Time is broken.

If an apologetic Hermione Granger appeared to me right now and told me that she had been using her Time Turner on my house for the past two days, I would be more relieved than annoyed, because it would explain why I constantly feel like it's an hour later than it is. I have been incredibly productive--good--because I keep looking at the clock, going "wait, what? That can't be right," and then working for another hour, all because I can't believe it's actually that early.

This is a recipe for a fussy, fussy day. Today I made word count on both novel and short fiction projects; exceeded word count on both novel and short fiction projects; answered email; answered Tumblr Asks; processed three chapters of edits on the next Toby book (as opposed to the original target of one chapter); and still had time to watch three episodes of Elementary and take a nap.

I know part of this is my brain going "YES YES GLORIOUS WORD COUNT OH MY GOSH TV YES I HAVE MISSED YOU TV" in celebration on getting home from New York, but honestly, it's weird and I will be happy when I drop back down to my normal levels of restless productivity.

On the plus side, I am home until January. Yay, home.

I also cleaned my desk today! Since I re-calibrated the over-desk "brag shelves" on Friday, this means that my work space is remarkably unmessy for a change. It's cluttered, but that's intentional; I like being able to look up and stare at a bunch of different things. It knocks stuff loose. I need to take some of the things off of my inspiration board, which is getting too cluttered to really inspire the way it needs to, but apart from that? I am tidy.

(Because someone asked me recently: when my desk and brag shelves are "tidy," they contain eleven dolls if you're counting things that are articulated to one degree or another, and eighteen total toys with eyes. Lots of things watch me work. None of them are my cats. They would rather watch me nap.)

I hope you're all having as pleasant a winter season as is possible, and that your own workspaces are as clean, or unclean, as you need them to be in order to get shit done.

Every month I make a post to tell folks what I'm working on, a) because it seems polite, b) because it keeps me accountable, if only to myself, and c) so you will understand why I do not have a social life. This is the October 2014 post.

To quote myself, being too harried to say something new: "These posts are labeled with the month and year, in case somebody eventually gets the bizarre urge to timeline my work cycles (it'll probably be me). Behold the proof that I don't actually sleep; I just whimper and keep writing."

Please note that all books currently in print are off the list, as are those that have been turned in but not yet printed (Symbiont and Pocket Apocalypse). A Red-Rose Chain, Chimera, and Chaos Choreography are off the list because they're finished and in revisions with the Machete Squad. The cut-tag is here to stay, because no matter what I do, it seems like this list just keeps on getting longer. But that's okay, because at least it means I'm never actively bored. I have horror movies and terrible things from the swamp to keep me company.

Not everything on this list has been sold. I will not discuss the sale status of anything which has not been publicly announced. If you can't remember whether I've announced something, check the relevant tag, or go to my website, at www.seananmcguire.com. Please do not ask why project X is no longer on the list. I will not answer you.

( What's Seanan working on now? Click to find out!Collapse )

...although I suppose that since these days my hair is dyed in a lovely "sunset over the cornfield" ombre, I should probably consider changing that title, huh? Nah. Shan't. I am who I am, and even if I dye my hair black and start being Mira full-time, I'll always be a blonde girl. So! Statuses and such.

Shipping.

I am in the process of packing prizes and purchases and presents to go into the mail. I had a rough couple of weeks, and didn't do the mail when I was supposed to, which means I have a truly daunting amount of mailing to do. I shall persevere, have no worries on that front! It helps that I just got a brand new Ikea shelf for the front room, to act as a shipping supplies/office supplies storage area. I am much more likely to actually cram things into envelopes and send them out in a timely manner if I have easy access to envelopes, rather than needing to rummage through half the back room to find the damn things. (This is part of the overall "declutter the house and make it more easily livable" plan that has been in process for the last month or two.)

Post-Hogswatch cleanup.

So quite a few people who are not regulars around here added me to their LJ friend lists during the Hogswatch festivities, which makes total sense, since who doesn't love a daily giveaway? And now they're subtracting me, sometimes with apologetic little notes, because the giveaways have ended. I just want to remind y'all that doing this is totally cool. I am a voluntary follow zone! Please un-friend me at will, and don't worry that you're going to hurt my feelings. Unless you belong to a very short list of people, all of whom are dear friends who have known me for ages, I will not be upset. I'd be more upset if I learned that you had forced yourself to stick around out of obligation, and consequentially become sad.

Prepping for Boskone!

My first official appearance of the new year will be at Boskone, a Boston-based science fiction convention where I will be appearing as the author Guest of Honor, and more, where my first ever collection of essays and poetry, Letters to the Pumpkin King, will be released. I haven't seen the cover yet, but I'm sure it's going to be gorgeous. More, it's an opportunity to own the contents of my first two (severely out of print) chapbooks. So that's cool. Boskone will be held over Valentine's Day weekend in Boston, Massachusetts, and I hugely recommend swinging by if you're in the area and want to hear me blather about whatever the con winds up telling me to blather on about.

My icon.

Something new is coming in 2014. Step right up and try your luck; a dollar and a quarter buys an all-night pass. Details to come: watch this space for news (but don't bother asking me now, for I won't answer, no, not at all).

Cats.

Mom ran the shop vac on Saturday, to prep for the new Ikea cabinet I mentioned before, and the cats flipped their shit as only cats can do. Two days later, we still feel the echoes of the epic shit-flip. Thomas has been doing sock slides in the hall, Alice is a ball of bale, and Lilly keeps getting confused by the way things have moved, sitting down in the middle of the floor, and keening.

Cats are complicated, and I can't find the reset switch, is what I'm saying here.

Do you wanna build a snowman?

Or ride our bikes around the hall?

Words: 3,104.
Total words: 11,242.
Reason for stopping: I am out of go. Time to watch Eureka.
The cats: Alice, eating; Lilly, washing her toes; Thomas, elsewhere.
Music: random shuffle, lots of Jill Tracy.

So I didn't quite finish chapter three, but as I have left absolutely no time for the poor Machete Squad to cope with things, I'm okay with that. I have a very ambitious word count schedule for the rest of the week, largely because I'm going out of town for the weekend to attend a memorial, and I'd like to have things ready before I depart. This way, I figure I can send lots of files to be reviewed, and come home to lots of things to correct. Thus is the circle of authorial life maintained.

I'm still getting comfortable inside this book (although it took like six words for me to get comfortable inside of Toby's head, because I've been living there for so long that it's practically my second address). I'll be hitting the main plot soon, and in the meantime, I'm trying to work the exposition and reminders into the text in an organic way. It's fun! And brain-bending.

And that is why I am now going to go and watch television. A girl's got to get her recovery somewhere, right? Right.

Words: 2,731.
Total words: 8,017.
Reason for stopping: chapter two is done, and it's time for dinner.
The cats: all cats are currently out of view, which is worrisome.
Music: still the soundtrack to Syfy's Monster Island. I am predictable.

Once again, I am proving the old adage that all it takes to get me writing again is a finished manuscript and the sucking terror that comes from having nothing immediately demanding my attention. (These are things I needed to be writing anyway, mind you. It's just that Parasite was such a huge chunk of text that it sort of blocked the pipeline for pretty much everything else.) So now here I am, once more hip-deep in InCryptid and loving every mucky, slime-covered step.

Half-Off Ragnarok is really interesting so far, because it's the first book from Alex's perspective. I can't help looking at the text and thinking "gosh, the Machete Squad is going to kill half of this," and at the same time, I can't tell you which half they're going to target, so I have to write it all. That's a good thing, honestly. It forces me to get used to Alex's voice, and the little quirks and oddities of his personality. He's my first (and so far, only) male narrator in this series, and so it's important to me that I get him right.

I am very excited about this expansion of my universe. You get to meet Grandma and Grandpa Baker properly, and see more of the actual ecology of the non-sapient cryptids and how they're able to remain under the radar of modern science. It's going to be a fun ride.

Whee!

Words: 4,059.
Total words: 8,138.
Reason for stopping: I finished chapter two! It's time for food.
The cats: Lilly, bed; Alice and Thomas, flopped over in the hallway.
Music: the soundtrack to Syfy's Monster Island, disturbingly enough.

4,000 words and a chapter—now that's more like it! The shape of the plot is starting to become apparent, and while we're not in the thick of things just yet, it's increasingly clear that yes, we're going to get there, whether we want to or not. (I want to, Toby, as you can probably guess, is not quite so enthusiastic about the idea. Poor Toby. She really never has nearly as easy a time of things as she wants to. If it were up to her, I would write an entire book where the most exciting thing that happened would be Quentin forgetting to put the toilet seat down.)

I think I'm really going to enjoy writing this book, now that I'm starting to get my claws into it properly. Better yet, I've finished some of the pending short fiction that was taking up space on my mental shelves, and that means my normal rotation (Toby, then InCryptid, then a third book) is reasserting itself. Life is good.

Also, this icon is my placeholder for books that don't have icons of their own yet, and I'm really excited to know that soon, I'll be able to swap it off of all my Ashes of Honor posts. Because I am that much of a nerd.

Words: 2,211.
Total words: 4,089.
Reason for stopping: chapter one is finished! Time for So You Think You Can Dance.
Music: random shuffle, lots of Glee.
The cats: it's early yet, so they're off doing cat things.

Well, that's chapter one down. A little over 2,000 words for the night isn't awesome, but it's always slow-going in the beginning, when the story is just beginning to pick up steam and I'm still feeling my way into the situation. Honestly, just typing "chapter two" before closing the file made me want to weep for joy. I'm back. I'm in Toby's world, and I'm back. And more, I get to stay for at least three more books after this one, so I can unpack my things and really get comfortable.

There isn't too much I can say about what's going on, since Ashes of Honor isn't out yet and I try not to spoiler. But jam is involved, and also shirtlessness, coffee, and Toby not getting enough sleep. But isn't that always the way?

I'm back.

Words: 1,878.
Total words: 1,878.
Reason for stopping: it's time for bed.
Music: the Rock of Ages soundtrack.
The cats: Alice, bed; Thomas, bed; Lilly, cat tree.

It's official: as of tonight, Chimes at Midnight is properly and officially started. I've hammered through most of chapter one, I've established the initial conflict that kicks everything else off, and I've remembered why I am so damn in love with this world and the people that it contains. I know some people are frustrated by the fact that I've gone down to one Toby book a year to make room for InCryptid, and while I desperately hope that someday I'll be able to be full-time and write three urban fantasies a year, there's a beautiful homecoming aspect after having taken this long of a break that's just plain magical. It's like...this is where I wanted to be, and I barely even knew it. It's amazing.

Tomorrow night, I'll knock out another thousand or so words of the Rose Marshall story I'm working on (it's for an anthology), and then I'll finish chapter one of Chimes at Midnight. And then I'll probably cry, because here we go again.

Here we go again.

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

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

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

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

It will be awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

I am slammed, and so you're getting one of those dense little fudge-like blog posts where everything fits easily in your mouth and also, you probably don't want to eat the whole box. You're welcome. And so...

The Return of the Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling Show.

The Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling Show will be coming together again on October 1st, to blow the roof right off of Borderlands Books! It's going to be a party. This time, the lineup includes Vixy and Tony, Betsy Tinney, Katie Tinney, Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff, Paul Kwinn, and the always-awesome Beckett Gladney. Mia Nutick will be on hand, with pendants. Kate Secor will be on hand, with sticks. Come for the music, cupcakes, readings, raffles, and fun; stay to buy books and make the bookstore like me. Hooray, Circus!

Ashes of Honor.

The sixth Toby book is trekking right along, and is currently on-schedule to have a finished first draft by October 26th. I even have a progressive daily word count goal sheet to prove it. Once the book is done, it goes off to the Machete Squad and The Agent for review and severe physical harm, and I can really buckle down on Midnight Blue-Light Special, a few YA projects, and the next Mira Grant book. This is what we call "Seanan rewards herself for working by creating more work." This is also what we call "Seanan has no social life."

Social life.

Except that I do have a social life, honest! I'm flying to Seattle this weekend for a Counting Crows concert (yes I am flying to another state just for a concert DON'T JUDGE ME I LOVE THEM). The Pirates of Emerson are getting ready to re-open their annual haunted house park, and I'm very excited about that. And I'm already making sure to plan dinners and lunches with the friends I'm going to see during...

My fall convention schedule.

The first full weekend of October (7th-9th), I will be the Literary Guest of Honor at Conclave, in Romulus, Michigan. The weekend after, I will be appearing at the LitCrawl!, this time in the Borderlands Cafe. The weekend after that, I will be flying to Ohio for OVFF, where I will sing in the Pegasus Concert, share a room with Brooke, hug Vixy a lot, and wear a pretty dress.

And after that, I nap.

Too much TV.

All my fall shows are coming back on the air. Right now, as of this week, I'm watching Eureka, Warehouse 13, Alphas, Castle, NCIS, Glee, The New Girl, America's Next Top Model, Fringe, Haven, and Doctor Who. Some of these shows are ending for the season very soon. Others are just getting started. Still others have not yet made an appearance on the schedule. Thank the Great Pumpkin for Tivo.

Toys!

The spring line of Monster High dolls has just been announced. I have acquired the Modern Doll Collector's Convention Evangeline ("Soul Sweeping"), but not the centerpiece doll (which I want very much). I have arranged a proxy for the Halloween convention. I am, in short, insane. But wow, do I have lots of toys staring at you while you try to sleep.

Cats.

Insane.

"Wicked Girls" T-shirts.

At the printer now! Soon, I shall have them, and soon, we shall begin sorting out the shipping process. Since some of you did order them as gifts for the holiday season, I may try doing a "priority boarding" post, where I say "let us know if you need yours soon for any reason," and bump those people to the front of the queue. If I do this, however, I need to trust that only people with real need will ask; more than fifty such requests, and we won't be able to handle them, so no one will get out-of-order shipping. And the spreadsheet is really random, the order in which your request was placed has nothing to do with it.

...and that is all, for right now. More to come later.

I need a nap.

Words: 9,843.
Total words: 48,180.
Reason for stopping: I have finished chapter twelve. Now is the time of sleeping.
Music: mostly Pink, Dar Williams, and Ludo. Still.
The cats: Alice, demanding I stop typing and love her. Others, unknown.

...well, that happened. And yes, the temptation to write just another two hundred words and break the 10k barrier was very strong. I have suppressed it by reminding the little voice that asks for such things that we're on track to break 50k on Wednesday (I get Tuesday nights off), and that's pretty damn awesome. Ashes of Honor is projected to be "average length" for a Toby book, which means between 101,000 and 112,000 words. Probably somewhere in the middle. So hey, I have almost half a book! Woo-hoo!

In the text, I can say without spoilers that Toby and Quentin have reached Tamed Lightning, and everything is going about as well as can be expected at this stage in a Toby book. So I get to have April O'Leary-flavored goodness for at least five minutes before everything goes to hell.

Finding the balance between "look, if you're reading book six in the series, I really hope you've read the first five" and "previously, on October..." is fascinating, and incredibly difficult. Every book, I get people who complain that there's too much back story, and people who complain that there's not enough; I have to find the ragged edge between them and skate along it like my life depends on it. I think I'm getting better at it, but there's so much background now that it's still occasionally very hard.

I'm making my goals; the book is moving along at a decent clip; while there will doubtless be extensive rewrites and at least one crying jag, I expect to have a finished first draft by the end of October.

Yay.

Tomorrow is the release of One Salt Sea. Tomorrow. It's being spotted in the wild; I couldn't take this book back if I wanted to. And to be quite honest, I don't want to. I'm excited as all hell to know that you're about to have the chance to read it. I hope you will. And because I am a blonde who is disturbingly fond of feeding her cats, I hope you'll buy it, too, and enjoy it as much as I enjoy knowing that it's out there.

I am currently working on Ashes of Honor, and am literally making this post to free up some tabs. So here, have some links:

Book Banter is doing a giveaway, in which you can win a copy of One Salt Sea. I love the gang at Book Banter. They are awesomesauce. So enter, and win!

Sara Anne, who I found through Twitter, has an excellent post on why official publication dates matter, and hence why authors get a little sniffly when people talk about finding their books early. I would really, truly love to make the NYT again with this book. I would love to make the print list even more, since that would mean I'd have something to frame. If I make the print list, I will do a giveaway the likes of which has never before been seen. Just saying.

And look! One Salt Sea is a Night Owl Reviews Top Pick! Hooray! I'm totally thrilled, because this is totally awesome. Hooray for good reviews!

See you tomorrow!

Newsflesh trilogy, final stats.

Start date: September 4th, 2005.
End date: September 2nd, 2011.

Volumes: Three.
Words: 455,814.
Pages: An awful lot.

...so yeah. That happened.

Last night, at approximately 9:15PM, I finished processing the last of the editorial changes to Blackout, and kicked the manuscript off to The Agent for a final typo check. She kicked it back to me this morning, and at approximately 5:21AM, I finished correcting the last of the grammatical and typographical errors. The book is back with her for a final final check, and then it's off to The Other Editor, to begin the process of transforming into something you can read.

It's over.

I have other things to do in this universe, other stories to tell and to enjoy telling, but this story, this trilogy...it's over. I am finished with the Masons. Their tale is done.

I've never finished anything like this before. I feel a little numb and a little scalded and a little overwhelmed, all at once.

Thank you. Thank you to everyone who's read these books, recommended these books, loved these books, hated these books, or interacted with them in any way. Thank you to Michael and Amanda, Kate and GP, Spider and Steve, Alan and Jude, Brooke and Vixy and Bill and Mike and Rae and Sunil and Amy and Cat and...and...and everyone. Just thank you.

Thank you for helping me tell this story. I never could have done it on my own.

Alive or dead, the truth won't rest. Thank you for helping me to rise up while I could.

Since I'm currently trying to clear out all the older reviews from my link file, thus enabling me a) to post reviews of newer books while they're still, you know, new, and b) to find the non-review links I saved because I wanted to write about them, I thought I should take a moment to explain my position on reviews. Namely...

1. I don't link to every positive review I find.
Yes, good is good, and everybody likes a little good news, but some reviews are very brief, or don't say anything especially new. I appreciate and am honored by every review that I receive. That doesn't mean I want to subject people to the all-reviews, all-the-time channel. That's a good way to get myself hit.

2. I don't go looking for reviews.
I'm way past the point of ego-surfing looking for reviews of my books, and I've found that, on the whole, I'm happier if I only read the things people email me links to, or that are found by my Google spiders. So if I don't post about your awesome review full of witty comments and deep thoughts, it may be because I never saw it. Or it may be because, as now, I'm three books behind in the file. Both things can happen.

3. I don't read Amazon or Goodreads reviews at all.
This is a hard rule. For serious. Some of the reviews posted on those sites seem to have been written by people who think authors don't have feelings, and while I try to say "judging the work, not judging me," it's really hard when people get personal. So I just don't go there, and everyone stays happier.

4. I don't generally link to negative reviews unless they have something really interesting to say.
I've had a few people say, somewhat sharply, that I'm a Pollyanna when it comes to reviews; I just post the good ones. This is largely true. There are two reasons for this: one is selfish, and one is altruistic. Selfishly...this is my journal. Why should I link to people saying bad things about my stories? I love those stories. They're my babies. Altruistically, most of the people who read this journal are here because they love those stories, too. I don't want to unleash a swarm of flying monkeys on some blogger who was just having an honest opinion, and then found themselves unexpectedly linked to by the author. It's not nice, it's not fair, and I'm not that kind of a girl.

5. I make no promises as to the timeliness of my links.
I have had one reviewer—just one—email and yell at me because their long, thoughtful review hadn't been linked to three weeks after it was posted. It's August, and I'm posting reviews from October. I love linking to reviews. It makes me happy. But wow, are there no guarantees as to when it's going to happen.

A vague disclaimer is nobody's friend!

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

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

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

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

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

Anybody want to come over and help me index stuff?

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

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

1. Deborah (the Lovely Assistant for the Wicked Girls shirt project) is now contacting anyone whose payment hasn't been received via LJ comment, in an effort to give folks every possible chance to complete their order before we go to press. Remember, this is a limited-run thing, so we're not making more shirts than have been paid for, at least not for general sale (I may make and squirrel away a few extras, but that isn't going to help you if you haven't checked your email for her payment request). So if you're still trying to complete your order, please do so ASAP.

2. Speaking of completing things...my LJ comments got a little bit away from me, with over 600 waiting in the queue at one point. I've managed to peck and pick them down to 74 comments in need of answers, and I'm going to be trying to get to all of those this week. If you left me a comment and didn't hear back, and you thought I was ignoring you, I wasn't. (This applies to first comments only; I don't reply to all replies, I would lose my mind. Also remember that I declared amnesty for all comments left on the countdown, and will not be answering those.)

3. I am still waiting to hear back from all winners in Friday's Deadline drawing. Specifically, I have not yet heard back from irish_ais. If I do not hear from you by 5PM PST tonight, I will be choosing a new winner. Sorry about that.

4. I'm going to be doing my first giveaway of an ARC of One Salt Sea (Toby Daye #5) later this week. Watch this space for details.

5. Here is a lovely interview with Elizabeth McClellan which mentions, among other things, "Wicked Girls," Sooj, Amal's splendid Honey Month, and Cat Valente. Go, read, be delighted.

That's all for right now. What's new with you?

April is the cruelest month. It is also, apparently, the month where I spend half my time dealing with the pieces and paperwork that I spend the other half of my time ignoring. Yippee for me!

In a weird way, I really do mean that. I am a creature of essential chaos, bounded and defined by an equally essential degree of order. I can't have an artfully disorganized shelf of stuffed toys unless I know where they are to artfully disorganize them in the first place. I can't make room for more Monster High toys (and I am about to make room for a lot more Monster High toys*) unless I have the ones I already own put where I want them. My intellectual life is very similar. I can't tell the stories I want to tell unless the ones I've already told are where they're supposed to be.

So last night I processed edits and approved page proofs and made my word count (which I've been pushing hard lately, to try to buy myself a day off on Sunday for Jeanne's wedding), and then I set up the spreadsheet for the Wicked Girls shirts and started confirming people's requests. Remind me next time I say "I don't know if twelve people will want this..." that the answer is almost certainly "yes, they will" and "hire an assistant for the duration." I may have to cut orders off after two weeks, rather than waiting a whole month, just so I'm not still mailing them come time to head for San Diego. (Yes, I have lots of other trips between here and there. That's just sort of the big 'un for this summer.)

I also managed to place my order for convention ribbons for the next year (or two, or three). Wow, did I order a lot of ribbons. Like, even the person who handles the ribbon orders was all "that's a lot of ribbons." But it means I will have AWESOME RIBBONS, so that's okay, then. Not all of them will be handed out with joyous abandon, since some are specific to events or panels or states of mind, but there should be plenty to share with all. Yay, ribbons!

Today, I will go to the passport office and apply for my new passport, go by the DMV and get an actual state ID for the first time in ten years, and then go home, write 2,000 words, and update my T-shirt spreadsheet a whole bunch. This is going to be the way my week goes.

How about you?

(*See, this is how you know I don't have any advance copies of upcoming books. Because if I did, I would so be trying to BRIBE THE WORLD FOR TOYS. I'd be like, "Who wants to swap me a zombie novel for a zombie in her prom dress?", and I'd have the Dawn of the Dance Ghoulia Yelps to love and hug and shamble for me.)

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

Ahem. Anyway...

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

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

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

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

What's new with you?

So, um, hey.

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

Things I did this weekend:

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

Things I did yesterday:

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

Things I will do today:

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

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

With two books coming out soon (and one of them being the sequel to Feed), I'm getting a lot of contacts, in a lot of forums. So here's the periodic reminder about reaching me:

1) My website has a "contact" form. Actually, both of them do. You can contact Seanan-me or Mira-me, and both of them go straight to me. I answer Seanan-mail a little faster, because it dumps into my main inbox, but either one will do the job.

2) My LJ is paid! Which means you can email me @livejournal.com. It's true! That, too, will drop you into my main inbox, which is a warm, comfortable place to be. You should try it.

3) Sending me messages through the LJ inbox, on the other hand, makes me sad inside. I'm serious. If I could block it without screwing up my comment notifications, I would. As it stands, I make absolutely no guarantees about answering you. Ever. Messages sent to inboxes I've asked not be used are the only ones I don't feel obligated to reply to.

4) The same goes for Facebook. I use Facebook to play stupid clicky games and occasionally check on my friends. I do not use it for mail. So if you send me messages there? I may never get back to you.

So seriously, if you need me? Email. Email is the ONLY WAY I can guarantee a reply. Even there, please be aware that I am about twenty feet underwater at all times right now; it may take several days, or even weeks, before I reply, unless your message is somehow time sensitive (like "Please come over here and eat this cupcake").

Thank you!

I am utterly obsessed with a show called Doctor Who, and have been since I was somewhere in the neighborhood of three years old. (This is not an exaggeration. You can ask my mother.) I contributed an essay to Chicks Dig Time Lords [Amazon], a book of critical essays on being a fan of the show while also being a girl (not always easy).

So naturally, when Tor.com contacted me and asked if I wanted to be a contributor for their mad awesome "12 Doctors of Christmas" blog event, I said yes so fast it left a few heads spinning, including my own. Here, then, is the official announcement:

Tor.com's 12 Doctors of Christmas: A Holiday Extravaganza!

...okay, so many the extravaganza part was me, but seriously, how cool is this? They've got at least one person for each Doctor, and the lineup is gorgeous. To whit:

First Doctor (William Hartnell), George Mann. "Susan, history is a gift. Do not break it."
Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton), Nick Abadzis. "Be Scottish at it, Jamie. Perhaps it will go away."
Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee), Paul Cornell. "And don't wander off!"
Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker), Nicholas Whyte. "Care for a jelly baby?"
Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison), Pia Guerra. "Celery is good for you."
Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker), Josiah Rowe. "You wicked, wicked little thing."
Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy), Seanan McGuire. "Come on, Ace. We've got work to do."
Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann), Steve Mollmann. "I didn't mean to."
Ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston), Graham Sleight. "Brilliant!"
Tenth Doctor (David Tennant), Nasty Canasta. "The last. The very last."
Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith), Lynne Thomas and Tara O’Shea/Mark Waid. "Who's the man?...right, never saying that again."
Twelfth Doctor(s), Jason Henninger. "RESULT!"

That's going to be twelve days of pure, unadulterated awesome. None of which will make any sense at all if you don't have at least a little familiarity with the show, for which I apologize. But not too much.

I love Doctor Who. Squee!

And now we reach the end of our countdown to the release of A Local Habitation [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy]; it comes out tomorrow, and I don't feel like going into negative numbers. ("Reason -6 why I am getting really tired of this game...") One more day. One more day before the sky falls on my head and I suddenly have to admit that book two is actually out.

Aigh.

On the plus side, this means that as of tomorrow, I can start going crazy over different things. You know, things like "do people like the book?", "will people like book three?", and "will I be the top-selling paperback at Borderlands for the month of March?" (Hint on that last one: they do mail order, they'll have signed copies, and I would really appreciate it if you could order from them if you wanted a signed and personalized book but can't get to any of my signing events.) I can also resume going crazy over the process of writing book five, The Brightest Fell, which is kicking my ass in the most delightful of ways. Seriously, this book is like "no, you don't know what's going on, now shut up and sit down." If I don't wear my seat belt, I may go through the front windshield of the book the next time it hits the brakes. It's very odd, but sort of awesome.

Amy the Fiddler arrives tonight, fresh from the wilds of Alabama, where she's been staying with my Halloween Family for a week. I envy her immensely, but I'll forgive her instantly, because it means I get an Amy, and I really need an Amy right now.

In other news, I have uploaded a bunch of new strips to the "With Friends Like These..." strip gallery, and will continue updating it as I get them re-sized for easy viewing. We're actually moving into the ones where the art isn't quite so primitive. Yay!

And now we must rinse.

So in the last seventy-two hours, I have...

...finished "Good Girls Go To Heaven," the first Sparrow Hill Road story, and returned it to my editor for review. (I like to be early, so that there's time for me to be thoroughly edited.) I'll probably be starting "Dead Man's Party" in a day or so.

...finished "The Alchemy of Alcohol," my first-ever steampunk story (also my first story about Mina Norton, alchemist, bartender, and exceedingly cranky native of San Francisco). It was ludicrously fun to write. Mina is refreshingly annoyed.

...started "Gimme A 'Z'!"—which, as you can probably guess from the title, is the next adventure of the Fighting Pumpkins cheerleading squad. The wearing of little pleated orange and green skirts is clearly dangerous, given the trouble these girls manage to get themselves into.

...started "Slow," a much more viscerally upsetting zombie story. It's a zombie week here at Casa de Blonde.

...written way too much of Blackout, which probably explains why I have so many zombies on the brain right now. I love this series a lot. I'll love it even more when I get about another five thousand words on in the current book, since that will mean it's time to pause, consider, and process edits. (Yes, I really do schedule everything.)

...finished reviewing my page proofs for Feed. Alive or dead, the truth won't rest. Rise up while you can.

My new website will be going live real soon now, which means new material, including the Toby FAQ and the Sparrow Hill Road landing page. Watch this space for details. I am now going to go extract my Maine Coon from my purse.

Current stats:

Words: 7,137.
Total words: 85,301.
Reason for stopping: about midway through chapter twenty-two, totally exhausted.
Music: my evolving Discount Armageddon mix.
Lilly and Alice: asleep in my tank top drawer, being a puddle of blue and white fur.

The speed with which this draft is suddenly materializing is a little scary, and is making me feel faintly hag-ridden. Seriously, there's "my normal writing speed," and then there's "writing to make a deadline," and then there's "holy Great Pumpkin in the sacred patch, where the hell did the day go?" Assuming this book comes out at exactly the estimate, I have fewer than 20,000 words left to go. Second draft will cut ten percent of that. (Actually second draft will cut twenty percent, but half of what I cut will be replaced by clarification, necessary bridgework, and general textual repairs. That's what second draft is for.)

After this draft is done, I have to focus fully on Blackout and The Brightest Fell while my proofreading pool crawls all over the text and rips it into tiny bleeding shreds. (For Christmas this year, I'm getting a bloodbath! Just what I always wanted.) I figure I should have space on the docket to get into Midnight Blue-light Special sometime around May...you know, when I have the Guest of Honor slot and the book coming out. Gosh, it's fun to live inside my head sometimes, in the sense that apparently even I don't think I need to sleep. Sleep is for the weak and sickly, right?

I am so in love with this book right now. I am so in love with this series right now. I am so in love with this world right now, with its reality shows and its cryptid-owned strip clubs and its many, many expeditions into the sewers of Manhattan. I can see where a second draft is going to be absolutely necessary, but right now? Right now, I am just enjoying the hell out of the ride.

I can't wait for you to meet these people.

1. I have mailed the first three "delivery by post office" chapbooks. They're going to, respectively, California, New Hampshire, and...Australia. Sometimes the distance my work has managed to travel genuinely astonishes me. (I'm still giggling over how fast the chapbooks went away once I posted them. Zoom!)

2. I have mailed a restock of Stars Fall Home off to the nice people at CDBaby. (My first two CDs—Pretty Little Dead Girl and Stars Fall Home—are now distributed entirely by People Who Are Not Me. This is for the sake of my sanity, as well as for the sake of the folks at my local post office. You can still order Red Roses and Dead Things through my website, but that isn't going to last for long.)

3. As part of my "do all your damn mailing already" campaign, I'm going to be mailing any pending CD orders on Monday, when I mail the prizes for the LOLtest (voting is still open through tomorrow, so please vote). I currently have three CDs in "confirmed and good to ship" status. If you've ordered and have never received a "payment confirmed" email, please ping me so we can try to fix it. If you haven't ordered, now is basically the perfect time to do it and be semi-guaranteed quick delivery of your CD. (I say "semi" because I'm the Rain King, not the Mail Queen.)

4. In other news, Piglet mailed me candy corn. Piglet is now my new best friend.

It's good to be the Princess of Halloween.

* Busier than God.

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

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

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

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

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

Having been asked to provide personal notes to go with my personal list of places I knew needed to receive ARCs of Rosemary and Rue, and being the balanced, reasonable, under-achieving person that I am, I decided to slack off, and just fill in some pre-printed mad libs...and if you actually think that's true, you should really go take a look at my website. "Balanced, reasonable, and under-achieving" is about as accurate a description as "made of enchanted pumpkin pie, stapled together by magical weasels from the moon." (Actually, the latter description may be more accurate. I like pumpkin pie...) Viewing this as an excuse to acquire new art supplies (always an aspiration of mine), I promptly went to the art supply store, where I acquired...

* Two packs of watercolor greeting card blanks
* A new set of gorgeous watercolors in a cunning stack
* Two new watercolor brushes

...yes, I probably ought to seek help, but I really don't care. I am a content and comfortable addict, whose habits mostly just inconvenience my capacity to put anything away. I've spent a comfortable week composing, sketching, and painting watercolor "thank you for reading" notes to be sent off to my publisher. Since I really wanted to get them into the mail today, I spent about two hours last night doing a watercolor marathon as I finished off the detailing on the various cards.

Enter Alice.

Alice loves water. Watercolors are, surprisingly enough, largely based on what? On water. So Alice thinks that me doing watercolors is awesome. So awesome, in fact, that she really wants to help. Guess what doesn't actually help me do fine detail watercolors? Wow. Good guess.

Step one, set up watercolor station. Take brushes away from Alice.
Step two, start working. Discover that Alice is drinking the water I use to clean my brushes. Take water away from Alice.
Step three, clean brushes. Discover that Alice is now drinking the purple paint. Take paint away from Alice.
Step four, reassure self that yes, this is non-toxic paint.
Step five, discover that Alice is now licking the paint off one of the envelopes. Take envelope away from Alice.
Step six, put Alice off the couch.
Step seven, put Alice off the couch.
Step eight, give up and let her drink the damn paint water if she really wants to. At least she's not drinking the actual paint.
Step nine, discover that Alice is now a blue classic tabby and purple and orange and green.
Step ten, put everything away on a very high shelf, resolve never to work in oil paints.

My cards are done, and you can barely tell how much "help" I got. And since the paint is non-toxic and Lilly loves bathing Alice (whether she needs it or not), everything is basically back to normal. Except, perhaps, my nerves.

Late Eclipses—formerly Late Eclipses of the Sun, before I admitted that if even I wasn't calling the book by its full title, there was no point—was originally finished, in its first draft form, towards the end of last year. (This is the fourth Toby book, for those of you playing the home game. Which is essentially everyone but me, in this particular case.) It was a lumpy, sort of misshapen monster of a thing, but that's not uncommon for first drafts, and besides, it was mine, and I loved it. Not all of it, true, and there were some parts I even came close to outright disliking, but still. We try not to judge our children.

Thankfully, my various proofreaders—and perhaps more importantly, The Agent—have no such compunctions about judging me, and my manuscript was sent home beaten, bleeding, and covered in corrections. Many of them were structural, since there were large chunks of text that seemed intent on playing ring-around-the-rosie with one another.

(As a small digression, some of these same sequences would have seemed amazing if I'd produced them, say, a year ago. Two years ago? The skies would have opened and angels would have descended to sing "Listen to Jesus, Jimmy" in six-part harmony. This is the problem with writing constantly: you get better, and then people expect better, because they know you're capable of it. Sometimes I feel like I'm tap-dancing on an ice floe surrounded by hungry polar bears with attention deficit disorder. If I ever run out of shiny things, I'll become some lucky bear's new picnic basket, filled with lovely things to eat. Like my spleen.)

I've been working on revising Late Eclipses for the last several weeks, with varying degrees of success. Oh, I'm constantly succeeding—the text is changing, the book is getting shorter (it was previously almost 15,000 words longer than a "normal" Toby book, and it didn't need to be), and the action is getting more linear—but the rate of success is exceedingly variable, and can sometimes feel like I'm swimming through vanilla frosting. Mmm. Vanilla frosting. Anyway. Last night? Last night, I basically sliced the book open, ripped out half its guts, and stuffed them back into the chest cavity in a new, more aesthetically pleasing arrangement. Last night, I dropped from 115,000 words to 109,000, and the counter is still descending. I cut a chapter, transplanted another chapter to a point later in the book, and then combined the transplanted chapter with the chapter it was now adjacent to in a variety of interesting patchwork ways.

I am totally exhausted. My book is a battlefield. It's like Elm Street in here; dead darlings everywhere, blood on the ceiling, and the vague, sticky fear of a sequel (in this case, it's called The Brightest Fell). But the book is getting better. It's sort of awesome, in a "baby, when I finish this, plain ol' Philadelphia Burke is going to be Delphi forever and ever" sort of a way. Plus, it's eventually going to be fun to tell this story at conventions and watch people check their copies of the book for scars.

I just don't know if I'm ever going to get the blood out of my hair.

I have spent my week being very, very productive, especially when you consider the fact that a) I just got a new kitten, b) Lilly didn't allow me to sleep for over a month during her "kitty go crazy" period, and c) the lack of sleep, followed by sleep's sudden return, has left me slightly sick and very definitely jet-lagged in my own body. It's exciting! But this week, I have...

...turned in an essay for one of those exciting "smart people try to sound smart while talking about television" essay books. I'm excited! This is the first time I've been asked to participate in something like this, but I've always been a little envious of authors who get to go and sound smart while they talk about, say, Supernatural or Buffy. Hopefully I've managed to sound super-smart, because I'd love to do this again. I have a list of shows I'm just dying to sound totally smart about. Like Fringe and Cupid. Oh, and if there's ever a "smart people try to sound smart while talking about shows that were canceled before their time" book, I can corner the market on Freakylinks.

...revised nine chapters of Late Eclipses, only to discover that one of those chapters needed to be combined with another to form a sort of, I don't know, "super-chapter," while another chapter needed to be cut entirely. On the positive side, I made these discoveries entirely on my own, without any outside assistance. Also on the positive side, this will help with my goal of getting the book down between 105,000 and 110,000 words. On the negative side, dammit, I already revised this part of the book. Damn plot. It's getting complications and fingerprints all over my stuff.

...set up the landing page for the Velveteen vs. series, including a brief description of what the series is about, a listing for the stories in order-as-written, and a listing for the stories in chronological order (which will matter more as the JSP-era stuff starts getting posted). All the Vel stories are being cleaned up and revised before they're posted, which slows it down a bit, but also lets me take care of all those pesky typos and logic problems that people have been so very kindly pointing out to me. Behold! For now I wear the continuity pants!

...submitted all my receipts, agreed to an estimate on my taxes, and confirmed that I'm ready to receive my extension forms, hence to turn my taxes in. Self-employment tax blows. The next time someone asks why I haven't quit my day job yet, I may pull out my tax receipts and a conveniently labeled graph. SCREWING A WRITER IN FIVE EASY STEPS. Step one: self-employment tax.

...introduced Lilly and Alice to one another without bloodshed (either feline or human), and without any major emergencies, unless you want to count Lilly forcing her way into the bedroom during what was technically the isolation period. I rarely, if ever, close my bedroom door all the way -- the cats like to be able to come and go, and the litter box in my room is a relatively recent development -- so I had totally forgotten that Lilly knows how to work the latch, and will work the latch if given sufficient motivation. Like, say, being locked out of the room. But all's well that ends well, and this has ended well.

What's everybody else's productive looking like?

Me: I believe I shall revise this chapter.
LE: I believe I shall kick your ass.
Me: I'm the author, I get to win.
LE: *chuckles evilly*

(Eighty pages and a lot of profane language later, there's blood on the ceiling, and slaughtered adjectives litter the carpet like, um, thingy.)

Me: I HATE YOU SO HARD.
LE: I'm better now.
Me: ...what?
LE: I'm a better book now.
Me: ...why the hell couldn't you cooperate if this was the end result?
LE: Because it's more fun this way.

(Cue more insensate swearing. Fade to black.)

In other news, work on the fourth Toby book continues apace -- yes, I'm aware that the first book doesn't come out until September; remember, my life goals include "turn in the second trilogy by the end of 2010," because that's just the way I roll -- and is only causing me small amounts of severe physical, mental, and emotional trauma. I'm busting ass now, while I can, before the promo for Rosemary and Rue kicks into such high gear that I don't have brain anymore.

Late Eclipses has lost three words from its title, four thousand words from its text, and two chapters from its numbering system, and it's better for these subtractions. It is gradually becoming a lean, mean, causing-me-pain machine.

Now, television, tuna sandwiches, art card inking, and the eventual sleep of the just. Good night, y'all. Don't burn down the internet.

It's the fifteenth of March and I've just staggered home after a cross-country plane trip, which makes it the absolutely perfect time for the March edition of my monthly current projects listing. Again, these are labeled with the month and year, just in case somebody wants to find a specific post later on. Anyway, this is the post where I make it cheerfully apparent that I do not actually ever sleep.

Please note that the first three Toby books are currently off this list, as they have been fully turned-in to DAW; the next input I'm gonna have will come with the ARCs, and you'll be able to buy Rosemary and Rue on September 1st, 2009. Ah, progress. It smells like fear and uncontrollable twitching. Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues is also off the list; it's under review with my agent, and is thus not being actively worked on. Newsflesh is off the list because it's being shopped, and that means I essentially can't have any contact with it until the process is done. I miss you, baby!

The cut-tag is here to stay, because no matter what I do, it seems like this list just keeps on getting longer. But that's okay, because at least it means I'm never actively bored. I have dinosaurs and zombies to keep me company.

( What's Seanan working on now? Click to find out!Collapse )

So, in an effort to get people to stalk me -- I mean, ah, 'track me down' -- at Wondercon, I have declared that the first ten people to track me down and ask me about Rosemary and Rue will receive, gratis and on-the-spot, a specially drawn art card made entirely for the purpose of being given away to at-con, er, trackers.

Because I never work very well under 'you must do X by Y and PS don't screw it up' pressure, I decided the best way not to make this a crazy-making thing would be to do it entirely at random -- as in, just sit down, draw ten art cards, and whatever they turn out to be, that's what Wondercon gets. So I did. And the result was...

1. The Kitsune Girl from the Babylon Wood.
2. A very unhelpful turtle.
3. Toby, stark naked, in a pond, looking pissed.
4. Angie the centaur pirate (long, long story).
5. Bunny with an Electric Knights poster behind her.
6. The Rose-Owl from the Babylon Wood.
7. Cassie Hack from Hack/Slash.
8. Alice Healy with a nice cake.
9. Velveteen in her Junior Super Patriots yearbook picture.
10. A man-eating plant eating a human arm.

Don't worry if not all of those make sense to you -- they barely all make sense to me, and I drew them. Still, I think they're all pretty nifty, and I'll scan them in after I've had a chance to color them.

Life is good. Time to sleep.

So I haven't been posting many word counts recently -- not, as one person jokingly asked, because I've given up writing in favor of playing Kingdom Hearts for the fifteenth time, but because I've entered one of those phases where the word counts are somewhat less quantifiable. If I start out with a file containing 50,000 words, and finish with a file containing 51,000 words, I've clearly written 1,000 words, right? Well, what if, in the process of working that day, I deleted an entire chapter, replaced it with a new chapter, and rewrote three fight sequences? I actually wrote 11,000 words. My net gain, however, is 1,000. And how do you measure revisions? Sometimes I'll spend six hours of quality time with a manuscript and a machete, and come away bleeding, grinning, and down a couple of thousand words. Negative word counts seem a little silly in that situation. I wind up just waving my hands around in the air and saying, blankly, 'lots.'

I've actually been busting ass around here lately. Discount Armageddon got a whole new first chapter, as did Late Eclipses of the Sun; in the case of Discount Armageddon, the original first chapter stayed on as the new second chapter, but in the case of Late Eclipses, well...kill your darlings. I've said it often enough that I really do need to learn how to live by it. I've also done some serious restructuring on the rest of Discount Armageddon, making it tighter, leaner, and much more prepared to dance the samba all over whatever happens to get in its way.

Late Eclipses is going through a similar, but much more dramatic, series of restructurings; several large swaths of the book are being tossed out the window and completely rewritten, including, so far, the original chapters one and two. (One of the other things I say way too often to plead ignorance: the author can be wrong, and that's what rewrites are for.) The story is still essentially the same, it's just getting tighter and more directed in the things that it's saying. That, and I'm slaughtering a lot of wishy-washy modifiers. They're like kittens -- one is awesome, thirty is a crazy cat lady.

I'm just about finished working on Discount Armageddon for a little while, since it's a busy book with places to go and people to see. This is going to mean the return of the word counts for The Mourning Edition, as I get back to work on my favorite zombie universe, and probably the beginning of the editorial revisions on An Artificial Night.

In short, even when it looks like I'm goofing off and having fun with art supplies, I'm working too much to sleep.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeee.

And now, my third set of art cards. The thing about art cards is that they're small. So going end-to-end on one of them is a matter of an hour, tops, and that assumes I can't find the colors that I want in the big bucket of markers, or that something got screwed up somewhere, or that my TV show got really interesting all of a sudden. So I just keep doing more of these. (In the meanwhile, I've also totally rewritten Discount Armageddon. Let's see if anyone notices.) Anyway, here's the next set of six art cards. Again, clicking the graphic will take you to the larger version.



From top to bottom, left to right, you have my second Grants Pass art card, featuring my protagonist, Mercy Neely; a random picture of me (as drawn for my ongoing comic strip) with a pumpkin; a set of three cards modeled around Jim Hines's The Stepsister Scheme (my mother asked me to, and I tend to try to keep her happy), and my third Discount Armageddon/InCryptid art card, introducing another of our major cryptid races.

My next set of six art cards is finished, and will be scanned tomorrow, or possibly Wednesday in-between 'getting home from work' and 'running for the airport.' Either way, I'm busting ass to get things done around here before it's off into the wild blue yonder, and back to Seattle.

Excelsior!

Well, I'm home from a day spent in Fremont (for those of you who aren't Californians, read 'an hour's train ride away from my small-town home, and a much more urban place than I normally spend my afternoons') stitching chapbooks with Beckett, who is quite possibly the most elegantly artistic person I know. She makes art happen the way I make song lyrics -- with an incredible amount of diligence, practice, and carefully-earned skill that looks entirely effortless from the outside.

In 2005, Beckett graciously helped me make a chapbook, Leaves From the Babylon Wood, for that year's Ohio Valley Filk Festival, at which I was the Toastmistress. This year, she agreed to help me make a followup chapbook, titled Paths Through the Babylon Wood, for Conflikt, where I'm going to be the Guest of Honor.

(Someone asked what it's going to take for me to make a third chapbook, I think because they forgot that it's never a good idea to ask about a new project when the wounds from the current one are still bleeding. I replied that it would almost certainly need to involve a convention with the word 'World' somewhere in the name. Because man.)

When Beckett does chapbooks, she doesn't screw around. Hand-printed, hand-stitched -- these ones have a gorgeous photographic cover, in full color, as well as roughly seventy-five pages of poetry. (And surprisingly few printing errors -- a comment not on Beckett's skill at layout, but on my skill as a proofreader. Seriously, the woman's a goddess.) I spent the day happily folding sections, collating piles, and just talking to her. I love spending time with Beckett. It makes things better. (And it's deeply reassuring to talk to someone who understands what I mean about the quality meter breaking on the sixth, or seventh, or twenty-first revision of the same thing.)

I am home. I am safe. I am overcome by the wonder that is my friends. And I am ecstatic over these chapbooks, because they're gorgeous.

Life is good.

Yesterday, I...

...did a lot of fussing about, did a lot of reasonably important (if not entirely time-sensitive) email inbox cleanup, did some work on The Brightest Fell, and finally, attended a multi-hour rehearsal to get ready for my Guest of Honor concert at Conflikt II, as well as the house concert that I'm going to be performing in tomorrow night. If you're even remotely local, and have been considering attending either event, I highly recommend it. If you've never seen me live before, here's a nice quote from one of the conventions I've been featured at:

"Seanan wraps together deep, poetic lyrics and complex melodies, a soaring voice, and an exhilarating hold-nothing-back performance style."

See? Isn't that sweet? The house concert is actually a Vixy & Tony gig to which I have kindly been invited, and we're going to be doing some awesome stuff. We finally hit 'Tanglewood Tree' (a Dave Carter cover) at exactly the right angle last night. When I have tears in my eyes at the end of a rehearsal, that's when you know that you're doin' it right. And the convention, of course, is going to be one of my usual 'but what if we threw a concert and everybody came extravaganzas. I'm even packing the prom dress. Just in case.

Today, I...

...got out of bed, sat down, and wrote the first song of 2009 ('My Story Is Not Done'). To quote the lyrics:

I was born into a fairy tale,
Cinderella's dust-bin daughter.
Seemed like I was meant to fail,
Turning wine back into water,

Mama's slippers shattered when
She turned around to run,
But I never thought that mattered and
My story is not done.

My brain, ladies and gentlemen. Studies are even now underway. That done, I wrote three poems, updated my 'Velveteen vs.' continuity guide, and processed some edits to The Brightest Fell, which I'll get back to just as soon as I finish this entry. Once Fishy wakes up (allowing me access to my suitcase), I'll be getting dressed and going out for lunch with the wonderful folks from Team Seattle. And tonight, of course, we're rehearsing one more time for tomorrow's concert, in a setting which I have been promised will provide both ice cream and kittens. My life, so hard.

Tomorrow, I...

...will be appearing in the house concert I've been nattering on about so much above. Because love means never having to listen to me talk about one thing for all that long.

Hope everything is awesome in the worlds of you -- what's going on?

Since I'm feeling better* today, I'm taking care of all those things which were permitted to slip over the past several days. Specifically...

* I've gone through and checked checks against orders in my ordering database, so that I could correctly mark off those people I don't need to harass into paying me. I'm a very polite harasser, really, but the major down-side of doing CDs the way I do -- IE, 'the pre-orders pay for the production costs' -- is that when people don't pay me, I have real trouble making the albums actually exist. In other news, I now have 212 pre-orders in the system. I feel special.

* I've reviewed the final mastered tracks for Red Roses and Dead Things, confirming that they are MADE OF AWESOME. I am, of course, hyper-critical of my own performances, but that's my nature, and everything I can be objective about on the album is fantastic. Michelle Dockrey, Maya Bohnhoff, and Tom Smith are all super-cool in their appearances, and Tony Fabris just blows me out of the water with his mournful Dave Davenport. I'm so glad this album is about to exist.

* I've also written the back page for the liner notes, which is sort of like the acknowledgments page in a book, only with a lot more references to James Gunn and his pressing need to call me. And yes, I will be sending him a copy of the album. He's on the extremely short 'freebie' list. (It consists of James Gunn, Stephen King, and Eric Kripke, for this album. Because I am a good little horror girl.)

* Since I like not being clubbed to death by The Agent for getting nothing done**, I've also been plugging away on The Brightest Fell. The goal du jour is hitting three hundred pages, and then breaking to hammer on The Mourning Edition for a little while. I find it hysterical -- and also annoying -- that I have, like, two books in my entire 'write this' list that start with the word 'the,' and I'm working on them both at once. Bah.

* Also, I keep stopping to poke at Facebook, and its addictive little clicky-clicky vampire game. You know you're hooked when you consider soliciting total strangers to join your clan. Again, bah.

More to come, after I find my desk under this pile o' crap.

(*Local values of 'better' include 'capable of moving around under own power without feeling the intense need to stop and yark up everything consumed in the past hour' and 'capable of stringing six coherent words together in a line.' We've lowered our standards, now up yours.)

(**My definition of 'getting nothing done' is a very specialized one. I know this thing.)

Well, I've done my songbook updates for November, and since there were buckets of them (although not as many as October), I decided to provide handy links. Because I'm friendly that way. Also because it was something to do with myself while I pretended I had any remaining inclination to process edits. So here you go.

November 2008 Songbook Updates.

Mother of the Crows.
Bargains.
Slippers of Glass.
Temporary Kings.
Waxen Wings.
Denial of Summer.
Into My Parlor.
Like a Cat.
The Terror from the Alintangy Woods.

Whee!

The tiny little part of my tiny little blonde head that controls essential tasks—those things that have to be done, but which I absolutely dread and abhor doing, like formatting submissions, writing cover letters, and outlining projects—decided that the perfect time to write the series outline for the Mason Trilogy* would be while I was all hopped-up on cold medication. Because my brain is special.

Series outlines are the bane of my existence. Basically, they're your "short pitch," your chance to try to sell your story in a format that's longer than a cover letter, but shorter than the whole manuscript. Series outlines are sort of like high school book reports: they're packed with spoilers, and they strip out most of the detail of a story. "A young girl travels to a foreign land, kills the first person she meets, and teams up with three strangers" levels of stripping out the detail.

Feed is over five hundred pages long. Deadline is on track to be just as long. I have no real idea about Blackout, but I'd be astonished if the last book in the series was somehow shorter than the first two. I managed to condense all three volumes to nine pages. My agent loves me right now.

Fear me. And now? I'm going back to bed.

(*This may or may not be the official name of the series, but since all three books are about Shaun and Georgia Mason and their exciting journalistic adventures, it's as good a name as any. My original name for the project was "a good excuse to study virology and talk about zombies a lot," so this is really a pretty big improvement, marketability-wise. I'm great at naming books. I'm terrible at naming series.)

Well, I just finished copy-editing my friend's manuscript and returned it for review. Because I am virtuous and hard-working and industrious and stuff. (I am now awaiting the crews of trained ninja assassins and rabid pixies to burst through my bedroom windows and slaughter me, but that's another matter altogether.) As my reward, I shall go and see Bolt with my housemate. That's how we roll around here. Oh, yeah.

I'm actually quite pleased with myself. I managed to copy-edit -- lightly, but still thoroughly -- an entire manuscript, while not falling behind in my own (often self-assigned) deadlines. As I said earlier, I have some things I have to finish this weekend, but none of them have been endangered by my taking the time, so ha.

Copy-editing someone else when I spend so much time being copy-edited was interesting, because I've learned a lot of rules of grammar and punctuation without intending to; they were hammered through my admittedly thick skull through constant and occasionally angry repetition. (You'd be angry too if you'd given me the same correction fifty-seven times.) There are a lot of casual behaviors, text-wise, that are technically incorrect, but which we happily do anyway. What's interesting is that they often create a slight feeling of 'something is wrong here' when we look at those sentences in a critical fashion, yet without knowing the actual rule, we may or may not be able to articulate the actual problem. The brain is fascinating. So is the language.

...wow, that was all a little closer to 'deep thinking' than I like to be on a Saturday afternoon immediately after completing a large task. Blame it on the soda the size of my head (which is woefully now gone to the great soda fountain in the sky).

Off to the movies; don't burn down the Internet while I'm away, and I'll reward you later with my cranberry sauce recipe.

* Busier than God.

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

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

* Siamese cats + the shower = hysterical win.

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

* Washing your flash drive is scary but entertaining afterwards.

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

I'm currently marooned in the Denver International Airport, due to fun wackiness with my flight back to the Bay Area. (Apparently, the gods of travel thought that Chris and I had too many dinner plans for tonight. Ah, well.) Since I am relatively self-amusing -- I'm the authorial equivalent of Tom Sawyer, I can almost always find a dead rat and a string to swing it with -- I settled down on a power outlet, and have just finished the first chapter of The Brightest Fell, also known as 'Toby Daye, book five.'

(I swear, there really is a method to my madness. A lot of that method centers on the fact that I'm going to be a lot more curtailed in my writing once Rosemary and Rue comes out and book promotion eats my life. So this is sort of a 'start walking early because you know it's the only way to get yourself even remotely close to your destination before the army of frogs attacks.)

(And yes, Jennifer, I've also been working on my GP story this trip. I just hit the point where all the talk of plague was making my neck itch, and since I have a mild cold, that was not a good thing. Work will resume after medication.)

I'm not done with Late Eclipses of the Sun -- there are more edits to be received and crunched through, and I haven't even reached the 'give it to your agent and see if it inspires projectile vomiting stage of things -- but I'm sufficiently finished that working on the next book is the logical thing to do. At least if you're me.

Whee.

The fascinating thing about the speed at which I tend to work is the way that I always feel like I'm not getting anything done. To quote Amy, "Even though Superman can move super-fast, time feels the same for him as it does for everybody else." So while my idea of a 'slow day' may look like some other people's idea of 'so productive I wouldn't be able to move for a week,' the agonies of feeling like I've been goofing off are just as severe for me as they are for everybody else.

I get scolded for this periodically, since I tend to get frustrated and whine. Another friend likened it to that lady who only needs to lose five pounds, yet complains every time she accidentally ingests a calorie. To which I can only note that those five pounds may mark the end of a two hundred pound journey. I'm as fast as I am because I've always ridden myself to move faster, move cleaner, and get more done.

Watching other people at work is truly a fascinating thing for me, because they're chasing the same end through methods which are, quite often, entirely foreign. This is also why I say that there's no 'one true way' to write, beyond the part where all writing eventually needs to involve putting words on paper. (Although even that's questionable, since I know people who've composed and memorized stories and poetry without every writing anything down. If they perform it the same way every time, isn't it still something they wrote? Oral tradition and the rise of podcasting as a method of getting stories out there are changing 'wrote' to mean more than just the act of physically recording words on a page.)

Lilly is ecstatic about the fact that I'm writing again; she feels that my adoration of the strange clicky-box is paid for by the fact that when I'm adoring it, I tend to sit still for long periods of time, thus giving myself ample time to pet the cat. I think she senses that the ailing health of my older feline means something, but hasn't yet put together the connection between 'Nyssa isn't doing well' and 'Mommy keeps looking at pictures of Siamese kittens on the clicky-box screen.'

Won't she be surprised? And, as a secondary question, how does writing work for you?

Yesterday, I...

...got official sign-off to turn in An Artificial Night to my publisher. This means that the entire first trilogy has now been turned in, and I can focus (at least for a few days) on the process of prepping the second trilogy, starting with Late Eclipses of the Sun. I'm deeply excited about this. I have a finished rough draft of Late Eclipses, and about half of The Brightest Fell, but Ashes of Honor is an entirely unfamiliar country. I hope my passport photo doesn't make me look like an idiot.

...finished processing some full-body machete-shot edits to Late Eclipses of the Sun, resulting in my needing a cold shower and the book needing some serious medical attention (the big baby). There's still a lot of work to be done, but the overall shape and structure of things is getting cleaner by the day, and by the draft. I'd estimate that I have maybe two or three passes through left to go before I can file it and get to work on book five. Book five lives in fear. Book five has every reason to be afraid.

...finished the next Velma Martinez installment, 'Velveteen vs. The Flashback Sequence, Part I.' (Technically, that means I need to write the second part of the story still, and I'm direly afraid that it's going to develop a third part, but we take what accomplishments we can get.) I've finally had the opportunity to fully introduce The Junior Super Patriots, West Coast Division. Velma 'Velveteen' Martinez, David 'The Claw' Mickelstein, Yelena 'Sparkle Bright' (no last name released by her handlers), and Aaron 'Action Dude' Frank. As a lifetime comic book girl, it's incredibly awesome to have the excuse to taunt the things I love.

...fully outlined my story for Grants Pass, after realizing that I was trying to write it from the wrong point of view. Yes, again. Only this time, I was in first when I really needed to be in third. (It seems that my novel default is first, and my short story default is third. I do not know why this is, only that it is.) I am a happy girl, full of pep and the love of horrible pathogens.

...watched an enormous amount of television.

Now we shall have victory cake and Diet Dr Pepper, for no other libation could properly match this victory. VICTORY!