention, please let me know so that I can package your order for hand-delivery. If you don't tell me, clearly, that you'll be there, your shirt will not be coming with me. I don't have the suitcase space for guesses.

4. I am about 4,000 words from the end of Ashes of Honor, which is good, since I expect to receive my Blackout page proofs any day, and need to be able to focus on going through and writing STET a lot. ("STET" is editorial for "no, do not make this change." I use it to argue against people who don't believe in the Oxford comma, and people who try to standardize my use of "Miss" to "Ms.")

5. I am too sick for a list of ten. Now is when I fall on my face and die.

Catch you when I wake up.

If I were a My Little Pony, I would be Sparkle Plague.
If I were a Care Bear, I would be Hacks-A-Lot.
If I were a Strawberry Shortcakelander, I would be Nightshade Muffin.
If I were a sign of the apocalypse, I would be Crippling Cough.

So I apologize, internet, but I am going back to bed. Also, I will not be answering comments on this post, because oh gods too sick to die.

Denver, Colorado. July 2nd, 2014.

Janice Barton knocked twice on the door to Dr. Wells's office before opening it and stepping inside, expression drawn. "Do you think you can see three more patients today?" she asked, without preamble.

"What?" Dr. Wells looked up from his paperwork, fingers clenching involuntarily on his pen. "I've already seen nine patients so far! I've barely finished filing the insurance information for Mrs. Bridge. How am I supposed to see three more before we close?"

"Because if you'll agree to see three more, I can probably convince the other nineteen to come back tomorrow," Janice replied. For the first time, Dr. Wells realized how harried his normally composed administrative assistant looked. Her nails were chipped. Somehow, that seemed like the biggest danger sign of all. A man-made virus was on the loose, Marburg Amberlee was doing...something...and Janice had allowed her manicure to fray.

"I'll see the three most in need of attention, and then I have to close for the night," he said, putting down his pen as he stood. "If I don't get some sleep, I won't be of any use to anyone."

"Thank you," said Janice, and withdrew.

She was gone by the time he emerged from his office, retreating to wherever it was she went when she was tired of dealing with the madhouse of the waiting room. On the days when it was a madhouse, anyway. This was definitely one of those days. The gathered patients set up a clamor as soon as he appeared, all of them waving for his attention, some of them even shouting. Dr. Wells stopped, looking at the crowd, and wondered if the other doctors involved in the Marburg Amberlee tests were having the same experience.

He was deeply afraid that they were.

The trouble wasn't the patients themselves; they looked as hale and healthy as ever, which explained how they were able to yell quite so loudly for his attention. Their cancers were gone, or under control, constantly besieged by their defensive Marburg Amberlee infections. It was the people they had brought to the office with them that presented the truly alarming problem. Husbands and wives, parents and children, they sat next to their previously ill relatives with glazed eyes, taking shallow, pained-sounding breaths. Some of them were bleeding from the nose or tear ducts—just a trickle, nothing life-threatening, but that little trickle was enough to terrify Dr. Wells, making his bowels feel loose and his stomach crawl.

They were manifesting the early signs of a Marburg Amberlee infection, during the brief phase where the body's immune system attempted to treat the helper virus as an invasion. That was the one stage of infection that could be truly harmful; when Marburg Amberlee was hit, it hit back, and it was more interested in defeating the opposition than it was in preserving the host. These people were infected, all of them.

And that simply wasn't possible. Marburg Amberlee wasn't transmittable through casual contact. Pointing almost at random, he said, "You, you, and you. I can see you before we close. Everyone else, I'm very sorry, but you're going to have to come back tomorrow."

Groans and shouts of protest spread through the room. "My baby's sick!" shouted one woman. A year before, she'd been dying of lung cancer. Now she was glaring at him like he was the devil incarnate. "What are you going to do about it?"

"I'm going to see you tomorrow," said Dr. Wells firmly, and waved for the chosen three to step through the door between the reception area and the examination rooms. He retreated with relief, the feeling of dread growing stronger.

He honestly had no idea what he was going to do.

***

Rumors of an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever in and around the Colorado Cancer Research Center have, as yet, been unsubstantiated. The head doctor, Daniel Wells, is unavailable for comment at this time.

When will you Rise?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Zombies are still love.

What's up with you?

I am sick even unto death, and so I am not really capable of the kind of coherent and thoughtful blogging that I try to provide. Instead, I am going to provide something truly awesome: a starred Publishers Weekly review of Deadline. Behold:

( Cut for FEED spoilers!Collapse )

I cannot brain today. I have the tired, and the office cold has decided to hang out in my head, making me slow and lurgy and reluctant to commit to anything more strenuous than sitting around my bedroom, not putting on pants.

So here is a picture of Thomas cuddling with Amberlee the velociraptor, intended to signal that this post is an open thread. Tell me things! Any sort of things you want. Also, I am declaring amnesty from my normal "answer all comments" policy. So I may answer comments on this thread, and I may not. Either way, my psychotically cute kitten will be snuggling with a dinosaur, and that proves that life is AWESOME.

Enjoy!

Things people have said to me recently:

"You look tired."
"You should take some time, you know. Some time to rest."
"You should sleep more."
"You have to take care of yourself."

At the end of the day, I do look tired. Why shouldn't I look tired? I am, after all, working two essentially full-time jobs: I get up at 5am every day to travel from my suburban home into San Francisco, where I put in an eight-hour day before repeating the commute in reverse, and spending the evening writing, editing, and trying to stay on top of my frankly horrifying inbox. When all my must-do items are checked off the list, I collapse on the couch with my cats, and watch mindless television to power down my brain. And then the next day, I do it all over again. On the weekends, I either write like my shoes are on fire, or go to conventions, where I have a lovely time, as long as I don't think too hard about how much catching up I'm going to have to do later.

Why do I do this? Why am I working two jobs, with a massive commute in the middle? It's not because I particularly need the money. I know how to make a pound of hamburger last for a week; it's not pretty, but I can do it. I may like to buy books and toys when the cash is coming in, but I do pretty well with amusing myself on what I have then the cash isn't there. So what's the big deal here?

The big deal is medical insurance. The big deal is what can happen to you when you don't have it. The big deal is that not everyone has friends who can put together an anthology of massively awesome authors to save them from bankruptcy* when they get sick, as people have a natural tendency to do.

Melissa Mia Hall didn't have the same option. She died last week of a treatable medical condition, because she couldn't afford to go to the doctor. She died alone in the night, of something modern medical technology could easily have fixed. And yes, they would have treated her if she'd gone to the emergency room, but she didn't go, because she knew—as the uninsured always learn, as I learned, when I didn't have insurance—that it would be expensive, and she couldn't afford to risk losing everything.

My mother doesn't have medical insurance. Neither does my youngest sister. I work two jobs because I need to have medical insurance, and because I live in honest fear of the day Rachel calls to tell me that Mom was having pain and didn't say anything, because she knew it would be expensive. And if that sounds overly dramatic, well. Take a look at either of the examples listed above. One woman who sought medical care and would have lost everything without her friends stepping in; one woman who chose to die rather than gamble with the loss of everything she'd worked for.

And that's why I look tired, and why I wish people would stop telling me how tired I look. I know how tired I look. I just don't see where I have any other choice.

(*If you missed this: Ravens in the Library was an anthology project organized to pay the medical bills of SJ "Sooj" Tucker when she got hit out of the blue by an illness that required serious hospital care. You can see my original post on the matter here. Without that book, Sooj would have been in a lot of financial trouble. I think that book saved her life as lived, even as the hospital saved her life as living.)

Welcome to the second, and hopefully final, portion of my not-a-con-report for Arisia. I really did have a wonderful time in Boston, snow and all, and I'm definitely going to be going back. Eventually. After I've had the opportunity to take a nice nap, and maybe watch a whole lot of really, really dumb television. Anyway, here are the summarized highlights (and lowlights), for your amusement and edification.

My candy corn hat! The Agent knows me too, too well, it seems, and when the time came to give me the last piece of my holiday gift, she led me to the dealer's hall and purchased me a felt candy corn hat from one of the local vendors. Yes. I now have a hat that looks like a piece of candy corn. TREMBLE WITH FEAR, MERE MORTALS. I wore this hat to almost every serious panel I had during the weekend, and proclaimed proudly that wearing it provided that I was a professional. I never said what kind of professional.

The Mad Science song circle! I didn't make it to very many filk events this year, sadly, because I was busy with other programming and also wound up spending most of Sunday vilely ill (more on this in a moment). But the Mad Science circle was awesome, and Ben Newman sprung a positively wicked new science parody on me. It was a very cool circle, and I'm so very glad I got to go.

Alice and Josh! My life is better when it contains large quantities of Alice, and since I had to leave my beloved Maine Coon in California, I supplemented diet of Alice with a local fan and acquaintance of mine from this blog. She and her husband took me to dinner, where I ate, unsurprisingly, shepherd's pie, and then she and I sat and talked for like an hour and a half while he ran off to a panel. It was a really nice, relaxing way to spend an evening, and I had a wonderful time. Since they didn't run screaming, I assume they did, too.

Meeting Toni! My friend Toni lives near Boston, and was able to come out to the convention on Saturday, transforming herself from "my Internet-only friend Toni" to "my friend Toni, whom I have met in real life." She brought her husband, who was witty and fun to talk to, and I brought Diana, who was witty and fun to talk to and bought me chicken fingers. There were exchanges of books and hugs, and life was very good. It's nice to have people transform from words on a screen into actual humans. It makes me happy.

The Guest Breakfast! Arisia had a special breakfast event on Sunday, where people could buy tickets to have a special, intimate breakfast with the Guests of Honor and Special Guests. Each of us had a table of our very own. Sadly for me, someone at the next table over was wearing a mango-based perfume, and the breakfast went rapidly from "yum yum, free fruit" to "quietly excusing myself, walking to the bathroom, vomiting copiously, and walking back to my table to resume being entertaining." I would become progressively sicker for most of the day. It was so much fun. My poor roommates had to deal with my basically being a creepy dead girl from a horror movie. How I try their patience.

Cat and Seanan strike back! Cat and I are getting pretty good at our urban fantasy girl version of "An Evening With Kevin Smith." Every time it happens, the crowd gets a little bigger, the questions get a little smoother, and our comfort levels get a little higher, which leads to, you know, more swearing, more craziness, and more references to Lord Byron's penis. It's a victory for everybody! This installment of the Cat-and-Seanan Show was pure hammered awesome, and we only had to decline one question, which is possibly a record. More impressively, I wasn't even able to walk without throwing up an hour before the panel. So this is what I do for love.

Better Off Ted! Diana and Cat introduced me to this show, and Cat's Netflicks account allowed us to wallow in it each night before bed. I now require the box sets. And maybe a meat blob.

Post-antibiotic science fiction gone wild! My final panel was on Monday morning, and was all about post-antibiotic science fiction. It turned into "Seanan defends her thesis on causative agents for the Black Death" for about twenty minutes, which seemed to be fun for everyone, if a little more mentally rigorous than I had wanted to be that early in the morning on the last day of a convention. I recommended not licking things as a way to avoid infection. You're welcome.

Flying home! Actually, the flight was pretty lousy. But my cats made up for it.

See you next time!

There's something magical about airport departure lounges. They're these strange, impossible liminal spaces, where the world is infinite just because it's so limited. I spend a lot of time in them these days, what with the conventions and the work and everything else. The TSA at San Francisco is starting to know me by name.

I am heading home from Boston, where I just spent a wonderful, terrible, magical, mundane, perfect, flawed, absolutely incredible weekend as a Special Guest of Arisia 2010. The convention was warm and welcoming and filled with people who hugged me and were happy I was there. I had a terrible allergic reaction Sunday morning and spent most of the day sick even unto death. I sat on a stage with Cat and talked about gulper eels and Lord Byron's penis. I tried to make the hotel internet work, to mixed results. I curled up in a warm bed with two of my favorite people sitting nearby, and watched great television. I wandered around unfed and confused.

I had a fantastic convention. I am glad to know that someday, I will go back there. I am so very glad to be going home. And that, really, is the convention experience. You go to a strange place, you enter the airport departure lounge of your soul, and you do your best to fall in love with the people you meet there. And then you all get on planes and go home to your separate places, and you wonder whether you'll ever fly that route again.

My bags are packed. I'm ready to go. The city streets are filled with snow. I hate to wake you up to say goodbye...

But I will. And soon, Great Pumpkin willing, I'll say hello.

Thank you for everything.

Since it's a "talking about birthdays" kind of a day, here's my own (belated) birthday report:

Last Wednesday was my birthday, and it was, quite frankly, pretty miserable. I had gone home from work early on Tuesday, suffering from a nasty cold. It had mostly cleared up by Wednesday morning, which was awesome, although there was still some, well, let's call it "blockage." The "blockage" continued to reduce over the course of the day, until somewhere around noon, when I sneezed, knocking the last of it free...

...and unleashing the GALLONS OF BLOOD I had apparently been storing in my sinuses, courtesy of an unnoticed six-hour-long nosebleed. I managed to burst a blood vessel deep inside my head with all the sneezing and misery of Tuesday, and then, well. Bleeding! Like it was an Olympic sport! Accompanied by dizziness from, you know, LOSS OF BLOOD. I managed to make it to the bathroom (barely), where I passed out on the floor, and was later found by a co-worker unconscious in a pool of my own blood. HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME.

(Yes, I have seen my doctor; no, it was not an aneurysm; it was really and truly just a burst blood vessel, and I am now fine. There have been no repeats of the "massive bleeding followed by passing out" party-time fun.)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was sent home from work after turning the bathroom into my own private horror movie, and—after medical what-not and transit—met up with my mother and youngest sister for our usual Wednesday errands. We actually put off going to the comic book store in order to drive to Berkeley and eat Indian food for dinner, because it made sense from a traffic perspective. I complained a few times about the lack of cake, but not with any real passion, as I was a) tired, and b) still a little out of it. We ate. We drove back to Concord. We went to the comic book store.

Upon entry, I declared happily, "It's my BIRTHDAY!", since it's awesome when your birthday corresponds to new comic book day. The staff looked theatrically shocked...probably because that was about when Libby (the owner's wife) emerged from the office with a cake.

Yes. A cake.

MY COMIC STORE GOT ME A BIRTHDAY CAKE.

Did you ever need proof that I was an enormous nerd? Because if you did, here it is: my comic book store GOT ME A BIRTHDAY CAKE. That is how much time I spend there. BUYING ME A CAKE amounts of time.

I love my life. Medical emergencies and all.

It's a Sunday afternoon and I'm too sick to think, with one of those headaches that makes it feel like my brains are going to run out my ears and causes every medical website on the Internet to say that I have brain parasites or something. OH JOY. So here are ten reviews, very quickly, and I'm going back to bed.

Grapeshot Magazine says, "Feed, I have to say, is a book for the geeks. Those who are into blogging (both posting and reading), enjoyed reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or are horror junkies, should definitely put Feed on their must-read list."

Shroud Magazine Book Reviews says, "...she has written what is, in my humble opinion, the best zombie novel since the one by that Brooks fella."

The Unfanboy says, "While Grant is far from the first author to use epidemiological mayhem as the basis for a zombie story, her premise is just original enough to lead to some new implications that keep this one fresh."

Crackin' Spines and Takin' Names says, "For me, this book had everything! I laughed, I cried, I threw up in my mouth a little bit, I cried some more...It was the closest thing to a perfect zombie book and I truly cannot wait to read the next installment of the Newsflesh series."

Coffeespoons says, "You can read it as a zombie book or a commentary on new media. Either way, Feed is a powerful book, and anyone who's read through till the end will understand why."

BookGirl's Book Nook says, "I loved this book, even if it did scare the shit out of me."

Bite Club says, "Feed is an interesting, clever, and engrossing book that kept me reading to the very end."

Poisoned Rationality says, "Grant is as sneaky as Joss Whedon with her foreshadowing."

Good Books and Good Wine says, "The ending blew me away and I definitely choked up a little bit while driving."

Finally for now, SFReader says, "Feed is a post apocalyptic zombie novel, and it's a damn good one."

...and that's about what I can handle just at the moment. I'm going to go be horizontal before there is cookie-tossing. Someone come over here and kill my headache with a chainsaw, will you?

I try to answer all comments on this journal, because it just seems polite. But after spending the night worrying about my sick cat, and spending the morning medicating her (which she hates), I honestly can't bring myself to answer individual comments on my post about her illness. It's just going to make me start crying again. So...

Thank you all, so very much, for your kind wishes and concern. Alice is still sick, but seems to be on the mend—she felt well enough to glare at me this morning when I hauled her out from under the couch and pumped her full of sticky pink antibiotic goo. Thomas and Lilly are confused and clingy, since they don't understand what's going on, and everyone is thrilled by the sudden wide availability of tuna.

Medicating Alice is easier than it could be, because she is seriously one of the world's most civilized cats; she mostly just squirms and scowls at me, like her infection is my fault, and not the fault of rapidly-replicating bacteria. I cannot explain epidemiology to my cat. I know. I've tried.

I'll keep you posted, and thank you again. I really appreciate it.

Friday evening, Alice started looking a little ill. She was listless, unresponsive, and not interested in treats, although she did drink the juice from my can of tuna willingly enough (one of her favorite things). I consulted with a few people whose opinions I trust, and decided to monitor her condition before taking her to the vet, as no one wants to deal with the emergency vet when they don't have to. Saturday, she seemed better, although still droopy, and I thought she was recovering.

Sunday evening she took a turn for the worse, dramatic enough that I called my vet the second they opened this morning and made her an appointment. My mother, thankfully, agreed to take her in, since I had to go to work, and my vet agreed to treat the cat but allow me to pay over the phone via credit card. Thank the Great Pumpkin for reasonable people. At this point, Alice was having breathing difficulties, throwing up, licking her lips constantly, was extremely lethargic, and had visibly lost weight. (No, I am not a totally irresponsible cat owner. This all happened very fast, and Alice felt bad enough that she kept hiding under things, making it difficult to monitor her condition.)

After spending the morning in borderline-hysterics, I finally got the call from Mom: Alice has pneumonia, which she got the same way humans get it—bad luck, fluid in the lungs, and an opportunistic infection. She's been given an antibiotic shot and some fluids, and I have liquid antibiotics to pump into her for the next few weeks. I also have strict instructions to give her anything she wants, providing it won't hurt her, until she gets her weight back up. So I guess it's the all-wet food, all-the-time diet around my place for a week or two. Let's just hope she doesn't get any ideas about illness equating to better chow, shall we?

It's easy to be calmer now, to make jokes now, to talk about giving her an entire turkey for Thanksgiving, if that's what she wants. But the fact of the matter is, I've been terrified since last night, when it became apparent just how sick she was getting. I am so relieved that she's okay. She's only two. You're not supposed to have to worry about these things when they're only two. But you do.

Hug your kids for me, regardless of their species. I know I'm going to spend the evening hugging mine.

So my "little cold" turned quickly into "my big cold," and from there turned into my "oh sweet Great Pumpkin, let me die" cold. Isn't the human body awesome? I have treated it, thus far, with chicken soup and television, including a multi-hour House marathon. No matter what I've got, they've got something worse!

The cats, self-centered beasts that they are, love-love-love it when I have a cold that requires me to stay at home, crumbled under fluffy blankets and yearning for death. Why? Because it means I don't move much, and am, instead, available for endless petting of the cats. This is exactly how the world is meant to be...at least if you're asking the cats. I do love my cats. That's why they are not yet mittens.

(I'm getting my revenge, actually. I'm making them eat their Science Diet. They hate Science Diet. Mwahahahahahaha.)

The nice thing about a cold, for me, is that I get to spend the night sleeping the deep sleep of the Q-dosed heart, with its attendant, incredibly vivid dreams. I went to the premiere of the Feed movie last night in my sleep, you guys, and it was totally awesome. So hey, there's something to be said for viral amplification, right? Right?

Okay, writing this has exhausted me. I'm going to go watch more House.

So the discussion on my latest book piracy post is fascinating, and I fully intend to answer comments. However, right now, I'm not feeling terribly awesome, so I'm going to take some cold medication and go lay down. I just wanted to address a few high-level points first. Forgive the brevity, I really feel like crap.

Point the First: "Not everyone who illegally downloads your book would have bought it, so you shouldn't act like they would have."

True! That being said, I know enough people who have illegally downloaded books and then bought them, or have told me to my face (or via email) that they were planning to buy the book, only then got it for free, that I feel some consideration of the number of illegal copies is warranted. Just going off what I do know, I tend to assume about one person in ten represents a "lost sale." This accounts for new readers only, not people downloading copies of books they already own.

Point the Second: Downloading copies of books you already own is a morally gray area.

True. I completely understand and sympathize with people who download virtual copies of books they already own. Unfortunately, a) I don't own the e-book rights to my books right now, and thus can't say "sure, have a PDF with proof of purchase," and b) the methods for getting those downloads are non-legal. There's not a private literary speakeasy where you have to send in a photo of yourself with your legal physical copy before you get the download link. And so while I can understand the moral ambiguity of it all, I can't endorse the practice.

Point the Third: It's not piracy, it's copyright infringement.

Okay, true. For precision of language, I should call it copyright infringement. But the people who sometimes post intentionally inflammatory things on message boards aren't actually trolls, they're just being mean. In some cases, the prevailing language of the land is going to win out over precision. I apologize for any confusion.

Point the Fourth: "Does this mean you don't like me because I initially read your book in a sub-legal format?"

Did you buy the book? I mean, really, that's where my concern is here: In whether I can feed the cats. I first discovered the X-Men because my friend Lucy had an older brother who wasn't careful with his comics, and I didn't pay for those, either. As I said above, I can't condone illegal downloading, but once you've paid for the material, I lose all personal animosity.

Point the Fifth: Books and music aren't the same.

Most the research on illegal downloads has been in the music arena, and the numbers aren't the same. According to iTunes, the single song I have listened to the most often is the cover of "Livin' La Vida Loca" by Spork, which I have listened to 342 times. The single book I have read the most often is IT, by Stephen King, which I have read, if guessing generously, eighty times in the last twenty years. Many people don't re-read, or do so only sparingly. So saying that illegal downloads increase sales when you're only looking at music is like saying that breeding mice increases the elephant population.

Point the Sixth: Cory Doctorow does it.

Cory Doctorow is also recognized by my spellchecker, which doesn't recognize my name. He chose to distribute over the Internet, and it worked out awesomely for him. He's also doing Internet-savvy fiction, with a keen edge of interest for the online crowd. I write urban fantasies about women with silly names. We don't have the same target audience; it's mice and elephants again.

I'll come back and participate in the discussion more one on one later. Now? DayQuil and sleep.

While I was in New York the week before last, I did a lot of traveling via the PATH Train, a fairly simplistic transit system whose entire purpose is to get people from Jersey City to Manhattan, and vice-versa. This is normal for me. I am an old hand at riding the PATH, and no longer become in any way distressed about it.

Only the thing is, on Sundays, the PATH bounces through Hoboken on its way from Jersey City to Manhattan. This is a very jerky, bumpy, throw-you-around-y section of track, since it's not part of the everyday commute. Also on Sundays, they run fewer trains, resulting in a greater density of people on each individual train.

Can you guess what's coming next? I bet you can guess what's coming next.

Sunday, Kate and I got on the PATH to head into the city to have lunch with The Agent and another of her clients, followed by dinner with Betsy (Wollheim, not Tinney; it would have been a clever trick to somehow have dinner with my Seattle Maine Coon breeder whilst in New York). The train was very full when we got on; we had to stand. I got whiter and whiter as the train moved, trying desperately to keep from crying.

When I started screaming every time the car jerked to one side or another, some nice people let me have their seat. Thank you, nice people. I took my emergency pain killers and cried. "Take more painkillers and cry" was pretty much the mantra of the day, which would otherwise have been absolutely lovely. Because Betsy is a golden goddess who shall be renowned in song and story, she even drove us back to Jersey City after dinner. I have sent her a thank-you card.

My back has been out ever since. It's getting better, slowly, but it's been long enough since I had a flare-up this bad that, well, I'm being sort of a wimp about it. I cry a lot. I've been to the doctor for more painkillers, and I'm trying to schedule a spinal epidural, but right now? Right now, I just cry a lot. Part of me is glad that I'm missing OVFF and World Fantasy and my Alabama corn maze, because I am in SO MUCH PAIN right now that I wouldn't really enjoy them anyway.

So if I seem a little curt, or a little out of it, that's because I am either in extreme pain, or legally stoned to prevent the extreme pain from being a problem. Show mercy, I beg of thee. And please, Great Pumpkin, let this be over soon.

Okay, guys, bear with me for a minute here.

I am a fan of my breasts. I grew them myself, and as I am not an apple tree or a corn maze, there's not that much I can say that about. I am a fan of my breasts remaining healthy and hence, y'know, attached. Not all my friends have been that fortunate. Statistically speaking, I may not be that fortunate forever. This is a sad truth of the modern world.

But there are things we can do.

Books for Boobs, a project of Save the Boobs, is auctioning off signed books to help support the fight against breast cancer. Authors with works in the currently live auctions include Mary Robinette Kowal, Lev Grossman, me, Patrick Rothfuss, Scott Westerfeld, Holly Black, me-as-Mira, and many more.

Auctions will remain live for the next eight days, and are all currently quite low. Support a good cause, get yourself some signed literature, and save the boobs. Because sadly, not being apple trees or corn mazes, we can't grow more if we don't preserve the ones we have.

Last Wednesday, I was feeling lousy, in that annoying, "incipient cold" sort of a way. I spent the evening doing as little as humanly possible, and went to bed early, hoping this would be enough to stave off the inevitable.

It was not enough to stave off the inevitable.

I woke up on Thursday feeling like I'd been beaten up in the night. I couldn't breathe. Possibly because I couldn't breathe, I became dizzy if I stood up for too long, I couldn't focus, and anything more complex than dozing on the couch while watching endless episodes of The West Wing was pretty much beyond me. I literally called my mother to bring me orange juice and soup. Neither of which had any flavor at all. After sleeping through most of the day, I went to bed praying that the worst was over.

The worst was not, in fact, over, as Friday brought with it several exciting new symptoms, including a deep, bone-rattling cough and stomach issues, neither of which had been invited to the party on Thursday. Oh, yay! I got off the couch a bit more often on Friday, since I had to do some running to the bathroom, but it was still a primarily stationary day.

Why is this relevant to your interests, beyond the vague "aww, poor baby, you've been sick" factor? Because I just went literally four days with essentially no computer contact whatsoever. I didn't do any writing until Sunday evening, when I finished the Sparrow Hill story for August. I didn't answer any email at all. I didn't even put on outside clothes until Saturday. So if you're waiting for something from me, or you think that I'm ignoring you, I promise, it's just my mind-boggling nasty summer cold.

I still sound like I have tuberculosis, or at least a cousin of same, but I can walk now, and that's a massive improvement. Things are returning, glacially, to normal.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled babbling.

I am now somewhere in the region of 80% done with my insanely intensive and invasive dental work. Today's session was supposed to last about an hour and a half. It ran three hours solid, all of which was spent under nitrous oxide, listening to Adam sing version after version of "Rain King." (It turns out, by the way, that I can get through approximately twenty versions of "Rain King" in three hours, intermixed with a truly awesome number of alternate lyrics. In case you were wondering, this is all that keeps me sane when I have to face my ultimate phobia...the friendly, smiling Dr. Mason. The characters were named before I got this dentist, I swear.)

Three hours of nitrous leaves me woozy, unsteady, and barely able to stand up on my own. My mother, who is sometimes a cruel woman, finds this hysterical, and likes to point and laugh. Luckily, she also likes to take me to IHOP for the calories necessary to put my stomach back into its original position. I might otherwise be forced to kill her.

The cats also find this hysterical, as well as useful, since I mostly sit still with my laptop on my legs, petting the cats and watching DVDs of The West Wing. I really wasn't planning to spend my entire day in a drugged stupor, but there you go. Peh.

On the plus side, I finally finished Sparrow Hill Road #7, "Do You Want to Dance?" It's off with my first-pass proofers now, getting smashed to pieces with hammers. I like this stage. It's the stage that I have nothing whatsoever to do with. This leaves me with five stories to go before the big finish, and then...well, then, I suppose I'll be focusing back on Velveteen and her crew. I actually have an installment in process right now, "Velveteen vs. The Secret Identity," which will almost certainly prove to be messy for everyone involved. Fun!

Now I sit here in my leopard-print nightie, trying to figure out where I left my feet. I am really not recovering from today's procedure in anything resembling a swift or coherent manner.

Peh.

"When I was a kid, I always imagined I'd be normal by now." —Hannelore, Questionable Content.

I had a phone interview the other day in which I was asked about my writing process. I explained it—the checklists, the word counts, the editorial process—and the interviewer laughed and said, "So it's almost like an OCD thing, right?"

"Not almost," I said. "I have OCD."

He stopped laughing.

On most weekday mornings, I get out of bed at 5:13 AM. I write this in my planner. On Wednesdays, I get out of bed at 5:30 AM. I write this in my planner, too. On the weekends, I sleep later; last Sunday, I slept until 8:23 AM. I know this, because I wrote it in my planner.

After I get up, I dress, ablute, and check in online. This is done by visiting Gmail, personal mail, Twitter, LiveJournal, and FaceBook, in that order. Always in that order. I pack my lunch. On weekdays (except for Wednesdays) I leave the house at 5:34 AM, to catch the first bus. I know this, because all these things, too, are written in my planner. So is everything else. What exercises I will do, what my assigned word counts will be, what to remember to say to my roommates, whether it's time to brush the cat...everything.

I have been a member of Weight Watchers since late 2004. I like Weight Watchers. It gives me an excuse to write down everything I eat, and turn every activity into a number to be added to a little column. In the times where I can't attend meetings and get new "official" trackers, those same counts wind up going into my planner, along with a record of what time I took my multivitamin and how much water I've had to drink. What shows I watched that day. What books I read.

Tiny columns of numbers march along the sides of the calendar—how many days to book release, how many days since book release, how many days since I did something that I'm waiting to hear more information on. I record the return dates of shows that I watch, the release dates of movies, the official dates of conventions. Birthdays and ages. I celebrate friendship anniversaries and remember strange holidays that, having made it into my calendar once, are now a permanent part of my personal year.

When I see street numbers or phone numbers or the like, I will automatically start picking them apart to determine whether they are either a multiple of nine or a prime number. Either of these is deeply comforting to me. Numbers that are one digit off in either direction can be distracting, if I've been having a bad enough day. I would be perfectly happy eating the same things for every meal, every day, for the rest of my life.

People sometimes ask me how I can bear it; how I can break my life down into schedules and checklists and tasks without going crazy. But the thing is, that's how my brain works. I look at other people's lives and wonder how they can bear it—having to agonize over menus, not knowing where to sit, not remembering the order of the primes, not knowing when all their favorite TV shows come back on the air. I find the framework of my life to be freeing, not confining, and I don't really comprehend living any other way.

And yes, sometimes I have to make concessions in order to remain stable. I arrive at the airport two hours before my flights, period. I don't care if I have to miss things to do it; the rules say "two hours before," and I arrive two hours before. I become uncomfortable and have difficulty focusing if someone takes my chair in a setting where I have defined patterns. Some things have to be done in a certain order, and if I try to do them in a different order, I am likely to become very difficult to deal with. Failure to complete a to-do list is upsetting to me on a deep, profound level that I have difficulty explaining in verbal terms; it's just wrong. My friends learn that if you're going on a social outing with me, you need to arrive on time or deal with me having a meltdown, that I do not want to have adventurous food, and that I will throw you out of the house if your arrival interferes with standing scheduled events. And the beat goes on.

Because I am very functional, and because the standard image of "someone with OCD" is Adrian Monk or Hannelore, I do occasionally have to deal with people assuming I'm exaggerating. I don't compulsively wash my hands or clean my kitchen, I'm definitely not a germaphore, and if I re-type books completely between drafts, well, that's just a quirk. But obsession and compulsion both take many forms, and while I have found peace with mine, and consider them a vital part of who I am, that doesn't mean they don't exist. (Why I would joke about having something that is considered a mental illness, I don't know.)

Remember that just because someone is a functional, relatively normal-seeming human being, that doesn't mean they're wired the way that you are. I have to remind myself that not everybody wants their day broken down into fifteen-minute increments, because for me, that is the norm. The human mind is an amazing thing, full of possibilities, and each of us expresses them differently. I am a cybernetic space princess from Mars, and that's not a choice I made; that's the way I was made. I can get an address on Earth, but Mars will always be my home.

Whatever planet you're from, that's okay. Just try not to assume that everyone you know is from the same place. I'd be willing to bet you that they're not.

Jim is having deep thoughts about piracy. I am having deep thoughts about mucus.

Mindy is having deep thoughts about reviewing, some of which feed into my own pending post on the subject. I am having deep thoughts about NyQuil.

Many people are having deep and insightful thoughts on many deep and insightful things. I am trapped in a life-or-death battle with a stupid head cold, and while I know I'll win, I'm not going to be happy for a while here.

I'm going to take The Demon in the Freezer and Virus X for comfort reading and go back to bed now.

Too sick to die.

I actually got a Google Alert for Mira Grant that was about, well, me, rather than some random assortment of words that managed to trigger my poor dumb little spider! Damon at BSC posted his thoughts on the 2010 Orbit catalog, including some comments about Feed. Quote, "I think it could make a splash. I normally do not read these types of books, but I am willing to make an exception, I believe, for Mira."

Damon, I am going to do my damnedest not to let you down. And that is a promise from me to you.

Meanwhile, the Warren Public Libraries in Warren, Michigan had some really sweet things to say about Rosemary and Rue, including "It’s a gripping mystery with a lot of urban fantasy thrown in to the mix" and "Fans of any urban fantasy will do well here." There's also a strong recommendation for fans of Jim Butcher's work to give mine a look. From your words to the Great Pumpkin's ears, Warren Public Libraries!

Alice is sopping wet, thanks to my having had a minor bathtub incident, and is now squelching around the house like an animate mop. Attempts to dry her have been met with the cat equivalent of "No, Mom, don't wanna," so I figure I'll let her be wet for a little while longer before I bust out the blow-dryer. It's good when you can satisfy your cats with simple inaction. (Much better than being punched awake at 6:30 AM to provide affection, which was how we started our day. The joy of cats.)

My cheeks have swollen to the point that I really, really look like someone's been beating me, making me super-glad that Chris didn't come to hang out today; I would've been afraid to go out of the house in his company, since I try not to get my friends accused of introducing their fists to my face. If there were a zombie walk today, I would so rule the undead dance floor. As it is, I'm taking lots of painkillers and praying that the swelling goes down before I have to go back to work tomorrow morning. And that's the news from the pumpkin patch. What's new and cool in the world of you?

1. I am about to head for the dentist, where I will be undergoing full sedation for the sake of massive surgery. After this, you should get a few months free of my discussing teeth, which will be nice for everybody. Because someone asked: I grew up on welfare, I have naturally not-so-good teeth, and for a long time, I didn't have the money to fix what was wrong. This combination leads to massive work, when you can finally manage to get it done. Thankfully, I'm getting.

2. The Rosemary and Rue pendant sale is going like gangbusters over at chimera_fancies, and it's honestly amazing what Mia's been able to do with this batch. I really recommend swinging by and looking for a favorite. All pendants are signed by me, and made from pieces of a recycled ARC.

3. Because of item one on this little list, the Great Pumpkin only knows whether I'm going to be capable of complicated things like "being awake" or "typing" today, so if you don't hear from me until tomorrow, it's not because I've been eaten by a grue. So don't worry.

4. It's pouring buckets. I am the Rain King.

5. Please remember to enter the A Local Habitation ARC giveaway. It doesn't require your own pets. Use the pets of a friend, or neighbor, or take advantage of your brother the zookeeper and throw your book to the tigers. (I will replace your book if you actually bring me photographic evidence of throwing it to the tigers, providing that happens with zookeeper permission.) Have fun!

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

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

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

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

Screw you, too, Uncle Sam.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now we must rinse.

So today is Tuesday—hooray!—but for me, it's essentially Monday, because I spent the real Monday in a haze of sedatives, painkillers, and other exciting pharmaceuticals associated with having lots and lots of dental work done. I now have two permanent crowns on my upper right rear molars, and can actually eat crunchy foods, like apples and carrots. This is very exciting for me. I'm living the dream, and in the dream, I can chew. (Years of poverty plus a pronounced phobia of dentists mean that I have a lot of work ahead of me. Fortunately, I have a very understanding dentist who specializes in working with the phobic, and who understands that I need to keep my iPod on at all times to keep from panicking when I hear them talking about what they're going to do. Oblivion is my anti-phobia buddy.)

In keeping with the week's established medical theme, I'm going to be spending the afternoon with my doctor, being poked and prodded and (one hopes) declared to be in as good of health as can be expected. This is a necessary first step in scheduling my next spinal epidural, IE, "those periodic injections which render Seanan capable of continuing to walk and interact like a normal human being." It's probably too much to hope that the procedure could happen before OVFF, but I'm guardedly hopeful of shoving it into the week between OVFF and World Fantasy, when I'm already going to be off from work and can thus spend the day in bed without any guilt.

Today is the book-day birthday for The Mermaid's Madness [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] by jimhines, a gentleman and a scholar if ever there was one. He's also a fellow member of the DAW Mafia, and just an awesome all-around guy...plus the book is amazing. My mother liked it better than she liked the first one, and we all remember how much she liked the first one. I highly recommend The Mermaid's Madness as a good investment of your book-buying dollars for this week. Join the Princess party now, and beat the rush!

I spent a good chunk of Sunday accidentally taking a six and a half mile walk through the cities of Concord and Clayton. I was trying to get to a friend's house for a barbecue, and I overshot by a little bit, assuming you consider four miles, much of it uphill, to be "a little bit." I had never walked some of that route before, so it was educational. I also hadn't walked all the skin off my heels in quite some time, so it was painful to boot. I am now wearing thick socks and bandages, and have no intention of taking that walk again any time soon. Still, it was a pleasant, if unexpected, little adventure in getting to know my home town a bit better. (Quoth a woman who saw me walking by with my iPod on, a Super Double-Gulp in one hand, and a book in my other hand, "Now that's multi-tasking.")

Autumn has arrived at last; I was forced to break out my duvet Sunday night, and woke this morning under a cascade of cats, since not even Alice's innate insulation robs her of the feline desire to snuggle up to the nearest human and leech as much heat as she possibly can. (They promptly stole the warm spot when I got up. This is because they're cats, not idiots.) Next up, umbrellas and the annual hunt for a pair of shoes that I haven't already worn past the point of being waterproof.

And that, for the moment, is that. What's new with the rest of the world?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. I am about to head off for some fairly major full-anesthesia dental surgery. Why does this matter to you? This matters to you because my computer and my bed are in the same room, and it's entirely possible that I'll roll out from under the covers and decide to be...interactive. Please ignore any...interaction...for the next twenty-four hours, as I will be recovering from sedation, and know not what I say.

2. Alice woke me up by hopping onto my chest and trilling in my ear, only to run like the wind as soon as I showed signs of movement. Behold the sensibility and calm of the teenage Maine Coon.

3. The fall TV season is getting blessedly underway. I, for one, welcome the return of our Winchester overlords. Mmm, Sam and Dean. Actually, just mmm, Dean. How I've missed you. Never leave me like this again.

Mom just showed up to get me to the dentist, so these quick notes are even quicker than originally intended. In the meanwhile, drop by jimhines's place to see the LEGO HORROR CASTLE ZOMG.

That is all.

1. The Rosemary and Rue ARC giveaway is still running, from now through Whenever I Happen To Get Up Tomorrow Morning. So assume that I'll be announcing the winner sometime between five and eight AM PST (which is when I'll be coherent enough to deal with complex things like "the random number generator" and "counting").

2. Because I'm doing the drawing so early in the day, if you win, and you're able to get me your mailing address with reasonable alacrity, your ARC may actually go out in tomorrow's mail. I'm just saying.

3. Late Eclipses continues to be finished, which has me rather at lost ends. I figure I'll finish this zombie short story that I'm working on, and then crack open Discount Armageddon, see what Verity and the gang have been up to while I was away. Nothing says "relaxation" like "getting straight to work on a different book."

4. I am officially sick. Thank you, coughing people on my plane and annoying small child whose parents refused to make you stop kicking the back of my seat. Thank you so much.

5. My play list consisting of nothing but versions of the song "Rain King" by the Counting Crows is now two hours long, and incredibly soothing. If you've ever wondered why that song was my current music so much of the time, well...this is why.

6. Zombies are still love.