The 2017 Hugo Awards ballot is now live, and I am stunned and honored and delighted to announce that I am on it not once, but twice.

Every Heart a Doorway has been nominated for Best Novella. This is the book of my heart: this is the one I look at and dare to hope for, because I want it so badly, and I am so touched by its inclusion. Thank you to everyone who has looked at this little book and thought "how far can we help it go?" We have gone so far.

But that's not the stunner.

The stunner is that this year is the first time the Hugos have featured a category for Best Series. It's a trial run, a test, for a way to honor books and settings that work best in the context they create for themselves. Book eleven of something ongoing may not be the best candidate for Best Novel, but it may be part of something that, overall, is just as glorious.

And October Daye is up for Best Series.

I am stunned. I am overjoyed. I am not going to win--but winning isn't always the point. I have been given this honor, and I am not giving it back.

Thank you all so very, very much.

I will do my best not to let you down.

Are you a gamer? Do you like things that are fun? Are you planning to attend Emerald City Comic-Con?

I am anchoring a table for this year's Worldbuilder's Charity Party, and there are four seats left for the adventurous.

Come play with me! It'll be a good time. We all need a good time about now.

Yes. Play.

Good.

I usually start these posts with "I am pleased...". I'm not pleased right now. I'm not sure I'll ever be pleased again. Like so many of us, I am sick and scared and sad. I'm wishing I weren't getting so many random apologies from people who found the villain in Feed cartoony and unrealistic, but now find him horrifyingly plausible. I'm wishing a lot of things.

But time passes; the Turtle moves; the work goes on, and my fear and my sadness do not mean I can let y'all miss things you might want to know about. So:

It is my privilege to announce that I (as Mira Grant) am doing another novella with Subterranean Press. Final Girls is a story about virtual reality, psychotherapy, corporate espionage, and figuring out exactly who you are. According to the website...

What if you could fix the worst parts of yourself by confronting your worst fears?

Dr. Jennifer Webb has invented proprietary virtual reality technology that purports to heal psychological wounds by running clients through scenarios straight out of horror movies and nightmares. In a carefully controlled environment, with a medical cocktail running through their veins, sisters might develop a bond they've been missing their whole lives—while running from the bogeyman through a simulated forest. But...can real change come so easily?

Esther Hoffman doubts it. Esther has spent her entire journalism career debunking pseudoscience, after phony regression therapy ruined her father’s life. She's determined to unearth the truth about Dr. Webb’s budding company. Dr. Webb’s willing to let her, of course, for reasons of her own. What better advertisement could she get than that of a convinced skeptic? But Esther's not the only one curious about how this technology works. Enter real-world threats just as frightening as those created in the lab. Dr. Webb and Esther are at odds, but they may also be each other's only hope of survival.

Limited to 1,250 signed, numbered copies, Final Girls is available for pre-order now, and will be shipping in April. This is going to be a gorgeous book. Julie Dillon, who did the cover for Rolling in the Deep, is doing the cover for this one too, and I am so excited. Remember that Rolling in the Deep sold out fast, and is now virtually unattainable unless you're lucky or have a book budget I really envy, and order yours today!

I am awed, honored, and a little staggered to be able to announce that I will be the Guest of Honor at OVFF 2017, to be held over the weekend of October 20th to 22nd.

For those of you in the filk community, I'm sure you understand what a huge honor this is, and why it means so much to me. For those of you not in the filk community, allow me to endeavor to explain.

Filk--science fiction and fantasy folk music, essentially--is a small slice of fandom that enjoys sitting up and singing songs late into the night. We sing about myths and legends and TV shows and comic books and each other (oh, how we sing about each other). It's not a huge community, with maybe a few thousand people worldwide (at best), but it's a tightly-knit one, and we take care of our own. We have the numbers and the ambition to hold multiple conventions throughout the year, in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Germany.

And the biggest of all these conventions is OVFF, the Ohio Valley Filk Festival, in Columbus, Ohio. It is the Worldcon of filk. It is the brass ring. It is the goal. I was already honored to be their Toastmistress in 2005, and to be asked back is...

Well, it's everything.

I am beyond excited, and I am hoping to see so many of you there. I'm going to try to explain a bit more of what filk is over the course of the next year: let's see if I can't make filkers of all of you yet.

I'm Guest of Honor.

It's a dream come true.

What: Post-NYCC Author Coffee Klatsch

When: Monday, October 10 at 11:00AM-1:00PM (revolving door event; guests do not need to arrive at a particular time)

Where: Random House offices—1745 Broadway, NYC 10019 (between 55th and 56th streets)

RSVP: Please RSVP to delrey@randomhouse.com with “RSVP” in the subject line and the full names of everyone in your party in the e-mail body.

Details: Guests will sign in at the front desk upon arrival and security will direct them to the 2nd floor Club Room for coffee and mingling with authors. PRH will be stocking the first-in-series book for every attending author to sign and give away. Books will not be sold at this event. Readers are encouraged to bring any books they wish to be signed as there will be a limited supply of giveaway copies.

If you're in or around New York, I hope to see you there!

With only five days remaining in the pre-order, I suddenly realized that I had forgotten to post here. I AM SOMETIMES A VERY DISTRACTED BUNNY, OKAY?!

Ahem. Presenting:

The very first ever October Daye T-shirt design, by Unicorn Empire.

These shirts are spectacularly gorgeous, and I am over the moon delighted with how beautifully they've come out. They're available in rust and rose gold (both so appropriate), and on the off chance--far from guaranteed--that the design is added to the shop on a longer term basis, only one of the colors will be available for order. So if one color speaks to you more than the other, you should absolutely order it now.

This a pre-sale, not a sale. Why does this matter? Because before I give you the link for the shirts, I'm going to give you the link for how Unicorn Empire pre-sales work. Please, take a moment to read it. Amber, who runs Unicorn Empire, is a fan running a business for fans, out of her garage. She has help, but she's not a huge operation, and her timelines are thus longer than they would be for, say, Hot Topic. She's being awesome doing this for us, and I don't want to cause her any trouble.

There is no extra charge for plus sizes, because Unicorn Empire is awesome that way. The pre-sale is only open until June 20th, so get your orders in soon! (We know international shipping is expensive, so if you wanted to coordinate a group order for Australia or whatnot, this would be a great place to do it!)

Those of you who snagged a Sparrow Hill Road shirt know how good the quality is, and I hope you're all as pleased as I am.

I'm so excited!

You may remember that back in December, I ran a poll to determine the level of interest in Sparrow Hill Road shirts printed and sold by Unicorn Empire. The end result was a definite level of interest: enough that we decided to go ahead and open up the pre-sale! Woo hoo!

Now, this a pre-sale, not a sale. Why does this matter? Because before I give you the link for the shirts, I'm going to give you the link for how Unicorn Empire pre-sales work. Please, take a moment to read it. Amber, who runs Unicorn Empire, is a fan running a business for fans, out of her garage. She has help, but she's not a huge operation, and her timelines are thus longer than they would be for, say, Hot Topic. She's being awesome doing this for us, and I don't want to cause her any trouble.

Without further ado...

The Pre-Sale Is Now Live!

Based on your votes, we made both one and two-color versions of the design, available on T-shirts and tank tops. There is no extra charge for plus sizes, because Unicorn Empire is awesome that way. The pre-sale is only open until February 9th, so get your orders in soon! (We know international shipping is expensive, so if you wanted to coordinate a group order for Australia or whatnot, this would be a great place to do it!)

I'm so excited!

Some of you may remember that I went to New York for, essentially, the month of November. This is not an unheard-of occurrence, me going out of town for an entire month: when it works out, logistically, it's easier on me to go, stay, get everything I need to done, and then come home to sleep for a few weeks. I recognize that this is a privileged way of doing things, predicated on my a) having a job I can do from anywhere, b) being able to actually do that job while traveling, and c) having someone to feed the cats while I'm away.

Some of you may also remember that I adore musical theater. It's customary for me to try to catch a show with my editor from DAW while I'm in town; for this trip, I had selected Fun Home. Fun Home is based on the memoir of the same name, written by Alison Bechdel, chronicling both her relationship with her father and the process of her own coming out. I had read the book once, years ago; I knew the author mostly from her work on Dykes to Watch Out For; and I had seen one of the musical numbers, "Ring of Keys," performed at the Tonys. That alone had been enough to make me want to see the show.

Originally, it was going to be me, Sheila (my editor), and Betsy (also from DAW). Sadly, Betsy couldn't join us, for personal reasons. Thankfully, Josh (also also from DAW) was able to take her place, so her ticket wasn't going wanting (not that we would ever have a problem finding someone to come with us to a good show). We met up at the office and proceeded from there to Sushi Zen, aka, "the place we seem to keep winding up before we go to a show." I had the sashimi boat. I always have the sashimi boat. If you ever have the chance, have the sashimi boat.

I also had the edamame and the steamed mushrooms. Both were excellent, although not as good as the sashimi boat. Mmmm, sashimi boat.

Ahem.

We decided to skip dessert and head straight for the theater, which turned out to be a good thing, as the show started in twenty minutes and was performed without an intermission. I am so grateful to be walking better. I was able to bolt for the bathroom, pee, and meet up with Sheila and Josh with five minutes to spare (no small trick in a theater with only one girls' bathroom).

Fun Home is performed in a theater in the round. Our seats were front row, right on the "stage," so that the actors would be passing only inches away at certain points. It was amazing. Like, genuinely amazing. We got settled. I started reading my Playbill, and squealed when I realized that Bruce Bechdel, the male lead, was played by Michael Cerveris, aka, "September from Fringe." Sometimes I am twelve.

All I really knew about the show as a show was the song "Ring of Keys." Even after seeing it live, I feel like all I really know is "Ring of Keys," because that's where I started sobbing and didn't stop.

Alison (there are three Alisons in the show, portraying the author in various stages of her life: small, medium, and large) and her father are at the diner, having breakfast. A woman walks in. And Alison, small, tomboy, brilliantly rebellious Alison, looks at her, and sees her, and knows her. Knows her for being the same as she is; knows her for being alike. There's this feeling of glorious recognition in the song, of "if you are, then I can be too, and if I am, then we are, and neither of us is alone," that I recognize from my own clumsy, confused process of coming out.

The whole show is glorious. It's confusing and confounding and brilliantly staged, and I hope it goes on tour so I can take my sisters. But that moment, that song...

I would take the whole show for just that song.

You will need:

1/2 pound of good, fatty bacon
2 pints of heavy whipping cream/1 pint heavy whipping cream, 2 cups of whole milk
2 1-lb. bags of frozen corn
4 tbs. of sugar
2 tsp. of salt
1/4 cup of quick polenta

A deep skillet
A spoon

Take your corn out to thaw (you want it as non-frozen as possible). Cut your bacon into 1/4" to 1/2" squares (I find that using meat scissors works really well for this). Put the bacon into your skillet, and cook until you want to just eat it.

Add your thawed corn to the skillet, pouring it on top of the bacon, and mix thoroughly before adding your first pint of cream. Mix again. If the cream does not cover the bulk of your corn-and-bacon mixture, add more cream (or milk, if that's how you're rolling). Reserve half the remaining cream/milk for later.

Bring your heat up to medium-high. Stir your mixture until the cream begins to warm. Taste it. You should find that you need sugar to balance the richness of the cream. Add sugar, one tablespoon at a time, until the sweetness is to your liking (you can leave some of the sugar out). Sprinkle your polenta evenly over the mixture, stirring thoroughly after each pass.

Turn the heat down to medium-low, and give the mixture about four minutes to cook, stirring occasionally. As the polenta cooks, it will thicken more and more, creating a paste. You may wish to add more cream/milk at this stage, to render the cream more, well, creamy. I like my creamed corn to be thick but still a little bit runny.

Taste the mix. You should find that you need salt. Add salt to taste. Stir thoroughly. Bring back up to medium-high and stir for another three to five minutes, while your polenta finishes cooking. Be careful not to burn your cream (burnt cream is unpleasant).

Serves eight, reheats beautifully.

I will be modifying this recipe to begin with an onion cooked alongside the bacon, and will report back.

10. It's December! That is...terrifying and amazing and lots of other things, but mostly, it's a huge relief, because I don't have anywhere to go for the rest of the year. Oh, I have a lot of local commitments, parties and appearances and a doll meet-up, but nothing that requires travel. I get to sleep in my own bed, snuggle my cats, and clean my house for an entire month. I am ridiculously excited about this.

9. A lot of folks are doing their holiday shopping right now, which is swell! I posted the holiday book buying reminder yesterday. You can also contact Mysterious Galaxy, in San Diego, for signed copies of Out of Tune, and for copies of Dead But Not Forgotten signed by Charlaine Harris, Toni Kelner, and a bunch of the authors (myself included). Support independent bookstores this holiday season.

8. Or maybe you're buying stuff from me, posters and T-shirts and the like. If you are, please use the PayPal option for sending money to friends and family. There are a few reasons for this. First off, I am still not a store: I am literally pricing things to cover cost of item + cost of postage. Having huge whacks of money vanish into PayPal fees makes this a loss, and means I have to start charging more to be able to afford to ship things. Secondly, you know how I always say "please send me your shipping info via this other channel"? I have found that people who chose "goods and services" are more likely to ignore that request, because they've already provided a shipping address, and if I were a store, I'd be able to access that data. Not a store. Cannot access easily. Please don't.

7. The new Pokemon game is not making me as happy as I wanted it to. I am sure I will enjoy the post-game, where it's apparently LEGENDARYPALOOZA, but I am not enjoying my Pokemon journey, and that makes me sad.

6. Thomas, who has always been an asshole, has taken his assholing to new heights in his glee that I am home. Lots of purring, lots of cuddling, lots of knocking things off shelves to demonstrate that he is still the boss of all he surveys. Thomas is going to be mittens if he doesn't cut this shit out.

5. I will be doing the Thirteen Days of Hogswatch again this year, beginning on December 12th and continuing until December 24th. The introductory post will go up on December 11th. The prizes, drawing times, response times, and requirements for each day are not negotiable; if I say "I must hear from you by X time for you to win," and you think you might not be able to check your email on, say, Christmas, I am very sorry, but I do mean it. I can't have people claiming prizes weeks after the drawing. I'm just not set up for that. But hey, I am giving away so much stuff.

4. I missed the October tip jar, which means we're running out of prioritized free fiction. I don't want to open a tip jar in December (holidays), but I may go ahead and do it in January. (Or we may have to pay for all the bodywork on Mom's car, in which case, I will not only open the tip jar, I will dance on freeways if that's what it takes.)

3. Oh, yeah: some asshole hit Mom's car on Thanksgiving night. The damage isn't massive, but she was parked at the time, and we didn't see it happen. Now we need to get the bodywork done to fix the dent on the side of her car, before rust sets in and everything gets buckets more expensive. Whee. (Yes, she has insurance, but the deductible is huge, especially if we can't produce another driver.)

2. I'm going to see The Ghost Brothers of Darkland County on Friday! I'm so excited!

1. Jean Grey is not dead right now and it's making me cranky.

That's my list. What's new with you?

10. For some reason, people have been sending me Livejournal messages a lot recently. You are totally welcome to do this, but please be aware that I may take months to answer, even years, as they are a lower priority than messages which come in through my website contact form. If you want to contact me for any reason, your best channel is my website, which has a lovely and easy-to-use contact form. These emails go to my PA, who answers some questions herself and forwards the rest on to me. Where they appear in my inbox, impossible to ignore. Where they get answered.

9. Seriously, just use the contact form. I don't really answer messages received through any other channel in any sort of a reasonable time (and I don't answer Facebook messages at all).

8. I am making cioppino tomorrow night! I am so excited about that! Except...

7. ...I'm making it for me and Olivia to eat while we watch "The Quarterback" and cry. I know Glee is a frequently terrible show, but I am genuinely saddened by Cory's death, and this is going to be emotionally devastating.

6. The tip jar is remaining open until tomorrow morning, largely because I forgot to post this reminder yesterday. Thanks to everyone who's chipped in so far, and to everyone who hasn't, too, because sometimes life says "not this time." Y'all are awesome.

5. So awesome, in fact, that I am compelled to make sure you've seen the incredible videos on SymboGen.net. Seriously, this is some of the best marketing ever, and it's for my book. I am overcome with squee.

4. The field of Alice's fucks lies fallow, and I support this.

3. Carrie: The Musical is really fantastic. If you're in the Bay Area, I recommend the Ray of Light production, now playing in San Francisco. If you're not, look around; there are a lot of productions going right now, due to the rights opening up.

2. Zombies are love.

1. HAPPY OCTOBER HALLOWEEN IS COMING.

Today is the last day of September, 2013.

The first October Daye book—Rosemary and Rue—was published in September, 2009. It was not my first publication, thanks to a few anthologies that managed to speed through the publishing process (Ravens in the Library and Grant's Pass), but it was my first real sale, and it was the book that opened the door that led to those anthologies. Without Toby, I don't know that I'd be in either book, even though both were edited by friends of mine, because no one really thought of me that way. Not yet.

Since September 2009, I have published fifteen books, ranging from Toby to Velveteen. I have appeared in enough anthologies that I honestly can't tell you how many; not without counting them. I have experienced the soul-crushing terror of the Hugo Awards as viewed from the front row (which is a flavor of fear that I never truly appreciated until it was wrapping its arms around me and squeezing me tight). I have written more than a million words of fiction. Possibly more than two million words. And while I have been stressed and strained and stretched too thin, I have never lost sight of how incredibly lucky I am. I get to tell these stories. I get to see my name in bookstores, which is an honor and joy beyond compare. It's never not exciting. I hope it never will be.

Thank you. Thank you so much, for reading, for talking, for reviewing, for helping, by your very presence, because without people, there would be no publication. A book that is unread is a book that falls into obscurity, and has no sequels, and has no future.

I am very tired, but I am very grateful. The last four years have been amazing. I wouldn't trade them for the world.

Now let's go steal me four more.

My friend Chris came up yesterday, since we hadn't seen each other in way too long, and we spent most of the day doing what we do best: sitting on the couch, petting the cats, and watching fuck-awful SyFy Channel Original Movies that had been clogging up my DVR waiting for our next watch-a-thon. Movies watched over the course of the party included Shark Week, Boogeyman, Two-Headed Shark Attack, and Haunted High (note that for purposes of "watching," we "watched" it if we stared aghast at the screen for ten minutes before skipping to the next film because OH GOD LIFE IS TOO SHORT FOR THIS CRAP). We finished the night with Notting Hill, because we needed our faith in cinema restored.

I feel good about my life choices.

There's something incredibly pure about a terrible horror movie. When I was in high school, one of my favorite pick-up RPGs was called It Came From the Late, Late, Late Show, in which you played, yes, the lead in a terrible genre movie. I "invented" combat cheerleading (which would show up from my PCs for years to follow) during a session titled "Teenage Zombie High School." I learned about setting tarantulas on fire in "Leeeeeeeegs!!!! The Crawling Terror." And I always had a wonderful time.

Authors have this tendency to write "deconstructive works" about the genres and media that they love. Scalzi's Redshirts, Stephen King's The Dark Half, and so on. I am deeply afraid that one day, I am going to write my deconstructive work, and it's going to be like Night Vale meets the Care Bear Cousins.

That day is coming.

I love the SyFy Channel Saturday night movies. The goofy effects, the giant monsters, the sometimes wooden acting, it's all a delicious cheese sandwich to help me relax into the one night of the week where I don't feel rushed to accomplish ALL THE THINGS before I go to bed. I try to judge them by what they are, and not by what I want them to be: silly, shitty movies that accomplish what they set out to accomplish, no more, and no less. Sometimes they're even pretty good.

This past week, the Saturday night movie was The End of the World. It was about a group of geeks who owned/worked at a video store specializing in disaster movies, the judgmental SO of the geek who actually owned the store, the faintly evil cousin of the geek who actually owned the store, the disapproving parent of one of the geeks who worked at the store, the disaster guru idol of all the geeks, and a bunch of extras. The extras fell into three categories: evil looters who wanted to take stuff from our heroic geeks, assholes at the mental hospital where the disaster guru had been committed, and people at the military base.

Now. Looking only at what I've written above, how many of these characters were female? If you guessed "judgmental SO" and "disapproving parent," then ding ding ding! We have a winner!

None of the geeks were women. The SO even knowing what the Death Star was called was treated as a virtual miracle, and something so hot as to make the alpha geek temporarily forget about saving the planet, because she was speaking Forbidden Knowledge, yo. She was saying things that implied girls could be geeks too, and man, that was so impossible it was like she was demonstrating super powers! The mother figure was literally introduced calling one of the secondary geeks at work and asking him how the job search was going, because it was time for him to get a real job, in the real world, amirite girls? (The SO had a similar speech.) That's how we should interact with geeks! We should drag them kicking and screaming into respectability, because no one can ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever be happy and fulfilled just being a professional fan of things. And women can't even start being fans of things. It's not allowed.

None of the extras were female. None of the secondary characters, apart from the two listed above, were female. One of the female characters was there to nag and be a burden; the other was there to be a prize and to be enlightened about how Geek Things = Man Things and Man Things = Awesome.

And here's the thing. None of these characters—not a single fucking one—had such a gendered role that their character could not have been played by a member of the opposite sex. Testosterone did not unlock the key to saving the world. Estrogen did not cause the cataclysm. You could have literally flipped a fucking coin for every single role, and cast accordingly. "Whoops, female lead, male antagonist, female love interest..." Better yet, make it a d10, and if you roll a ten, roll again for assigned birth gender, and then go from there. "Female lead, male antagonist, ftm love interest..." It would have been the same damn movie.

But they didn't do that. They went with boys and boys and boys, and an exclusionist narrative that had me saying sadly "I like disaster movies. I exist, too."

I wound up stopping the movie halfway through because the lack of female voices had become so alienating to me that I needed to wait a while before I came back and finished watching. It was an okay movie. I won't be watching it again. There's no one for me there.

Men can identify with women, and should. Women can identify with men, and should. But there's a big difference between saying "Seanan, you should have been able to identify with the struggles of the protagonist, regardless of gender," and saying "Seanan, you should have been able to accept a world that cast your gender into the role of harpy and martinet, and not felt objectified or rejected by this setting." I did identify with Owen. I did care about his story.

It was everything around him that lost me. And honestly, I'm still lost, and I've been lost too many times.

Sometimes it would be nice to be found.

I have been doing stuff! On the internet! With people!

Have you ever wondered whether I had guilty pleasures? Well, I don't actually believe in being guilty about the things that bring me joy, but that didn't stop me from appearing on My Countless Lives to talk about my not-so-guilty pleasures. Looking at this list, I believe I can say, without reservations, that I'm a little weird. But I'm also super-fun to go to Disneyland with, so it all balances out.

Orbit asked me to write a thing about fictional politicians. So I wrote a thing about fictional politicians. Being as I am me, it's a pretty eclectic list. I kept it short by leaving off people who inherited their titles and became kick-ass royals, because yes, Neo-Queen Serenity is awesome, but that would have been the point at which things got completely out of control.

Oh, hey, I did an interview (as Mira Grant) for the Examiner. So that's a thing and you should totally read it.

Oh! Also! I did a sort of micro-interview with Romantic Times, also as Mira Grant. Not many questions, but the ones they asked were fun, so that works out.

Also, this one time, at band camp, I interviewed Mira Grant, and things quickly got really weird. So that's a thing which I have done on the internet.

And those are things and stuff what I have done on the internet.

Doobie-doo.

I became a geek when I was four years old. That's when my grandmother handed me my first My Little Pony (Cotton Candy) and told me that if I liked her, I could have more. That was also the year when I first really and truly understood that Doctor Who had an ongoing storyline that could be followed and thought about, even when the TV wasn't on. I don't remember much about the year when I was four, but I remember those two moments of epiphany.

But wait, some people would have said (and did say), as recently as three years ago: being into My Little Pony doesn't make you a geek. It makes you a girl. And to them I said, every time, that if being into My Little Pony didn't make me a geek, then they had to turn in their Transformers street cred. Science fiction and fantasy got tickets to the geek-out party, and if teleporting unicorns who live on the other side of the rainbow and fight darkness with magic and thumbs doesn't count as fantasy in your world, you are not relevant to my interests. You don't gotta like it. You do gotta admit that not only the boys' cartoons of the 1980s contained the seeds of geekdom.

He-Man? She-Ra. Both were epic fantasy adventures. The Care Bears were basically friendly aliens who just wanted us to stop blowing shit up all the damn time. The Littles lived inside your walls. How is any of this not genre? But if you asked the boys in my neighborhood, it was girly, and hence it wasn't good enough. I saw proto-geek after proto-geek give up and drop out after she'd been told, yet again, that Transformers were serious and My Little Pony was stupid. I very quickly found myself in the unenviable position of being the only girl geek in my neighborhood.

I played with the boys pretty much exclusively (after I'd beaten respect for My Little Pony through their thick skulls), at least until we got to middle school, and my being a nerd became a problem. (Note: I'm using "geek" to mean "obsessed with geeky things and very open about liking them" and "nerd" to mean "thick glasses, read constantly, did math for fun.") The boys scattered. The girls, who had been socialized that geeks were icky, wanted nothing to do with me. I nested in my interests, and waited for the world to be fair.

Then, like a shining beacon: high school. Access to conventions. Access to that new miracle, the internet. I was no longer going to be a girl geek. I was just going to be a geek! I could be interested in ANYTHING I wanted, FOREVER, and my people would understand me, because they'd been through the same thing! FOREVER!

...only My Little Pony wasn't really fantasy, because it was "too pink," and Amethyst Princess of Gemworld wasn't a real comic book, and I had to be lying when I said I loved Warren Magazines because girls don't like horror, and Stephen King? Ugh so lame. In order to be a geek, I had to conform to the shape that others defined for my geekiness, hiding the things I really loved behind a veneer of Star Trek and learning the names of all the members of the Justice League (even though I had zero fucks to give). During that period, I guess I was a "fake geek girl" in some ways, because the people I perceived as having power over me had informed me, in no uncertain terms, that loving the things I genuinely loved, following my true geeky passion down the dark corridors it so temptingly offered, would mean I wasn't a geek.

It would just mean that I was lonely.

I learned to fake it. I can name multiple incarnations of the Flash, even though I am not and never have been a DC girl. No one who's ever asked me to do this has been able to explain the entire Summers family tree, but I've known since I was fourteen that if I confused Wally West with Barry Allen, I would be decried as a faker who didn't really like comics. I learned to quote Monty Python without ever seeing the show, and made at least a stab at all the big popular epic fantasy series of the day. My geek cred was unquestioned.

And it got better. I discovered fanfic, where people were a lot more willing to tolerate whatever I wanted to get excited about, as long as I didn't expect them to read my novel-length fixfic for a Disney Channel Original Movie. My Little Ponies became "retro" and "vintage," and my collection was suddenly "ironic" in the eyes of the people I allowed to judge me. I learned to roll my eyes at moments of judgement that would previously have reduced me to snotty tears. And somewhere in the middle of all that, I stopped giving two fucks about what other people thought of my geekiness. I stopped trying to be a gender-neutral geek and became a geek girl.

But you know what? I wish I hadn't been forced to go through that particular evolution. I wish I'd been able to walk in and say "My Little Pony is as good as Transformers" without needing a sudden surge in male My Little Pony fandom to make that opinion acceptable. (I love all My Little Pony fans. Friendship is magic. But as a girl who grew up with Megan and Firefly, it really does feel a lot like "okay, girls, we've finally decided your sparkly unicorns are cool, so they qualify for membership in the genre now.")

I've been watching the "fake geek girl" mess go around, and it feels like middle school. It feels like people going "your passions don't match my passions, ergo your passions must be invalid." And I say fuck. That. Noise. Geeks like things. That's why we exist. If what someone likes is costuming, or Twilight, or SETI, or looking for Bigfoot, why the fuck should I care? If you like something enough to shape your life around it, you're a geek. Period. You do not need to prove anything. Ever.

I look at geek culture now, and we're primed to allow a whole generation of little girls to grow up without that horrible middle stage that I had to live through. But they can only have that freedom if we stop pretending that unicorns are inferior to robots, or that girls can't like zombies, or that boys can't like talking bears with hearts on their stomachs.

Now if you'll all excuse me, I'm going to go to Target and buy some Monster High dolls, which I will unbox, redress, and play with, like a boss.

LIKE A GEEK BOSS.

So Friday night, I will be appearing at The Booksmith in damp, drizzly San Francisco, California, as part of their Read Until the World Ends Halloween Bookswap. I've never done one of these before, so I turn to their website for details:

"$25 gets you dinner and an open bar, a bookstore all to yourself and forty of your new best friends, discounts and swag, a chance to rub elbows with amazing authors, and tons of surprises. Amy Stephenson hosts."

$25 to share a room with me and an open bar. Oh, the drinks that we'll drink! Oh, the thinks that we'll think! Oh, the giggling as I slowly list gently onto my side and go to sleep! I...okay, that last part wouldn't be very professional of me. So I won't do that. But if you're in the San Francisco Bay Area and looking for a fun way to spend a Friday night, come and spend it it with me in my guise as Mira Grant, and with all the boozimohol the bookstore can provide.

Whee!

T-shirt update.

Shirts are being mailed! But in the interests of not being stoned to death by the other people who use my small local post office, they're being mailed in batches of twenty to thirty at a time. What does this mean? It means that if you have not yet received your shirt, it probably hasn't been mailed, but is instead sitting in a large sack in my living room. If you ordered three or more shirts, there is a good chance that your order is coming in more than one envelope. Breathe deeply, and it will be with you soon.

CDs and stuff.

I have sent a restock of both Wicked Girls and Red Roses and Dead Things to CD Baby. I estimate that I have roughly a hundred copies of Red Roses left, after which the CD will be out of print. I'm not currently planning a reprint, so, y'know, get it while it's available.

My cats are weird.

This morning, Thomas decided that he was going to accompany me to work, and attempted to accomplish this by stuffing himself into my backpack. It astonishes and terrifies me that he can fit inside my backpack; he's a lot of cat, and there are other things inside that bag. But he did it! And if he'd remembered to pull his tail inside, he might have made my day a lot more exciting than I ever wanted it to be.

The Pirates of Emerson.

Just a reminder to my Bay Area friends: the Pirates of Emerson have opened their annual haunted theme park at the Alameda County Fairgrounds. Five awesome haunted houses, two mazes, the Bumpkin Patch, live entertainment, games, and more, all presented by spooky-ass pirates who leer and go "arrrrrrr" whenever provoked. It's a lot of fun, it's super reasonably priced for what you get, and I highly recommend it.

(I do not, however, recommend it for kids under twelve, or even for easily frightened kids under thirteen. You can still take them if you want, but you can't blame me for the night terrors and bedwetting that may follow.)

Best shirt ever.

My friend Craig sent me an official CDC Zombie Preparedness Task Force shirt, and it is the best shirt ever. I am the happiest disease/zombie fangirl in the whole wide world right now.

One con more...

I have only one convention left in 2012: WindyCon in Chicago, this coming November. After that, I am blissfully home free for the (admittedly short) remainder of the year. Which means a) if you wanted to catch me at a con, Windy is your last chance this year, and b) I might actually take a nap.

Although that's unlikely.

At last it is October, the month I spend the rest of the year yearning for. When it's October, everything is wonderful, even when it's not. When it's not October, I'm wishing that it were October again. There's a reason that Marnie Piper and the Cromwell witches are some of my favorite Disney (semi) icons.

After a weird two-day heatwave, we've settled into sweet fall, with foggy skies and color-changing leaves and everything. The Maine Coons are growing their winter coats, and thumping around the house like the tiny yeti that they secretly are. (Okay, local definition of "tiny." Thomas has hit the size where even I can't pretend that he's anything but massive. It's just that he still has kitten-face, and I fear what this says about his next growth spurt. He's going to eat me.)

The season's first treat has already been mentioned: Feed is still $1.99, and will be for the next two weeks. Yay! We're currently hovering in the Kindle 600s, which isn't bad for a book that's been out for two years. More treats will be forthcoming, once I know what they are. And of course, at the end of the month, When Will You Rise comes out from Subterranean, and that's sort of the ultimate treat. I cannot wait to see this book with my own eyes!

I'm hosting the SFWA Pacific Northwest Readings for this month, and I'm going to Disneyland with my fairy tale girls immediately afterward, so it's going to be a busy October, and that's just fine. I have a lot of work to do and a lot of experience at doing it, so I'm going to rock it.

Welcome to the month of my heart!

I am home.

I am recovered.

I am well-rested.

I am the proud owner of the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Fancast.

YES. YES, I WON A FUCKING HUGO AND IT'S IN MY HOUSE AND IT'S BEAUTIFUL AND IT HAS MY NAME ON IT AND I THINK IT STARTED OUT AS CAT'S (I'M PRETTY SURE WE TRADED AT LEAST ONCE) AND I DON'T CARE BECAUSE IT'S MY HUGO!!!! I HAVE A HUGO!!!! I AM A HUGO-AWARD WINNER!!!!!!!!

...be really glad you can't see my uncoordinated geek dance. You might go blind.

Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who voted. This truly means the world to me. Y'all gave me a Hugo for never shutting up.

Message received.

It's Hugo-prep time over here in Casa de Seanan, which means lots of flailing and frantic attempts to herd cats into something resembling order. And is always the case when I have to prep for a major event where appearance matters, I am reminded that it is expensive being a girl, especially being a plus-sized girl who actually wants to look, you know, nice.

To start with, you need a dress. Not just any dress: a dress which is appropriate and flattering and doesn't make you look like a manatee. I wound up going with a really lovely black and red ballgown from Sydney's Closet, a vendor that specializes in plus-size formal wear. I hugely recommend them, they're wonderful to work with. The dress fit almost perfectly, and Meg is doing some minor alterations. I should get it back tonight, just in time for...

Shoes and lingerie! I need shoes. I may also need a new strapless bra, since we can't tell exactly where the neckline will fall until Meg has everything stitched into position. Either way, I'm going to be tromping around the mall for a few hours. Nothing says "it's time for Worldcon" like a trip to the mall in a ballgown. Seriously. Nothing.

I have an appointment at my sister's school for Saturday morning, to have my hair done, and an appointment at Benefit Cosmetics for Saturday afternoon, to have my tan done. (Yes, I know, spray-tanning is horrible and will kill me and boo. But my tan lines are severe enough that I'm essentially calico right now, and that won't look good with my dress. As long as I'm not orange, I'm good. And really, this is me: if I were orange, I'd probably be pretty blissful about it.) My sister will also be doing my nails, before I fly to Chicago, and helping me set up my makeup bag. I don't know yet whether my foundation needs replacement. I guess we'll find out!

Jewelry, I have earrings already, and a few necklace prospects, although I may wind up buying something at the con from Spring.

So yeah. Being a girl? Is expensive as shit, and I am hugely envious of anyone who can just rent a tuxedo and be done. But I am going to look lovely, and get my picture taken with all my favorite people. I didn't go to my high school prom.

This will do.

I watch a great many horror and monster movies, and have since I was a very small child. This explains a lot. This has also taught me a great many things about what not to have characters do, 'cause it's dumb. I will share some of those things now.

***

10. Do not clone predatory dinosaurs and expect things to go well right out of the gate. Seriously, here. In the movie Raptor, they're trying to clone "dinosaurs with a brain*" to do heavy labor and generally become grunt workers for mankind. Okay, if you're a moron, I guess that's a plan. So they start with...velociraptors. And Tyrannosaurus Rex. Because, y'know, that ten-ton killing machine is totally going to use sentience to go "sure, tiny meat-snack man, I'll work my tail off for you!" If you're going to clone dinosaurs, start with a plant-eater.

(*Meaning "a human level of intelligence and reasoning." Because that's a good idea.)

( 9. While we're on the subject, do not make anything that already likes the taste of people super-intelligent...Collapse )

In wandering aimlessly down the primrose paths of the internet, I recently encountered a comment from someone* who found my online persona "grating." Now, no one really likes to be called grating, unless they're in the middle of preparing cheese for the pizza, but they weren't calling me grating, they were calling my online persona grating. Except, of course, for the assumption built into that statement, that the online persona is inherently different from the person behind it.

I think everyone online has an aspect of "persona" to them, if only because ideally, on the internet, you have the opportunity to think before you press "submit." Not everyone does, but the option is still there, for all of us. We filter out certain aspects of ourselves: the faces we present to the world are not exactly one-to-one identical to the faces we present in private. I'm a little wittier on the internet, because I never have to deal with l'esprit d'escalier. On the internet, it doesn't matter that I can't pronounce l'esprit d'escalier (my French pronunciation is so bad it's comical).

I swear a little less on the internet, because I have to think about the process of typing out the word. "Shut your fucking face, you fucking fucker" rolls trippingly off the tongue, but it doesn't fall quite so easy from the fingers. I don't usually document how many times I need to pee. And yeah, since I come from the "do not air your dirty laundry in public" school of thought, I can come off as a bit of a perpetual Marilyn Munster when I really tend to flux between being a Marilyn and being a Wednesday. I let my cynicism off the leash sometimes, but I've found that it's more effective when I don't live and breathe in a haze of grumpy.

Also, I really am inappropriately enthusiastic about everything. Soda. Movies. Commercials that I really like. Street pennies. Peeing. I love peeing! I mean, I don't pee on trees or anything, but I really like it when I go into the bathroom feeling uncomfortable, and come out feeling a-okay. Plus it's an excuse to sit and read, and who doesn't love that? People who are around me in the real world are likely to get treated to a constant stream of alternatingly perky and snarlingly homicidal sound bytes. "Gosh, trees are nice, I like trees I WILL DESTROY ALL WHO THWART ME do you think maybe we should go back to Disneyland in October SOMEONE ON THE INTERNET IS WRONG RARRRRRHGHGHGHGH oh hey juice." Most of these things never make it online, because they're fleeting impulses, or because I don't feel like providing an ocean of context to make them make sense.

I guess that's really where internet persona comes in, at least for me: I make more sense online. I have less visible downtime, I'm a little less random, and I'm a little more measured with my swearing. I'm just as perky, and just as cranky, it's just not a twenty-four/seven thing. It's really important to me that I not be artificial online, because I spend so much time interacting with people offline, and I don't want to be reading from a script every time I do a public appearance. (Although that would be hysterical. I should write a "being Seanan at a book signing script," and start tapping people to stand in for me while I go to get myself another soda.) Filtered doesn't mean shallow, and thoughtful doesn't mean fake.

On the balance of things, I think you can tell whether or not you'd like me in person from listening to me online, as long as you remember that there's a whole third dimension offline, and that I can sometimes use that third dimension to run into traffic after red balloons, or produce seemingly random frogs. And I find that pretty cool.

Thoughts?

(*Who will not be named here, you know the drill, and everyone has the right to an opinion.)

Like, seriously. How else do you explain Blackout being the first of my books to make the print New York Times list (in position #15 on the Mass Market Paperbacks sub-list) and now making NPR's list of the best science fiction and fantasy of the summer?

In other news, HOLY CORN MAZES, YOU GUYS, BLACKOUT IS ON THE NPR LIST OF THE BEST SCI-FI OF THE SUMMER!!!!!!!

Ahem.

I am very, very excited, as is only natural when INCREDIBLY AWESOME THINGS of INCREDIBLE AWESOMENESS decide to happen. This is so amazing. I am so amazed. Also, there have been confirmed sightings of the Newsflesh trilogy at WalMart, and no matter what you think of WalMart, that's a lot of eyes potentially falling on (and maybe even buying) my books. Dear world: please buy my books. I have a lot of cats to feed.

NPR! NYT! OMG!

Squee.

Here's a reminder for all you Mira Grant fans out there:

I, and by extension, she, will be appearing at Borderlands Books this coming Saturday, June 2nd, at 6:00 PM. Why? To celebrate the release of Blackout, naturally! There will be Q&A, cupcakes, and a reading from "San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats."

As an extra added bonus, if you come early, Mary Robinette Kowal, also known as "the voice of October Daye," will be at the story at 3:00 PM, reading from and promoting her awesome new book, Glamour in Glass.

Borderlands events are free of charge, and the store is more than happy to take orders for signed and inscribed copies, if you can't attend.

I hope to see you there!

First off: my beloved catvalente has written a heartbreaking essay about sexism in geek and science fiction/fantasy culture. You should read it, because it is relevant. Also because it is heartbreaking and true. Having been one of those female fantasy authors threatened with sexual violence because I dared to own cats who came from a breeder, and not a shelter, I can testify that things get really ugly, really fast, on Captain Internet.

And so...

Last weekend at Emerald City, I saw a sign that infuriated me. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. It was a big banner on the front of a self-published* author's booth, reading, "Finally, a book for BOYS that the GIRLS will enjoy reading, too!"

Oh. You mean unlike 90% of the well-regarded "classic" science fiction, fantasy, and young adult genre novels out there? And 98% of the horror? And 99% of the military science fiction? And, let's face it, the majority of anything that's not a romance, a story about princesses, or a horse book? As a girl who grew up reading Bradbury, King, Wyndham, Anthony, Asprin, Piper, Foster, Knight, Shakespeare, Poe, De Lint, Baum, superhero comics, and horror comics, I cry thee foul.

And no, this is not a case of me carefully editing out the female authors of my childhood. After wracking my brain, the only ones I could come up with who even managed to compete for my affections—who were writing stories with girls, rather than girl stories, and were thus worth reading in my twelve-year-old estimation—were McCaffrey, Kagan, Tiptree (who wrote as a man), Pini (whose writing still gets credited to her husband by about half the people I talk to), Jones, Duane, and McKinley.

I discovered more female authors as I got older. Emma Bull. Pamela Dean. Jody Lynn Nye. Women who were writing stories with girls, not girl stories; women who were building the foundations of a new genre, filled with interesting, clever, intuitive characters who yes, sometimes happened to have the same plumbing I did. And sometimes they didn't, and that was okay, too. But—and this is where we loop back to the beginning—it didn't matter. If I wanted to read, I needed to read books about boys. Books that were probably intended by their authors as being for boys. If I wanted to enjoy reading, I needed to enjoy books for boys.

If this has changed at all, that change has happened in the last eight to ten years, beginning with the publication of Twilight. People were writing books for girls before that, but there's always a trigger event, and Bella Swan making millions of dollars for her author (and publisher) was the trigger for a veritable flood of "girl books" hitting the shelves. These were books with female leads, with women on the covers, with a stronger romance subplot than had necessarily been required in YA before people figured out that hey, girls read, and maybe some of them will read more if you offer them female characters to read about.

Since then, the number of "girl books" has exploded, and while some of them are girl stories, some of them are also stories with girls. Some of these books are romances. Some of them are not. Some of them are medical thrillers, adventures, war stories, epic fantasies, distopian futures, cyberpunk, steampunk, mythpunk, modern day, anything you can think of. Because they are stories. And yet somehow, the fact that they have girls on the cover makes them not worth reading. The fact that the main characters have to squat when they pee makes them untenable to half the population. The fact that their authors grew up being told that real science fiction, fantasy, horror, and adventure starred men doing manly things in a manly way, and yet grew up to write books about women doing the same things, does not prove that literature can be a gender neutral experience where story matters more than anything else; it proves that we need more books for BOYS that GIRLS will enjoy, too. It means that the girls keep on coming second, that we keep being the deviation, and not the norm.

I do dislike the fact that right now, sexy girls pout at me from the covers of almost every book in the YA section, because I know that culturally, we discourage boys from reading those books, and damn, they are missing out. But I also dislike the fact that I'm expected to be totally a-okay with teenage girls reading books covered in muscular men with giant guns, while sneering at teenage boys reading books with thoughtful-looking women on the covers. We say "don't judge a book by its cover" like it's a Commandment, and then we turn around and tell boys not to read books with girls on them, or books with pink on them, or anything that doesn't look macho enough.

If I could read Little Fuzzy, you can read Partials. If I could read Myth Adventures, you can read The Chemical Garden. There will always be some stories that appeal to us more than others, but when we start saying "this book is for BOYS but don't worry, GIRLS can read it, too" vs. "icky GIRL BOOK is ICKY and NOT FOR BOYS," we create a division in our literature that doesn't need to be there, and frankly, upsets me.

Let's all just read the books we want to read, regardless of covers or the gender of the main characters, okay? Because otherwise, we're missing out on a lot of really great stories. And that would be a shame.

(*This is relevant only because it implies no editorial oversight. If I were to try using a slogan like this, my editors, and my agent, would politely make me stop.)

VERITY PRICE!!!!!!

Ahem. Discount Armageddon has debuted on the New York Times Bestseller list, in position #35. This is otherwise known as "the best position," because it is mine, and I love it. I am...I am overjoyed. I am SO EXCITED I COULD DIE. This is my second time on the list (my first was with Late Eclipses), and to make it with my very first book in a brand new series is like a dream come true.

This is my crazy little book about a ballroom dancing cryptozoologist cocktail waitress with talking mice in her closet and nothing in her fridge, and it's on the New York Times Bestseller list. I can't believe it.

Thank you, thank you, a thousand times thank you to everyone who bought this book during release week. I am so glad, and so grateful, and so excited. Above everything else, I am so excited.

Discount Armageddon made the list.

Hey, look! I'm in an anthology! River, from Dark Quest Books, edited by Alma Alexander. It's a book of stories about, well. A river. My story, "Lady of the Waters," is about a ship called The Jackdaw, her centaur captain (no, really), her faintly annoyed crew, and some giant catfish. I quite like it.

Oh, and hey, the audio books of all the Toby Daye adventures are still available at Audible.com, including Late Eclipses and One Salt Sea, which periodically appear as customer favorites. I find this awesome, and you should totally check it out if you haven't already listed to the fabulous audio narration. Or even if you have. I'm not picky.

SCIENCE CHEERLEADERS. It's like a beautiful dream. With pom-poms. There was no earthly way not to share.

...and because that last link may have restored your faith in humanity, here are some insanely depressing "rules for girls" collected from Twitter. The next time someone asks you why I keep threatening to ignite the biosphere, this is why. We can't have nice things until we've burned out all the stupid.

The title of this article right here is "How Amazon Kills Books and Makes Us Stupid." Again, destroying faith in humanity through the aid of my link file. You're welcome.

So it's a mixed bag today, but it includes SCIENCE CHEERLEADERS and CENTAUR SHIP CAPTAINS, so I'm going to call it overall a positive. Your mileage may vary.

Saturday night was my belated natal day celebration, wherein several* of us gathered at The Mint in San Francisco to get our karaoke on. Now, if you're going to get your karaoke on, The Mint is the place to do it. They have an incredibly large, diverse catalog of songs, and their resident KJ**, Frank, is a snarky miracle. Plus they have pear cider on tap. It's a perfect storm of karaoke awesome.

Because it was my birthday, Vixy actually flew out from Seattle on Friday night, and we were able to spend a good chunk of Saturday ambling around San Francisco. I showed her Toby's new neighborhood, and we ate lunch at the Phoenix. All was well. Our reservation was for six; we reached The Mint about ten minutes early, and secured our tables. Several people were already there, karaoke-ing away. Some of them were even sober.

The rest of our party trickled in by dibs and dabs; you never knew who was going to show up next. Naamen, for example, spent an hour at the wrong bar before he checked his email and realized he was in the wrong place. Oops.

Successful karaoke requires an odd mix of "taking it totally seriously" and "not taking it seriously at all." You either need to choose songs that sound good in your range, or songs that are utterly ridiculous, like our lengthy run of Disney standards (Kate's "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" was awesome). You need to have a sense of humor, but not clown it up so much that it hurts to watch you. Because we are a group of lunatics, we're very, very good at successful karaoke. Not all of us can sing, but we can all laugh at ourselves while still being PROFOUNDLY SERIOUS about the source of our laughter.

We sang rock. We sang country. We sang "Bohemian Rhapsody" en masse. Morgan claimed not to know Melissa Etheridge, so Kate did "Come to My Window"; Morgan allowed that she knew Melissa Etheridge after all. Morgan sang "The Final Countdown," and we were all kazoos. Vixy sang "Barracuda," and I watched all the drunk sorority girls hate her forever (it was adorable). Victor and Lara did "Istanbul," which was hysterical and amazing. Sunil sang "Dragula," JUST FOR ME. In short, we had a seven-hour karaoke party of karaoke party awesomeocity.

At one point, having already exhausted the songs that other people wanted me to sing ("When You're Good to Mama" for Kate, "Raise Your Glass" for Vixy), I decided to do "Independence Day," by Martina MacBride. Only I don't really know her version. I know Talis's version, which has less spousal abuse, and a lot more alien invasions. So I figured what the heck, if the scansion worked, I'd run with it.

The scansion worked. I ran with it. Turns out I know the whole thing! The drunk people looked confused, since they could tell I wasn't singing what was on the screen. The sober people cracked up. One nice man even came up to me after to tell me that I was his favorite performance of the night.

Kate and Morgan saw us out with a duet of "Don't Stop Believing" that got literally the entire bar singing, and then we all limped, exhausted, home.

And that was my karaoke party. We're going to do it again soon. Frank promised me he'd get the new Taylor Swift***, and I need to get my karaoke on.

(*The Mint is not a massive establishment, so "several" was defined by how much space we could successfully reserve. Another party had already reserved most of the seating area for their loud drunk bridal shower. In the balance of things, I wish we'd reserved first, but we live with what we get.)

(**Karaoke DJ. Basically, he's the guy who decides whether you get the song you asked for, or the obscure Swedish cover that's been pitch-shifted up an octave and shifted to a faster tempo. Be nice to your KJ. Tip your KJ.)

(***"I think her ever-present frown is a little troubling. She thinks I'm psycho 'cause I like to rhyme her name with things.")

I asked Mom if we could go by the mall tonight after I got off work. "Sure," she said. "What for?" I told her there was a store I'd heard about called "Justice," and that they might have Monster High dolls. Mom, who is endlessly tolerant in some ways, thought this was a fine idea, and away we went.

Now, for the last month or so, we've been haunting the usual stores looking for the new beach assortment, the ghoulishly-named "Skull Shores." There are five dolls in the assortment, four of which have been released (the fifth, Draculaura, will be joining the set in the next wave of releases. This keeps you coming back to the shelves, even when you think you're done). We hadn't been able to find any of them.

We reached the mall, parked, and made our way to the Justice...where I immediately found all four currently available Skull Shores dolls, AND several Toralei dolls (the werecat I recently had wonderful people hunt for in Australia). I gleefully grabbed one of each of the Skull Shores dolls and, after a moment's consideration, snagged a Toralei as well. I wanted to compare her paint to the Australian version of the same doll.

Now, Mom and I go to Toys R Us a lot. I mean a lot. So we've come to know the people who work there pretty well, and one of them, M., also buys Monster High, for his little girl. Her favorite is Abbey Bominable, who is damn hard to find, and the reason that her father has also been awaiting Skull Shores anxiously. After a little more consideration, we grabbed a second Abbey. I paid for my toys (40% off the whole store!), and we decamped for the Toys R Us.

We took Abbey and Toralei inside, Abbey for M., Toralei to show the manager, since he's had people asking for her. M. was on lunch, and the manager said we might be able to find him outside. We went looking. Upon finding him, I thrust Abbey at him, going "Look!" He was very excited, since, well. Hell hath no nagging like a little girl in want of a specific toy. I explained that I hadn't found her inside, but we'd grabbed a second in case he needed her. He stared, and said (without handing back the doll—I think I would've lost fingers) that he had no cash on him. I affirmed that I knew where he worked.

Happiest. Dad. EVER.

I showed him the Toralei, so he'd know what she looked like. He asked, excited, whether they had another of her, too...so I handed him the Toralei. Dude, I have mine, and I am happy to play toy mule for actual small children. Tomorrow, I shall return to Toys R Us to get reimbursed for toys, and tonight, when he returns home, M. shall be a hero.

Karma is important. Pass it along.

I am absolutely delighted to announce that I will be the Guest of Honor at Windycon 39, to be held November 8-11 2012 in Lombard, Illinois (right near Chicago). The theme of the convention is ZOMBIES, which makes me basically the perfect guest in every possible way (no false modesty here). Even better, my beloved Amy McNally is their music guest, which means that Windycon 39 will be a veritable PERFECT STORM of SHEER AWESOME.

I am very excited, and I hope to see you there!

Also: a few people who knew about this early (not from me) spilled the beans, and I started getting cranky emails from people who wanted to know why I wasn't announcing the convention here or updating my website to reflect that I was going to be attending. The answer? I wasn't allowed. Please remember that regardless of what you know, I can't acknowledge things I don't have permission to talk about yet, and that includes convention guest invites that haven't been announced or confirmed by the con in question.

I can't wait to see you all in Illinois...and that's why I haven't been saying anything up until now. It's been a secret.

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

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

Anyway, here you go:

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

I have once again contributed Epic Silliness to the Orbit blog to celebrate a holiday.

Annabel Lee, After the Rising.

Go forth and be amused. And remember, once she's dead, she is no longer your girlfriend.

Happy Halloween, everybody, and Happy New Year's Eve to those of you who share my particular calendar. May the Great Pumpkin smile upon you tonight, bringing you candles which burn brightly, candy that never goes stale, corn mazes as complicated as the twisting choices of the heart, and costumes that are inventive, interesting, and not solely founded on the idea that "slutty" and "spooky" are one and the same.

(Lo, if you choose to be Sexy Red Riding Hood or Smoking Hot Super Grover on this night, I salute you, because you're wearing a costume, and I don't question how other people want to celebrate this night of nights. But if you're doing it because you don't think you have a choice, or because you can't think of anything else, call upon the Great Pumpkin. He's the Squash. He'll hook you up.)

I spent last night with my mother and sister at the Pirates of Emerson Haunted House Park, where we demonstrated that sometimes money can buy happiness, since it was money that got us through the gates, and money that allowed us to spring for Speed Passes, thus bypassing the huge "night before Halloween, let's party at the haunted houses" lines. I also demonstrated my eerie spatial memory by tearing through the corn maze in less than ten minutes, trailed by a cluster of lost-looking thrill-seekers who had been wandering the maze for over an hour before I came through Walking With Purpose. Had I been one of the Children of the Corn trolling for victims, He Who Walks Behind the Rows would have eaten very, very well.

Today, my back is out, and so I'm wearing my Starfleet bathrobe (in Sciences blue) over slouchy jeans and an athletic shirt, representing the few, the proud, the bored Starfleet Academy graduate students. Give me replicator coffee or give me death.

Enjoy this holiday. The walls of the world are thin today, and whether your personal year turns tomorrow or two months from tomorrow, thank you for spending this year here, with me.

Trick or treat.

This past weekend, I was in Ohio for OVFF (the Ohio Valley Filk Festival). I go as often as I can, usually every year, and I always have a wonderful time. This year, I was honored to be represented twice on the 2011 Pegasus Ballot, once for "Best Bad-Ass Song," for "Evil Laugh," and once for Best Song, for "Wicked Girls." My beloved Amy McNally, meanwhile, was on the ballot in the "Best Performer" category. It was an exciting year.

It was also a brutally hard ballot. Voting for the Pegasus Awards is never easy, but it's usually a little easier on my heart than this. There was absolutely nothing bad on that ballot, and nothing that I could even really say "well, that's perceptibly weaker than the things around it" about. It was all amazing. The only thing I was sure of was that I couldn't predict the results; the only result I was really praying to the Great Pumpkin for was in the Best Performer category, where I desperately wanted Amy to win.

Best Romantic Song was the first announced, and went to "As I Am" by Heather Dale. We all clapped and cheered, and laughed at her pole-axed acceptance. Best Bad-Ass Song was the second announced, and went to...me. And my dinosaurs. I sort of staggered to the front, blinked a lot, said dinosaurs were cool, and went away. My table clapped and cheered. Best Writer/Composer, S.J. Tucker.

And then...Best Performer, Amy McNally. My table, which had, again, clapped politely when I won, EXPLODED. Literally. Screaming, shouting, applause. Amy wasn't able to attend this year, so Brooke, Vixy, and I went up, announced that we were Amy's Angels, and accepted the SHIT out of that award.

I am so proud of her.

Best Classic Filk Song went to "The Phoenix" by Julia Ecklar. More clapping and cheering. And then Best Song...

Best Song went to "Wicked Girls." Oh, my heart.

I have coveted that award. I won't pretend that I haven't. I've wanted it, very badly, from the day I understood what it was. It is the ultimate "you are an awesome songwriter and you have written an awesome song" of filk, and I wanted it. I did not cry, but only, really, because I was still in shock and full of delight over Amy's win. We are wicked. We are fair. We can all of us save ourselves.

The winners for 2011:

Best Filk Song: "Wicked Girls" by Seanan McGuire
Best Classic Filk Song: "The Phoenix" by Julia Ecklar
Best Performer: Amy McNally
Best Writer/Composer: S. J. Tucker
Best Badass Song: "Evil Laugh" by Seanan McGuire
Best Romantic Song: "As I Am" by Heather Dale

Some interesting facts:

This is the first time the entire Pegasus slate has been won by women. No co-writers were harmed in the granting of these awards. Go team Wicked Girls!

Amy McNally's win marks the first time someone who is primarily an instrumentalist has been awarded Best Performer. So well-deserved.

Julia Ecklar won the John W. Campbell Award in 1991. I won it in 2010. This is the first time, ever, that both Best Filk Song and Best Classic Filk Song have been won by professional authors.

It was a very good year. Thank you to everyone who voted, and thank you to everyone who believed that we could fly.

Oh, and Amy? Congratulations, sweetheart.

I am still sick, which means that my attendance at this weekend's OVFF may be in question. I'm still planning as if I'll be better in time, and so I have a very important question to put to the floor:

Which of my two otherwise identical dresses should I pack for the Pegasus Banquet? The orange, or the green?

Last night, as the first rain of the season washed the world clean and gray and filled the air with the smell of ozone and damp leaves, I curled up on the couch, flipped through the channels, and settled, wonderfully, on Halloween II: Kalabar's Revenge, which was airing on the Disney Channel. The first two Halloweentown movies are among my favorite of the Disney Channel Originals (DCOMs), and the second is my favorite of the two, since it spends so much of the movie being about Marnie and Luke and their weird witch/goblin love. (I don't care if they went and canonically hooked Marnie up with a traditionally pretty warlock boy in the third movie. She and Luke are my DCOM OTP.)

There are Pumpkin Spice lattes at Starbucks and Pumpkin Pie Pop-Tarts at Target and pumpkin pancakes at the IHOP. Empty buildings are transformed into sprawling Halloween wonderlands with names like "Spirit" and "Halloween Central." Many of them used to be Borders stores. It's like changing one kind of personal church into another, more transitory, beacon of faith.

I spent the last night of September wandering lost in a vast corn maze, stopping periodically to hug the corn, to bury my face in the leaves and just breath in the sweet green smell of the autumn coming in. If one of the boutique perfume companies could make a perfume that was the exact smell of corn maze at midnight, with the dirt and the green and the ripening corn and the cool night air...I would buy twenty bottles. I would sell my entire current perfume collection if I had to, in order to buy more bottles of that perfect corn maze scent. Because it would be the scent of my soul.

For me, this really is the most wonderful time of the year. This is the time when the air smells right, when the coffee tastes right, and when it's easiest to resist the siren song of things I shouldn't be eating, because those things are everywhere.

October is like coming home.

Hey. Remember when I wrote a novella leading up to the release of Deadline, and we called it "Countdown," and everybody had a good time watching the end of the world? Yeah, that was fun. In fact, that was so fun that Orbit wound up purchasing the novella for the Orbit Short Fiction Program, which gave me the luxury of revising and expanding on the original text (since I couldn't really afford the time when I wasn't getting paid for it). Good times.

Well. The times are getting better. Subterranean Press, the publishers of amazing limited-edition, illustrated works of speculative fiction, have acquired the rights to "Countdown," and will be publishing a special hardcover edition of the novella. These books will be limited to a signed and numbered print run of 1,000, and will include both "Countdown" and "Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box" (also previously published by the Orbit Short Fiction Program).

I am so excited. I don't know yet exactly when the books will be available, although believe me, I'll be announcing it as soon as I have any information. They should sell for about $35 USD, and are likely to sell out, if past books from this publisher are anything to measure by. Subterranean does small, beautiful, collector's-quality books, and having an edition from them is something I have dreamed of for years.

Life is good.

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

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

Anyway, here you go:

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

Some of you may remember that I did a series of blog posts "counting down" to the release of Deadline, chronicling the days leading up to the Rising of 2014. Some of you may remember asking me whether there would ever be a collected edition. And, well. Some of you may remember getting my standard "I can't say anything right now" reply of "LOOK! A BUNNY!"

Well, look. A bunny. Or more specifically, look, Countdown: A Newsflesh Novella now available for your e-reading pleasure! Countdown retails for $2.99, and is an awesome opportunity to have more Kellis-Amberlee goodness for your very own.

Click here to go to the official Orbit Short Fiction page for Countdown.
Click here to go to Amazon, and the Kindle store.
Click here to go to Barnes and Noble, and the Nook store.
Click here to go to the iBook store.

Now, some people will doubtless ask why they should pay for this when they can (and possibly have) read it for free on my blog. They may not ask me directly, 'cause we're normally more civil than that around here, but I'm going to answer anyway. There are four really good reasons.

1. This is a professionally formatted file, with all thirty days in the same place. No clicking, scrolling, or getting lost in my occasionally quixotic tag system. Basically, it's three dollars for total convenience.

2. I said a few times while writing the original series of posts that errors would creep in because writing live left me no time to go back and revise. Well, the luxury of Countdown becoming something I was paid for allowed me to go back, edit, adjust, and correct a lot of things, some little, some big. It also got a pass through the Machete Squad, making it a much higher-quality work.

3. The novella I want to do next year for Blackout is much larger and more ambitious, and it's really going to need those editorial revisions to be as good as I want it to be. The sales of Countdown will encourage Orbit to buy The Rising 2014: The Last Stand and Final Fall of the California Browncoats.

4. My cats like to eat. My cats like to eat a lot. My cats will, eventually, if unfed, eat me. If the cats eat me, I stop writing. If I stop writing, everyone will be sad. Except for me, as I will have been eaten. Buying Countdown helps me shove gooshy food into the fluffy monsters, and allows me to remain uneaten.

Countdown!

(If you have links to other ebook stores, please kick them over, and I'll add them.)

Hey! It's time once more for Science Fiction in San Francisco, the game where the rules are made up and the points don't matter! This Saturday, July 9th, at the Variety Preview Room Theatre in San Francisco, California. Doors open at 6:00PM, readings begin at 7:00PM. Who's going to be there? John "I am so damn cool, I wrote songs for Blue Oyster Cult" Shirley, and Mira "Who wants to find out what's lurking in the haunted cornfield?" Grant. To quote the Mira bio from the website:

"Mira Grant may or may not have attended SF in SF before. She is the evil twin of local urban fantasy writer, Seanan McGuire, who shot to fame last year by winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the WorldCon in Australia. More recently Mira's personality has crept to the fore. Her debut science fictional zombie tale, Feed, has received nominations for Best Novel in the Shirley Jackson and Hugo awards. Rumors that Mira has kidnapped Seanan and plans to torture her to death in various slow and painful ways are hotly denied by her publicist (but then he's a demon and does everything hotly). Mira's new novel, Deadline, a sequel to Feed, is currently available in bookstores and summoning circles for appropriate payment."

See how awesome this event is? I get a DEMON PUBLICIST. I'm sure he'll be thrilled to find out that he's been outed to the world by a local literary event. Hopefully "thrilled" won't involve cleansing us with fire.

Readings will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Terry Bisson. Admission is free, but there will be a cash bar, with all proceeds benefiting Variety. There will also be book sales courtesy of the ever-awesome Borderlands Books. Support a good cause and a local bookstore and see me read live! Fun for everybody!

Hope to see you there!

Once again, we rewind to late May, when I was in New York City enjoying friends, humidity, publishers, and pigeons. Or, more specifically, we're rewinding to Sunday the 22nd, when I was scheduled to a) go into Manhattan to have brunch with The Agent, b) meet up with Will, and c) have dinner with several of my friends, including Batya, Alex, and the lovely Priscille. Everybody wins!

Foolishly, I thought that in New York, "brunch" meant, well, "brunch," and so expected to return to Jersey City during the day. Yes, yes, laugh at my pain. Anyway...

I rose, showered, dressed, and made my way to Manhattan, following the now-familiar path to the PATH train. I enjoy riding the PATH. It's easy and predictable and not really like riding the subway at all. Finding The Agent on the other end was easy, and we had a lovely, leisurely brunch at Cafeteria. I had a waffle with berries and cream. She had green eggs and ham (pesto is a magical thing). We split lemon pancakes with more berries and cream for dessert. Yes, I have now blogged what I had for breakfast. You have my permission to weep for mankind.

After brunch came the ceremonial Wandering Around Manhattan, wherein I actually did the traditional tourist thing and went shopping in New York. Sure, it was at Old Navy, where I bought half a dozen more tank tops in a variety of rainbow hues, but that counts, right? The Agent turns out to be hysterically funny in Old Navy, by the way, and even pickier about her tank top fit than I am. All hail compatible crazy.

We finished shopping and settled at the local Red Mango frozen yogurt, where The Agent ate yogurt and I didn't, because ew. Will came and got me, because he is awesome, and we bid The Agent what would be the first of many fond farewells. Will and I walked a great deal. I got an artisan Popsicle! Life is good. I also got to see Will's apartment, which was very clean and grownup, as befits a new law school graduate. Totally awesome.

After frozen treats and apartment visits, we made our way to the bus stop, hence to ride to the kosher Indian restaurant where we would be having dinner. Priscille wound up on the same bus, which was AWESOME, and much laughter and happiness accompanied us all the way to food, where we were met by Jon and Merav, Batya and Alex, a surprise Constance, and an extra bonus Jessica. Constance couldn't stay, but there was hugging, and then the rest of us went in to do some serious eating. I had goat. Who's surprised?

Dinner was followed by ambling aimlessly around the city, stopping by Dylan's Candy Bar, and finally drinking sugary things at Starbucks. Jon and Merav had actually driven into Manhattan, and so I was able to get a ride back to Jersey City, where I tumbled into bed, full of goat, happy, and ready to face the week ahead.

Which is good, because the week ahead was about to KICK MY ASS.

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

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

Anyway, here you go:

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

I am...honored and delighted and a little stunned to announce that Feed, written under the name "Mira Grant," has been nominated for the 2011 Hugo Award for Best Novel. The award will be given this August, at Renovation, the World Science Fiction Convention to be held in Reno, Nevada.

Yeah.

I've been nominated for a Hugo.

And yeah, I cried.

This is such an honor. This is...this is one of those things I never expected, that I get to have for the rest of my life. "I was nominated for a Hugo Award." Winning would be awesome, but in a way, it's icing on an already delicious cake, because I was nominated. Out of everything published in 2010, enough people said "Feed was the best" that I made the ballot. Me, and four other people, out of all the books there were.

I am honored and stunned and delighted and terrified, and it's something I've dreamed of literally since I found out Ray Bradbury had a Hugo Award, so I must have been, like, eight. And now my name is on that ballot.

When will I Rise? I don't think I could Rise any higher than I am right now.

Thank you all so much.

Because nothing says "Seanan is trying to relax" like me undertaking a new project, I am going to be making a limited batch of "Wicked Girls" T-shirts. How limited? "The number of orders I receive, plus maybe a few extras, but I don't make any promises"-limited.

The design, thanks to the ever-lovely Tara:



This is a mock-up; the actual shirts will use that design, but will vary a little. I'm printing them through a small local shop, and they're being wonderfully flexible about everything. There are three types of shirts I can do.

The standard girl-cut T (click here to view the basic shirt) can be printed in black, dark chocolate, dark gray, indigo, midnight navy, plum, or scarlet, and is available in small through 2XL.

A girl-cut T with a shallow V-neck (click here to view the basic shirt) can be printed in dark gray, indigo, plum, or black, and is available in small through 2XL.

The larger girl-cut T (click here to view the basic shirt) can be printed in black, charcoal, dark chocolate brown, dark green, or purple, and is available in small through 4XL.

The unisex T (click here to view the basic shirt) can be printed in black, charcoal, dark chocolate brown, dark green, dark heather gray, navy, or purple, and is available in small through 6XL.

There may be an additional charge for sizes 4XL through 6XL, but it wouldn't be more than a few dollars.

HOW THIS IS GOING TO WORK.

1. If you want to buy a shirt, comment here with:

a) what you want (size, style, color)
b) how many you want
c) your email address

2. For each shirt you're requesting, stuff $20 in a cookie jar somewhere. Why? Because I will not be asking you to pay for your shirt or shirts until we have a sufficiently large number of requests to print. (This is also why we're not doing baby shirts. If twelve people want to ask for them, then we can talk.)

2b. The $20 is inclusive of postage within North America; outside, please indicate that you are willing to pay additional postage.

3. I will add your information to a spreadsheet, and contact you when we have enough requests.

Orders are now closed. I am still contacting people to add them to the spreadsheet. Thanks to everyone who ordered!

Today marks the launch of the Orbit Short Fiction Program, through which they will be bringing you delicious nuggets of juicy fiction goodness from Orbit authors. Including, naturally, one miss Mira Grant.

In fact, they have a new Mira Grant story available right now.

"Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box" is a heartwarming story about high school friends who still see each other every week to play a game that they love very much. Namely, the Apocalypse Game, wherein they end the world with gleeful abandon. But sadly, someone may be taking the game a little more seriously than was originally intended...

"Apocalypse Scenario," and all other stories in the Orbit Short Fiction Program, are available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Diesel Ebooks, and Booksonboard.com. Follow the link to either the landing page for the program or the story itself to get the links.

Enjoy the end of the world.

The ballot for the 2010 Shirley Jackson Award has been announced. Shirley Jackson is one of those writers I've admired since before I really fully understood that the people whose names were on the front of books had written them, rather than nurturing them in strange gardens, where they were watered with blood and cream, and bloomed only under the light of the full moon. Although maybe, that's what writers really do, and when we talk about "writing," we really mean "plundering the hearts of our neighbors for seeds." Who knows?

Shirley Jackson wrote "The Lottery," and The Haunting of Hill House, which has scared the crap out of me on a regular basis since I was seven. The Shirley Jackson Awards were established with the approval of her estate, to honor "outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic."

This year, Feed is on the ballot.

To quote the website, the award is "voted upon by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics, with input from a Board of Advisors." It's a jury of my peers, and whether I'm found guilty or not, it is truly an honor to be brought before them. I'll be really honest here: I never expected this. I don't think of myself as writing the kind of books that get nominated for awards, no matter how much I love them. My garden bears strange fruit, but not the kind that takes the ribbon at the County Fair.

But there I am. On a ballot with Peter Straub and Robert Jackson Bennett and Neil Gaiman and Michelle Paver...and it's amazing.

It's just amazing.

So—for a variety of reasons—I've had the song "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves" stuck in my head for about three days. This has started to drive me insane. Consequentially, I spent a good chunk of yesterday composing new verses, just so I'd be singing something different. The last time this happened, I found it so entertaining that I decided to make it a party game, and now I'm doing it again (yes, this is now officially a party). Give me a girl from folklore, myth, literature, or hell, modern media, and if I have a clue of who she is, I'll write a verse.

A few rules:

1. Fictional people only. Real people go in the bridge, and I already re-write that every time we do the song live.
2. One girl per customer.
3. Jean Grey is not eligible.
4. Don't make me come over there.
5. Please don't reference the original entry and try to stump me. I'm happy to do second passes at characters I've done before, but only while it stays fun.

Game on!...annnnnnd game off. I have all the requests I can handle, and will be adding new girls to the list throughout the weekend! Thanks for playing!

( Click here for the girls who have already joined our party!Collapse )

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

I scrolled down the list.

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

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

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

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

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

Zombiesque [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] has been out for a few weeks now (although my anthology-loving heart still leaps every time I see a copy, even if it's on my desk), and a few reviews have poked their happy little heads up.

Lexile reviewed Zombiesque for Night Owl Reviews, and says, "Zombiesque is a better than average anthology." Yay! But what does she think of the Pumpkins? "The funniest story was Seanan McGuire's 'Gimme a "Z"!' about a cheerleader who recently died and is resurrected. She doesn't see any reason why even though she's dead she can't, you know, wash her hair or go out to get a soda or like be a cheerleader. The story is really ridiculous and what ultimately keeps her from being one of the shambling, flesh eating dead is just short of absurd, but it's immensely entertaining."

Oh, yeah. Fighting Pumpkins rule.

Kelly at Daemon's Books gave Zombiesque five stars, and says, "Personally, the zombie cheerleader story called 'Gimme a "Z"!' was my favorite." What more need be said? Oh, how about, "The writing was fantastic, Seanan McGuire’s take on the way that teenagers (well, stereotypical cheerleader teenagers) talk was perfect." See? All that snark is good for something!

Finally, the Zombiesque review at Errant Dreams calls out each individual story on its merits and failings, and gives a fantastic general overview of the anthology.

Everyone seems to be in agreement: this is a fun book with good stories, and you should check it out. Plus, it marks the first in-print appearance of the Fighting Pumpkins cheer squad (their prior appearance, "Dying With Her Cheer Pants On," was virtual). Show school spirit! Support the team!

GO PUMPKINS!