Sometimes sitting on news is hard.

I mean, part of my job involves not telling people things until I'm given permission. I'm bad at remembering who I've said what to, and so usually, I just tell people everything, sometimes eleven times; that isn't always an option these days. I have to accept that it's not lying when I refuse to talk about embargoed information. Sometimes I have to accept that it's not lying even when it is, when people go "hey, do you know anything about ________?" and then respond to "I'm not allowed to say" with a smug grin and a "that means yes!"

Silence doesn't always mean "yes," but sometimes people thinking they've tricked me into saying something one way or another can mean that the thing doesn't happen, because now I've run my mouth off and can't be trusted and so I'm off the project. So I sit on news, and I say nothing whenever possible, and I tell absence of information lies when I'm backed into a corner, and I twitch a lot.

Here's my latest point of twitchy goodness:

HOLY SHIT Y'ALL I'M A SPECIAL GUEST AT THE 2016 SAN DIEGO INTERNATIONAL COMIC-CON!!!!!!!!

Me! A Special Guest! At the con I've been attending since I was sixteen! Me! I AM A FANCY LADY AND I AM MAKING A NOISE THAT ONLY BATS CAN HEAR!!!

Sitting on this one was hard. But wow, was it worth it.

10. Seattle is beautiful. I know this, because I am currently in Seattle, at least until Monday (the 30th), when I will fly back to California, have my hair done, do my laundry, sleep, and get on a plane to England. I won't be home for more than a day until April 15th. My accountant is thrilled.

9. Emerald City Comic Con is this weekend! I have posted my schedule. It's very packed and very pretty, and I am super excited about all the good things to come. Whee!

8. Before I left California, Kate and I did a massive post office run, and I mailed another huge batch of domestic shirts, as well as about a third of the remaining international shirts. I will try to send another batch before I leave for the UK (although I can't guarantee it). Also, my mother called to let me know that a box from the shirt shop has shown up, which I presume contains the shirts that weren't printed in the initial delivery. Hooray! I won't be able to sort these until after April 15th, but hopefully this means we can finish fulfillment sooner than later. Thank you all for your patience.

7. Still not writing the X-Men. Give me time.

6. Rolling in the Deep comes out next month! On the seventh, to be exact, and it is fancy. Seriously, this may be the fanciest book I have ever written, at least in terms of awesome production values. What a fancy, fancy book. Also it is filled with murderous mermaids and ill-fated ocean voyages, which are two of my favorite things. Because this is a Subterranean Press book, there's no guarantee it will be coming to a bookstore near you, and it may need to be ordered directly from the publisher.

5. This morning was the San Diego Comic-Con hotel scramble, and it says something about how stressful this is on an annual basis that I was on the Air B&B site shortly after, looking at local condos and thinking "maybe this wouldn't be so bad." I need help, and the con needs a better way of handling hotel assignments.

4. We are getting pedicures today. Because we are fancy ladies.

3. Speaking of fancy ladies, I am seeing so many of my favorite fancy ladies this coming weekend that I can't even express how happy I am. Like, I try, and all the words go away and then the flailing happens and sometimes I just really love my life, okay? Sometimes my life is best.

2. Zombies are love.

1. I will be going to Disney World for the first half of May, so if I seem a little AHHHHHHHHHHHH for the next few weeks, it's because I am literally three conventions and six weeks away from Disney time, and I need Disney time so bad y'all, I need it so bad I can taste it.

What's shiny and new with all of you?

For justice!

I will be a Special Guest at the upcoming Emerald City Comic-Con (ECCC). But where, you may wonder, will that put me?

Friday.

Signing. 12:00-1:00PM, location TBA. Me, Myke Cole, and Django Wexler will be signing copies of Operation Arcana, the new, awesome military SF anthology from John Joseph Adams

Hard Sci-Fi Made Easy. 1:30-2:20PM, Hall B (WSCC 602-603), moderated by John Lovett. Join me, Sarah Remy, Dave Boop, and Kevin J. Anderson as we have a SCIENCE PARTY. To be followed by a signing at JJ 10/11. Books will be available for sale from the University Bookstore, located at booth 2803.

Saturday.

Defense Against the Dark ARCs: Dealing With Trolls, Controversy and Criticism. 3:30-4:20PM, Hall B (WSCC 602-603). I will be discussing the darker side of life in the Internet age, alongside Emma Michaels, Patrick Rothfuss, Isaac Marion, and Heather Reasby. To be followed by a signing at JJ 10/11. Books will be available for sale from the University Bookstore, located at booth 2803. Up against the Rat Queens social club, so I will totally not blame you if you're not there.

Sunday.

Transmedia Storytelling. 12:30-1:20PM, Hall B (WSCC 602-603), moderated by John Lovett. It's the transmedia panel! Join me, Holly Black, Frank Beddor, and Myke Cole, and thrill as Holly and I insist that talking about our cats for an hour is TOTALLY TRANSMEDIA. To be followed by a signing at JJ 10/11. Books will be available for sale from the University Bookstore, located at booth 2803. (I cannot recommend picking up Holly's The Coldest Girl in Coldtown strongly enough.)

When not on a panel, I can usually be found at my table, located at KK10, right between Myke Cole and Isaac Marion. Look for the mantis shrimp hair if you're not sure which one of us is me.

If you can't find me, why not visit some of my friends and colleagues and favorite humans?

Amy Mebberson and James Silvani will be at I-09, and taking commissions daily.
Espionage Cosmetics will be at 303 / 2811—visit them for awesome nail wraps, including Mira Grant designs!
Optimystical Studios will be at 306, and will have new, original, highly limited Toby Daye and InCryptid jewelry.
Unicorn Empire will be at 1221, with great fannish designs.
Kory Bing will be at 310, and has all the InCryptid Field Guide post cards available for sale.
Dylan Meconis will be with Erica Moen at 1318; visit them both for big wows.
Girl Genius will be at 704, for SCIENCE.
Randy Milholland will be with Danielle Corsetto at 1312. I like Randy. He sends me cat pictures. Adore him.

Torrey, who allows me to use her kitchen, would like me to also remind you all that Comic Book Characters For Causes will be doing photo ops to raise money for Camp GoodTimes this year. Camp GoodTimes is a no-cost summer camp for children with cancer, and it's a great cause. Meet an awesome superhero (and there's a cornucopia to choose from), have your picture taken by a professional photographer, and be able to tell anyone who thinks that shot of you and Captain Marvel is a little weird that you did it for charity. They also have calendars and T-shirts for sale, and can be found at the Cospitality Lounge, located in the Skybridge Lobby. Do good with do-gooders this year.

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 December 2014 post, and the last post of the year.

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 (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 )

I love comics.

I have loved comics since I was very small, paging through the issues that belonged to older friends of the family (IE, the teenage and pre-teen children of my mother's friends). I was always brutally careful, and fully aware that failure to take care would result in losing my comic privileges. I essentially grew up at Flying Colors, my local comic book store. The owner, Joe, has seen me go from skinny little girl to adult woman in one-week increments, framed by trips to the quarter box and the graphic novel shelves. The idea that comics weren't for girls never occurred to me, and he's part of the reason why. I wish everyone had a local comic guy like Joe Field.

I want to write for comics. That, too, has been true since I was very small. When I first started working with my agent, Diana Fox, she asked me what I wanted out of my career. She was probably expecting "a million dollars" or something else improbable. What she got was "I want to write the X-Men." So yeah, I've been trying to find a way to start writing for comics for a while now.

I found it.

I am proud, thrilled, and terrified to announce that I have signed on with Thrillbent.com to script a new ongoing series titled The Best Thing. We don't have an artist or a release date yet, but I am so, so excited about this concept and this world, and I am going to smash things so hard. The Best Thing is to magical girl titles as Velveteen vs. is to superhero teams, and I am really hoping it lives up to its name.

I'm gonna write a comic book.

It's gonna be the best thing.

It's time for Emerald City Comic-Con, Seattle's very own answer to the fact that San Diego has become the Mordor of Nerds! It's an awesome three day event in lovely downtown Seattle, and once again, I'm going to be bringing down the house in my own inimitable (and occasionally awkward) fashion.

I have one program item this year: "Beyond the Genre in Genre Fiction" on Friday morning at 11:40am. I am appearing with a bunch of truly awesome people, including Kory Bing, who some among you may remember as the illustrator for the InCryptid Field Guide. I am super excited! You should come!

If you can make the con but can't make my panel, I'll be around throughout the weekend, and am happy to sign things if spotted. Or if not spotted, but then the things may not belong to you.

Emerald City!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Zombies are love.

So it's been a little more than a week since my glorious return from the San Diego International Comic Convention, where I saw cool things, met cool people, and learned that "Hell" is another word for "being on the SDCC exhibit floor in a wheelchair." I also contracted a horrific cold, and have been fighting my way back to the semblance of health, which is why my relative radio silence on the subject. But that's neither here nor there: that's just framework and excuses. Here's what happened.

Leading up to SDCC, basically every woman I talked to expressed the fear of being "cred checked" at least once. The fake geek girl may not be a real thing, but her shadow is long, and since people started claiming to have seen her, the rest of us have been accused of being her with increasing frequency. She is the geek urban legend, the prowling, predatory female who's just there to take up precious space/time/swag with her girly girlish girliness, and she's like The Thing From Outer Space—a creature with no face and every face, AT THE SAME TIME.

I attended SDCC and similar shows for years before anyone said "Gasp! Some of these geek girls ARE TOTALLY FAKE!" and I started getting my geek credentials checked. Since that began, I have been forced to defend my knowledge of horror movies, the X-Men, zombie literature, the Resident Evil franchise, Doctor Who, and My Little Pony.

Let's pause a moment and just think about that. Men—adult men—have asked me to defend my knowledge of and right to be a fan of My Little motherfucking Pony. My first fandom, the fandom that is arguably responsible for getting me into epic fantasy (not kidding), the franchise that I have publicly credited with teaching me how to plot long-term. A franchise that was, at least originally, aimed exclusively at little girls who enjoyed ponies and hair-play. I think that all fandoms should be for everyone, and I love that My Little Pony has finally found a male audience, but are you kidding here? Are you seriously telling me that the second men discover something I have loved since I was four years old, I suddenly have to pass trivia exams to keep considering myself a fan? Because if that's the way things are going, I want to hear the Sea Pony song right fucking now.

Ahem.

Most of the female fans I know have expressed concern about this credential checking, in part because who the fuck wants to have to take a quiz when you're standing in line waiting to get Chris Claremont's autograph? I mean, really. And there's always the possibility that you'll fail the exam, and a) many of us have deep-seated test anxiety, courtesy of the American school system, and b) no one likes being bullied. Telling me I'm not a real geek because I can't name the members of the Justice League (spoiler: I can't, I don't read DC) is bullying. It's offensive and it's upsetting and it leaves me feeling like a faker, even when I'm not. Even when I'm demonstratively not.

And this "you're a fake, you have no right to be here" routine is almost universally directed at women. I see these women in these incredible costumes that took hours to make and will cause chafing and shin splits and lots of other discomforts, and then I see them getting mocked for being "fake" by men in jeans and hero logo T-shirts. Captain America probably doesn't like you making fun of women, good sir. Just saying.

Then, this year, I saw something wonderful. I was crossing the floor with Amy when we encountered a tall blonde dressed as Emma Frost. I will always stop and admire a good Emma—it's in my genes—so we paused to study her costume and tell her how amazing she looked. She saw the name on my badge and lit up.

"I was hoping to run into you!" she said. "I remembered that you love Emma!"

One of my fans dressed as Emma Frost and she did it for me.

I have never felt so much like a rock star.

We stayed and chatted with her—because let's face it, you dress up as Emma Frost to make me happy, you have damn well earned some chatting with—and she confessed that she had been cred checked not long before. "I said Emma was both the White Queen and the Black Queen," she said. "Was that right?" I started explaining the Dark X-Men. While we were doing that, a man with a camera came up and started taking her picture without asking permission. She stopped talking to us, turned her body slightly away from him, held up her hand, and said, "You can't take my picture unless you can tell me who I am."

She was dressed as a very iconic Emma: all in white, with the half-cape connected to a semi-corset top, white boots, and a white "X" logo on her belt. She had small snowflakes on her collarbones, representing Emma's transformation. She had the white choker. She had the blue lipstick. Basically, if you have any familiarity with Marvel, you would recognize her, and since that version of Emma has been on literally hundreds of comic book covers in the past five years, even most DC readers should have recognized her.

"Storm?" guessed the man.

All three of us laughed, but uncomfortably, like we were discovering a terrible secret. And while Amy and I stood there, this happened four more times: the unsolicited pictures, the refusal, the incorrect guess. Only three of the men actually stopped taking pictures when told to.

As women, we are afraid of being unmasked as somehow "not geeky enough." Meanwhile, these men, who were clearly just trying to take pictures of a scantily clad woman, not pictures of an awesome costume, can't identify one of the most iconic figures from one of the largest publishers.

I've been saying for a while that the "fake geek girl" thing was a form of harassment: a way of making sure that women in fandom don't "forget their place." But this, more than anything, drove home to me just how big of a double standard it is. As women, we're expected to know enough to "earn our spot," but not so much that we seem like know-it-alls; we're supposed to add attractive eye candy to the proceedings, but shouldn't expect men to stop taking our pictures when asked; we're supposed to worry about not seeming geeky enough, while never worrying whether the men around us could pass those same tests. The mere fact of their maleness is sufficient.

There was something beautiful about seeing the fake geek girl check flipped back in the other direction, but there was also something profoundly sad about it, because it illustrated just how deep this divide is growing. We're all geeks. We need to have respect for each other, in all ways—no taking pictures without asking, no shouting "Emma!" at a cosplayer and then saying "See? I told you she knew who she was dressed as" when she turns around. Just no.

It needs to stop.

(And if you were that Emma, drop me a line, hey? I never did get your name, and you were awesome.)

Okay, so:

The Kickstarter for Skin Horse, volume 4 is still going, with newly unlocked backer levels, including "Black Ops Foster Parent," which will come with a page of original art from the story "For Always" which I penned for this collection. All pages will be signed by Shaenon Garrity (the artist) and me (the author). Which means that if you want to have something completely unique—a page of original art from my first published comic story—this is the party for you.

(Hey, after they finally wise up and let me write the X-Men, that's going to be worth bank.)

There are six slots left at the Black Ops Foster Parent level, and I can guarantee that Shaenon will not have any pages left for sale after the Kickstarter finishes, as any that are not claimed by backers, I fully intend to buy for my own collection. So this is your one chance to both support an awesome web comic and keep me from adding more crap to the endlessly growing tide of stuff that threatens to consume my home.

Hooray for comics!

Guys guys guys guys!

The Kickstarter for Skin Horse, volume 4, is now live! What's more, the fools who run this comic book—you know, the ones who let me write the introduction for volume 3—have grown extra foolish, and allowed me to write an original Skin Horse story for the book! YES! I AM BECOME BONUS STORY!

The story, titled "For Always," is about Black Ops Foster Care, and it's short and sweet and awesome, and I am super excited. You should check out the Kickstarter and totally back it, because maybe there will be super secret stretch goals...

(Also yes, I will be at the tiki party. In case that matters.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Zombies are, however, still love.

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

With Midnight Blue-Light Special approaching fast (and Half-Off Ragnarok just put to bed), I am naturally spending a lot of time thinking about InCryptid, and blogging about InCryptid, since I want everyone to be as excited as I am. So here is your invitation:

Ask me a question. Ask me a big question. Like when I posted about the rules governing fae marriage. The ones that require serious thought, and a genuine desire to know.

What can cuckoos really do? What was the straw that broke the camel's back for Alexander and Enid? How do cryptid communities conceal themselves in human cities? Questions too big, and too complicated, to answer in the FAQ. Now, because I apparently wasn't clear enough the first time, I WILL NOT GIVE SPOILERS. Please don't ask me where someone is, or whether someone else is coming back, or whether I'll post a full calendar of Aeslin holidays (because I never, ever will). Ask me about laws and rules and universe, about etiquette and speciation and trends in fashion.

The ten best questions will get full blog posts about them, explaining whatever facet or facets of the InCryptid world they touch on. I get to determine "best," although you're all welcome to weigh in or ask secondary questions.

I have comment amnesty for any questions I do not choose to answer during this particular publication lead-in, because I want my brain to not dribble out of my ears.

Game on!

I have just received confirmation that both When Will You Rise and Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots are now shipping! These books represent my first solo hardcovers, one under each of my names, and like so many good things, they are here for a limit time.

When Will You Rise: Stories to End the World is published by Subterranean Press, and is limited to 1,000 signed and numbered copies. This gorgeously illustrated collection contains "Countdown" and "Apocalypse Scenario #683: The Box." If you place an order within the next few days, it should reach you in time for the holidays. Oh, and did I mention that we got a starred review from Publishers Weekly? Because yeah. We totally did.

Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots is published by ISFIC Press, and is also limited to 1,000 copies. You can obtain signed copies directly from the publisher, or by contacting Borderlands Books. If you place an order within the next few days, it should reach you in time for the holidays. This volume contains the Velveteen stories through "Velveteen vs. The Blind Date," along with all-new supplemental material, an introduction by Jim Hines, and a valediction by Carrie Vaughn. I'm really happy with it.

So those are my new hardcovers, and they're beautiful, and I'm totally excited about them. Glee!

You guys.

You guys, you guys.

I am absolutely stupid with delight that I get to announce this now. STUPID WITH DELIGHT. Guess what I'm announcing. Go on, guess.

Have you guessed yet?

On November 9th, 2012, ISFiC Press will be publishing Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots, volume one in the ongoing adventures of Velma "Velveteen" Martinez.

That's right. A print edition.

ARE YOU EXCITED YET?!

The book will be printed as a limited hardcover edition of 1,000 copies, with cover art by the incomparable Dave Dorman. If you're coming to WindyCon, you'll be able to pick up your copy on the spot. If not, you can order through their website above. The anticipated cover price is $25.00, although we won't know for sure until we get the quote back from the printer.

For those of you who don't do physical books anymore, there will also be an eBook edition, priced at $9.99.

(Please don't complain to me about the eBook price. All the stories remain freely available for your reading pleasure. Buying the eBook just means you're helping to feed my cats, and for that, I thank you.)

According to my contact at ISFiC, the book will be...

"Available through the ISFiC Press website for both hardcover and e-book. Also available through Amazon.com for hardcover, but their ordering and shipping arrangements are Byzantine for small publishers, so you will get it cheaper from them and faster from ISFiC Press.

"E-book edition should be available also from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBookStore, Reader Store, Kobo, Copia, Gardners, Baker & Taylor, and eBookPie."

This volume collects "Velveteen vs. The Isley Crawfish Festival" through "Velveteen vs. The Blind Date," with all new supplemental files on Vel and her allies, an introduction by Jim "Captain Escher" Hines, and an afterward by Carrie "Goblin Shark" Vaughn. All the stories have been revised and rewritten to bring them into full alignment.

I am, like, super-excited about this book, and I'm probably going to wind up buying like ten copies just for myself. So you should totally get yours before they're all up, up, and away.

Velveteen in print.

Eeeeeeeeeeee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Jean Gray is still dead.

10. If you read yesterday's post about ebook distribution around the world, you may want to go back and read it again; I made some pretty hefty edits after having a contract discussion with The Agent, and I think it's more accurate now.

9. While I will not say that Joss Whedon is my master now—I remain too critical for that, and still haven't forgiven him for several things—he has made my two favorite theatrical releases of this year, Cabin in the Woods and The Avengers.

8. Although if we don't get another female hero in the sequel, I am going to be one cranky kitty. I knew that would be an issue for me going in; I was not wrong.

7. We're down to three girls on this season of America's Next Top Model, and I don't hate any of them. What? How can this be? I think the world has been intrinsically damaged by the inanity of this season's "US v. UK" concept.

6. You know what's awesome? Disneyland, that's what's awesome. You know what's better? I'm going there in two weeks, with Vixy. Are we now planning to hit every Disney park in the world? Yes. Yes, we are. Next up, Disneyland Paris.

5. Eleven days to Blackout! Who's excited? I'm excited!

4. If you somehow get an early copy, please don't tell me. There's nothing I can do about it, and it'll just raise my blood pressure. But feel free to post a review. Reviews are awesome.

3. You know what makes everything better? Poison dart frickens make everything better. Look at their tiny technicolor deadliness!

2. Jean Grey is still dead.

1. I'm seeing The Devil's Carnival tonight! Yay!

Hope you're all having a great Friday, and are looking forward to an even greater weekend.

10. Orders for the second run of Wicked Girls shirts are now open, and will remain open until May 18th. Please read the post carefully, as it includes important ordering information. We're planning a more gender-neutral shirt next, probably saying "My story is not done," but we need to get through this batch, first. In other news, I am a glutton for punishment.

9. A bit of confusion has arisen relating to my East Coast trip. So here's the skinny: I am going to the East Coast, I am not attending any conventions while I'm there, I may or may not be doing any appearances. It's all still up in the air. I'll sign books at any bookstores I stumble over, but that's about all I can guarantee right now.

8. If you're in New York, however, and enjoyed Repo: The Genetic Opera, might I recommend looking at the tour dates for The Devil's Carnival? It's the new project by the same people, and it looks awesome. I'll be attending the 7pm showing in Manhattan on April 26th, and more people always make for a better party. Unless there's a limited amount of cake.

7. One of my favorite comic books, The Boys, is going into its final story arc. I am going to miss it so much when it's gone. On the other hand, I said the same thing about Preacher, which was this creative team's former collaboration, and look what it got me. I'm excited to see what comes next.

6. I am trying not to be nervous about the Philip K. Dick Awards, which happen Friday evening, while I'm, you know, a state away. I have managed not to get my hopes up too high, although I have to admit, it would be awesome to win. It really is just an honor to be nominated.

5. To the two girls dressed as Jean Gray who called the girl dressed as Emma Frost a skank this past weekend at Emerald City: Not cool. We're all geeks here together, and while you may have been giggling in character, she wasn't with you.

4. To the extremely pretty girl dressed as Emma Frost who got called a skank this past weekend at Emerald City: You looked absolutely stunning, and your confidence and poise as you walked made it even better. Don't let people bring you down. You are amazing.

3. And yes, that message would have been the same if it had been two Emmas and a Jean. I only noticed because the costumes caught my eye.

2. In further comic book news, my comic book store tried to incite a Sharks vs. Jets throw-down between Avengers fans and X-Men fans last night. Apparently the Avengers were winning...until I walked in the door. Turns out, I'm a destructive force of nature where my comics are concerned. Who knew, right?

1. Zombies are love.

First, the cool thing: I received my author's copies of Chicks Dig Comics last night, and they are genuinely gorgeous. Every essay in this book, even the ones that relate to properties I'm not emotionally invested in, makes me go "oh, my people, oh, we are growing every day." I have a copy in my bag to take to my comic book store tonight, and I will give it to Joe, the owner, and say thank you. And he will understand, because he is awesome, and also, he is used to me.

You can order Chicks Dig Comics on Amazon.com; it will be released, retail-wise, on April 10th. If you love comics, this is the book for you, regardless of gender. It says, very clearly, "you are not alone," both to men wondering what the female experience is like, and to women wondering if anyone else has ever had that female experience. I am so pleased to be a part of it. (Also, I am mentioned on the back cover. Great yayness.)

Now, the favor: I'm preparing for the second batch of "Wicked Girls" shirts, and I realized that I no longer need to use the mock-up from the original post, because there are actual shirts in the world now. So please, if you have a shirt from batch one, and you don't mind being shown as an example of a wicked girl, snap a picture and leave it here for me to maybe link in the shirt post. I'm hoping to put the post up within the next week, so time is of the essence, but I'd really love to see all of your awesomeness.

And that, for the moment, is all.

1. It's Saturday! Which means no day job for me, and twice the word count! DON'T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT. I got up at 8AM (for me, that's sleeping in), watched Criminal Minds while I ate breakfast, wrote and edited for a few hours, watched Criminal Minds while I ate lunch, took a shower, did 5 Things A Room, and now I'm getting ready to head for Borderlands. By arriving several hours before the event, I'll have time to, you guessed it, work.

2. "5 Things A Room" is where I go through the four rooms that contain the majority of my stuff and de-clutter five things, by either putting them away, throwing them away, or shifting them to another room. (Sometimes shifted things can't be put away immediately, due to other things being in the way. This is the issue with having a very, very cluttered house.)

3. Mom and I will be packing the next huge wave of shirts to mail tomorrow; the goal is to get them all packaged for mailing. Before you get too excited: our most recent pack wave revealed that there was at least one size/color/style combination which I didn't receive when I was supposed to, and was unaware was missing. The shirt shop is printing them now, but it means that not all shirts will be mailing, and that I may still be missing some combination I haven't tripped over yet. I'll keep you posted.

4. Remember that "six Velveteen stories in 2011" thing that I promised, and then had people tell me I couldn't do? Well, five of the six are now finished, and the last one will be in the bag before New Year's. So yes, I can so do six crazy superhero romps in a year. They just didn't balance out the way I thought they would.

5. If you're planning to go Black Friday shopping, can you drop me a line and let me know? I'm not going to be shopping that day, but there are supposed to be some new Monster High dolls releasing for the holiday, and I'd really appreciate if you could look for them for me.

6. Zombies are love.

7. There's a lot of shifting and shaking going on at Marvel Comics. The fabulous X-23 has been canceled, which just plain breaks my heart, and I'm not sure what I think of some of the narrative choices being made. I'll stick it out—I'm me—but I'm a little sad all the same.

8. Wilde Imagination is supposed to be announcing a new resin Evangeline Ghastly at IDEX in January. I know, this is relevant to like, three of you, but it's relevant to me. I really want a resin Evangeline, and the last several have been totally unappealing to me. Here's hoping the new one will be as awesome as Cemetery Wedding, which I have thus far been unable to obtain.

9. I'm getting ready to head into the city for the Narbonic Perfect Collection launch party. If you're local, I really do hope to see you there, and if you're not, remember, the bookstore ships.

10. The cats are possessed by demons today, and are following me through the house trilling and fluffing their tails (except for Lilly, who just squawks like she has a duck stuck in her throat). So if I'm never heard from again, it's because they ate me.

Saturday night is MAD SCIENCE LADIES NIGHT at Borderlands Books, where that lovely and talented lady of mad science and shadow government, Shaenon Garrity herself, will be hosting the launch party for her brand new Narbonic Perfect Collection.

For those of you unfamiliar with Narbonic, it's a mad science/romance/gonzo journalism/geek culture/time travel comic that ran for six years before coming to an earth-shattering conclusion. All six years are now collected in a single glorious locale, with two mind-blowing volumes available for your perusal. The books are $30 for the set of two, or $17 individually; they'll be available for sale on Saturday.

(And yes, as always, you can contact the store to order your very own signed and personalized volumes, if you can't be there yourself.)

Shaenon will also have volumes one and two of Skin Horse, one of my favorite currently ongoing webcomics; these are $14 each, and so worth it.

The party will be from five to seven PM on Saturday, November 19th. There will be cupcakes and wine (boxed and bottled), and original art available for purchase at the low, low price of $30 a strip. If you've been to my house, you've seen several of these strips framed and hanging in my front bathroom. Fine art for everyone!

We hope to see you there! It's going to be a real good time.

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

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

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

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

Ready? Okay!

( Click here for Seanan's handy-dandy Comicon survival guide! Read and be enlightened in all the ways that matter, which is to say, all the ways that Seanan actually thought of. Freshly updated for 2011.Collapse )

Today is the official release date for Whedonistas: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon by the Women Who Love Them. No, we don't expect you to use the book's whole name every day. That's just for company. You can call it Whedonistas when it's at home.

This is a book of essays about the many and varied works of Whedon, from Buffy to Dollhouse. I somehow managed to resist the burning urge to write about his work on the X-Men* in both movie and comic form, and wrote instead about how Buffy: the Vampire Slayer shaped my identity as both a fan and a creator of my own work. When the apocalypse comes, beep me.

I am, naturally, biased in favor of this book, which contains some awesome essays by some awesome women, many of whom are friends of mine. So here's a review written by an objective third party, which should hopefully sell you on the sheer awesome of this book better than I, who am biased, could ever manage. But if you buy this book, angels will sing, pixies will get their wings, and my cats will feast on sweet, sweet tuna. I'm just saying.

Or you could always win this book. My beloved catvalente is having an awesome book giveaway, for Whedonistas AND her upcoming totally rockin' books Deathless and The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland... Go forth! Enter! Read the instructions carefully before entering, because they are specific and also important. There could be ice weasels in your future if you don't read the instructions. Again, just saying.

Whedonistas! Happy birthday, awesome book of awesome!

(*Let's be realistic here: I was able to resist solely because I was already planning to write about the relationship between Scott Summers and Emma Frost, and why Jean Gray needs to stay dead, for Chicks Dig Comics. I am a blonde with very basic needs.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. A cake.

MY COMIC STORE GOT ME A BIRTHDAY CAKE.

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

I love my life. Medical emergencies and all.

Today is Kaja Foglio's birthday! If you don't know Kaja, she's one-half of the creative team behind Girl Genius, along with her husband, the interminable Phil Foglio. Together, they won the 2010 Hugo for Best Graphic Novel. Also, they fight crime.

I'm just saying.

This month, the Foglios unleashed their unspeakable powers on a new arena: the novel. While Phil has written book-length prose before (most specifically Illegal Aliens, co-written with the awesome Nick Pollotta), this is Kaja's first foray into this particular medium. Agatha Heterodyne and the Airship City [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] is a novelization of the first two volumes of the Girl Genius graphic novel. Meaning what? Meaning that if you already read the comic, this isn't new story, per se, but it's deeper story, more intricate story. It enriches and expands on what you already know. And if you haven't read the comic, well, why not? It's available for free online. Yes, all of it. Yes, the Foglios make a living giving away their product. Why? Because it's that good.

Why am I telling you all this? Because it's Kaja's birthday, and what she asked for this year was, well, that we talk about her book. If you were considering picking up Agatha Heterodyne and the Airship City [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy], why not do it today? Give Kaja a book sale for her birthday, and help the Foglios ring the bells on Amazon (or at your local independent bookseller—I note that Borderlands Books has the book in stock, as, I'm sure, do many others).

The Foglios are great people, and Agatha Heterodyne is a great book. If you like steampunk, gaslamp fantasy, wacky science, mad science, cute blonde girls in corsets, and making my friends happy, give Agatha Heterodyne and the Airship City [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] a look! Statistically speaking, if you're reading my journal, you'll probably be glad that you did.

So October is basically "embarrassment of riches" month here in the San Francisco Bay Area, at least as far as author events and awesomeness are concerned. Being a sensible person, I like things which are awesome. This weekend? Has a whole lot of awesome packed into a relatively small space. HOW DO THEY DO IT?!? I DO NOT KNOW. But you—yes, you—can benefit from it.

First up, tomorrow! Professor Laurence A. Rickels, author of I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick (available from the University of Minnesota Press) will be at Borderlands Books at 3:00 PM. One presumes he will be talking about his book. And immediately after he's had his turn...

ZOMG SKIN HORSE! Shaenon Garrity and Jeffrey C. Wells will be at Borderlands Books at 5:00 PM, celebrating the awesome-tastic release of Skin Horse, volume II in a delicious dead tree edition. It's gonna be awesome. Are we prepared to face Shaenon and Jeffrey together, in the same place? I do not know. But again, you can benefit from it, because dude.

Sunday, also at Borderlands Books, Richard Kadrey will be appearing to talk about the second book in the Sandman Slim series, Kill the Dead. Words cannot properly express how much I loved this book, and its predecessor, Sandman Slim, which is now in paperback. He'll be at the store at 3:00 PM, being AWESOME.

All events are free of charge, and remember, you can contact the bookstore to place orders and requests for signed books of your very own. I'll be attending the Skin Horse party, because I am a sensible blonde, and because I have been promised cupcakes. I hope to see you there!

10. It's Friday! And that means that tomorrow is Saturday, which further means that it's finally time for me to have a book event at the Other Change of Hobbit! Conveniently located next to Ashby BART, spacious, and full of neat things, this is one of my favorite bookstores. You should totally come.

9. Karen Healey (I know, right?) has a poll for the best moment of WorldCon 2010/Aussiecon IV, and yes, my squeaky acceptance of the Campbell Award is currently in the lead. Which is the sort of thing that makes me blink and cry a little. But in the good way, I promise! Also, John Scalzi licking stuff.

8. After our horrible "oh crap the house is full of fleas" experience this summer, everything seems to have settled down. Alice's belly-fur is growing back, no one's trying to claw their own flesh off, and our strict regimen of flea powdering the carpets and pouring poison on the cats is keeping the blood-suckers away. Thank the Great Pumpkin.

7. SHARKTOPUS! Tomorrow night on SyFy! Because Coyote loves me and wants me to be happy.

6. By the same measure, have you seen Jane Austin's Fight Club? Because seriously, this video is love. (Technically safe for work, if you're allowed to watch videos at work and feel like doing some potentially awkward explaining about why all those girls are smacking the crap out of each other.)

5. Resident Evil: Afterlife actually doesn't suck. I know, I'm as surprised as you are. Sort of tickled, too, but mostly just surprised. It's not as good as Resident Evil: Apocalypse, but then, what is?

4. Jean Grey is still dead.

3. Things that are back on the air: Glee, Fringe, Big Bang Theory, Bones, and America's Next Top Model. Things that have managed to stick the landing in their season finales: Rizzoli and Isles, Leverage, Unnatural History, and Warehouse 13. Things that make me happy: watching too much television.

2. Despite my currently perennially delayed posting schedule (curse you, Australia, and your lack of Internet), the latest iteration of the Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling Show went well, and we all had a fantastic time. Plus, the bookstore now has signed books, and that makes everything wonderful.

...and the best thing about today...

1. Welcome to fall.

What's awesome about your Friday?

A movie called Scott Pilgrim vs. the World was released recently. It's a classic "boy meets girl, boy fights girl's seven evil exes to keep girl, boy learns important life lessons through kicking ass" story, told with all the manic intensity of a Nintendo game on Red Bull and speed. Is it perfect? No. There are probably things that could have been done better, or at least differently, without changing the movie into something that it didn't want to be. But it's good. It's quirky and strange and wild and totally new; it's something we've only ever seen before if, say, we ate a dozen Krispie Kreme donuts before challenging our boyfriends to an all-night Super Mario 3 game session that ended with sweaty sugar-buzz groping on the living room couch.

For example. And even then, it was a hallucination, whereas Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is something you can show to other people.

Sadly, when the opening weekend box office for Scott Pilgrim was reported, it was well below industry expectations, and the movie was promptly written off as a flop. It doesn't matter if it makes back its budget and more on DVD; it failed. It didn't bring in big bucks in the theater. The same thing happened to Slither, which has been one of my favorite movies of all time basically since the first commercial aired. Bad box office, great DVD sales, game over. (And yes, opening week matters. It's incredibly rare for something to have sales that climb after the opening rush has passed, which is why, weirdly, it's important to be a part of that initial rush, if you can. That initial rush is what tells the accountants "this is going to be okay.")

A lot of people said a lot of things when the numbers for Scott Pilgrim started coming in, and what a lot of them said boiled down to, "Why do you care?" You are not, after all, involved with writing, producing, marketing, or selling the movie; you're just a consumer. The movie was there to be consumed, you consumed it, now move on. And to a degree, they're right. No one can ever take Slither away from me; all the bad box office in the world can't keep Scott Pilgrim out of my DVD collection once it's released in a purchasable format. So why do I care?

I care because we're not going to get another movie like Scott Pilgrim any time soon. I care because Slither tanking at the box office is why we had to wait five years for Zombieland. I care because all entertainment is profit-driven, and when we don't put our quarters in the plastic pony, it stops bucking.

Why do book series end in the middle? Because not enough people bought the books. Sometimes they can live on, as with tim_pratt's online serialization of his fabulous Marla Mason stories, but for the majority of authors, if the sales aren't there, the story's over. Why do midlist authors disappear? Because their sales weren't good enough to justify their continued publication. Why are TV shows canceled? Because not enough people gave money to their advertisers. All entertainment is profit-driven. We pay to play, and when we stop paying, they stop playing.

Scott Pilgrim is important because it's a weird, wacky, wonderful movie, and it's going to be a long time before we see something else like it. Next time you love something weird, wacky, and wonderful—whether it's a movie, a TV show, or a book—remember the lesson of Scott Pilgrim, and the eighth evil ex: the box office. In this economy, it's more important than ever that we kick its ass.

* Locate my little glass pumpkin full of Australian currency, and figure out exactly how much of it I have. This will be the start of my WorldCon budget, and no matter how much I enjoy sticking my fingers in my ears and going "LA LA LA LA LA," I really need to stop doing that and start coping with the fact that it's almost time to fly.

* Revise and process the editorial notes on the next twenty pages of Deadline. I'm currently through the end of chapter four, and I'd really like to get through the end of chapter five before it's time for bed. I also need to finalize my dedication, and start thinking about my acknowledgments, which is always fun like sticking needles in my eyes. Oh, how I love this part of the process. Not.

* Attempt to unearth my dresser from beneath the epic pile of crap that has accompanied me home from San Diego and Spocane. This may or may not be something I can accomplish without the use of a flamethrower.

* Fish the cat toys out from under the bed.

* Brush the cats.

* Attempt to integrate the epic pile of crap that accompanied me home from San Diego and Spocane into my bedroom without causing some sort of avalanche or otherwise hitting critical mass and opening a black hole into another dimension. Of course, if the objects responsible for opening the black hole influence the dimension on the other side, it will be a dimension filled with flesh-eating My Little Ponies and telepathic velociraptors. So that might be a nice place to have a vacation home.

* Trade the July pages in my planner for the shiny, new, relatively unmarked September pages. Immediately start filling the September pages with to-do lists, deadlines, goals, and the other unavoidable roadmaps of being me. I actually find this process quite soothing, in a nit-picky, obsessive sort of a way. Here is my month. I have scheduled panic attacks, showers, and laundry. Go me.

* Pick up my mats from the Aaron Brothers, allowing me to frame the latest batch of art. This batch includes the cover to Late Eclipses, two original Skin Horse strips, and the original artwork for Amy Mebberson's amazing Sarah Zellaby sketch. I need more walls. I seriously need to move into a house designed by Escher, just to give me sufficient walls.

* Laundry.

* Go to the comic book store and collect my latest dose of four-color sanity check. I also need to update my pull list, as it's time to (once again) winnow my monthlies down to trades. It saves space, money, and staples, as Lilly really likes to eat comic books. No, I don't know why. I've asked her, but she just meowed and wandered off to chew on the shower curtain.

* Fish the cat toys out from under the bed.

* Inform Alice that I am not going to fish the cat toys out from under the bed a third time.

* Fish the cat toys out from under the bed.

* Finish composing my first blog entry for the Babel Clash I'm doing with Jesse in September. Since we're both going to be traveling when the blogs go up, they have to be pre-written, and since I've been traveling so damn much recently, I haven't had a chance to pre-write anything. This would be funny, if it weren't verging on becoming an emergency.

* Continue my quest for a dress for WorldCon, since the dress I was having made isn't going to be ready for this year, due to bad time management on my part coupled with a really silly comedy of dropped clauses and missed connections. I keep thinking I've found a dress, only to discover that no, it's not going to work out. I'm considering hysteria.

* Ignore the Maine Coon telling me that her toys have disappeared under the bed.

* Watch Warehouse 13.

* Sleep.

So before we get too far from the convention, a few high (and low) points of San Diego 2010. Because otherwise, y'all will beat me with bricks in a dark alley somewhere, and I just don't have time for that.

This year, I was able to import Tara and Amy (webmistress and fiddler, respectively), and the three of us shared a room with Sunil (media madman) at the Gaslamp Marriott. Not only were we less than a five minute walk from the convention center, allowing us to easily drop things off in our room, but the hotel gave us free candy. Right there at the front desk, free candy. Amy and I decided that we were having the convention experience we would have designed for ourselves at age seven. Except for the drinking, this was probably true for the entire weekend.

Rebecca and Ryan were kind enough to pick me up from the airport; after they dropped me off, Amy and I went to get our badges while the car went back for Tara and Sunil (landing two hours later than I did). Hilarity and admission followed. Tara went off to hang with her friends, while Sunil, Amy, and I went to see an improv performance by Hammer Don't Hurt 'Em. They were decent, and the show was fun (especially since Amy got me a Long Island Iced Tea). The only real downside was Sunil accidentally ditching us while we were in the bathroom, but we went and met Rebecca and Ryan for Wendy's, so there was really no bad there.

Thursday was my first panel, The Power of Myth, which was a lot of fun, as was the signing which followed. I gave Amber Benson a copy of An Artificial Night, which she thanked me for, as now she would not be required to steal it. Tara, Amy, and I had lunch with Tanya Huff at the Cafe Diem, because the Cafe Diem is awesome. I also shopped. A lot. I enjoy shopping. I got a White Phoenix Jean Gray doll for my cover designer at Orbit, because I believe in bribery, yo. It was fun!

Thursday evening, Tanya, Tara, and I attended the Brilliance Audio author dinner, which I spent drinking Mai Tais, eating interesting things, and chatting with Phil and Kaja Foglio. My life, so hard.

Friday was my booth signing at Orbit, during which I signed a hundred copies of Feed. In the process, I drew ninety-nine tiny chainsaws, and one tiny Godzilla destroying a city. Again, my life, so hard. I had to miss the X-Men panel to do the signing (wah!), but I was able to attend the panel on James Gunn's Super (he needs to call me), which looks totally awesome. I had a second signing at the SFX booth later in the afternoon, and we gave away another fifty copies of Feed, one to the creator of Being Human. Totally awesome.

Friday evening, Tanya, Amy, and I attended the Penguin FangFest, which I spent drinking pineapple mojitos, eating cupcakes, and chatting with awesome authors. I finally met Charlaine Harris in the flesh, and it was hysterical. Exchange as follows:

Me: "Hi, it's great to finally meet you. I'm Seanan."
Charlaine: *politely blank look*
Me: *displays name tag*
Charlaine: "SHAWN-ANNE!"

*hugging*

I love having a weird name. After that, we went to the Boom! party, where I met Paul Cornell and his lovely wife, Caroline. Paul is one of my favorite humans, as he shares my love of the Black Death and giant flesh-eating lizards. I'm just saying.

Saturday was my second panel, The Rise of Zombie Fiction, which was a) mad fun, and b) reinforced my desire to write up a handbook for people doing panels at this sort of thing. Priscille from Books for Boobs came to the signing in a perfect Delirium costume, and I tried to eat her plush bear. Amy and I managed to catch the Warehouse 13 panel (Allison Scagliotti for Georgia Mason, anybody?), and then went off to dinner with John Grace at a very nice steak house. They served me port. MY LIFE, SO HARD.

Sunday, it was goodbyes and final shopping runs, and Tara and I had breakfast with Paul and Caroline before Amanda and Michael came to carry me away.

It was a good con. This writeup does not include hiding behind Anton, getting awesome swag and buttons from Rae, lots of hugging, accidental soda-based encounters, the dissolution of the Sacred Order of the Deli, ice cream, Gini Koch, late-night sammiches with Tanya, awesome dealer's room finds, free books, cheap books, expensive books, cookies, the art show, or repeat encounters with Felicia Day. But it does include a lot of awesome.

Also, if anyone came away from the con with a spare Sanctuary T-shirt, I am open to trades. Just saying.

1. admnaismith to the white courtesy phone, admnaismith to the white courtesy phone; you have won an ARC of An Artificial Night. Please email me with your contact information, using the contact form on my website, before Sunday, or a new winner has been selected. Also, I totally need you to come make me a drink, because damn.

2. Evolution is awesome, and more bizarre than you can possibly imagine. The best thing about real life is the way that it doesn't even need to pretend to make sense. Also, it allows for factual statements like "those little hornless males have giant testicles" and "they change their color pattern and rearrange their tentacles in a more typical female arrangement." How can you not love this world?

3. Actually, you know what's better than evolution? Drunken paleontologists being allowed to name the dinosaurs that they have discovered. Yes. Thanks to the glorious power of beer, the chasmosaurine ceratopsid family has a new member: the Mojoceratops. How can you not love this dinosaur?! It has a heart-shaped frill, people. A heart-shaped frill. This is like, Barbie's Dream Dino. Great Pumpkin, thank you for the drunken paleontologists and their glories. Thank you.

4. Remember that I'll be at Borderlands Books in San Francisco, California this Saturday, appearing with the lovely jennifer_brozek as part of the second stop on the Murder and Mayhem Tour. Also, we'll have delicious cupcakes from Cups and Cakes Bakery, because we all know that's really why you attend my book events with such alacrity. Be there if you can!

5. We're less than a week out from the San Diego International Comic Convention, which, this year, I will be attending with Amy McFiddler and the fantastic Tara in tow. So, y'know, that should be a good time, apart from all the flailing and hysteria. I'll be posting my panel schedule early next week, and if you're going to be at the convention, you should totally let me know. I'd love to see you.

6. X-Men: Second Coming is over. Several characters are dead. I'm sad about some of them, not so much about others (and barely remembered a few). I really want them to get Elixir on the business of growing back the various severed limbs, as, well, this is all a bit grim for an X-book. But hey, Jean Grey is still dead, Emma Frost is still pretty, and we still have three Stepford Cuckoos wandering around. So it's hard not to be happy.

7. Other things that make me happy: Warehouse 13, Eureka, Unnatural History, Leverage, and So You Think You Can Dance. Why yes, I am a media whore. Why do you ask?

8. Zombies are love.

9. In addition to the San Diego International Comic Convention being in less than a week, I'm about two weeks out from SpoCon, where a) I'm the Music Guest of Honor, and b) Tanya Huff is the Writer Guest of Honor. DAW GIRLS IN THE HOUSE! We shall wear our Urban Fantasy Mafia colors with pride, yo.

10. The turtle can't help you, but Alice will be happy to shed on you. Just ask her.

What's news with you?

Every year, as July approaches, someone says to me "Gosh, I've never been to the San Diego International Comic Convention before. I really don't believe it's as big as everybody tries to make me think it is." So every year, I smack myself in the head and update this guide and pray for their survival. Since I've been known to post obsessively-detailed Guides to Comicon on a yearly basis for some time now, I strongly suspect that these people are being aimed at me. But since I love you all (those of you I know, anyway; I am well-inclined by mildly indifferent towards those of you who just came in out of the cold), and want you to have the best convention experience that you possibly can, I've prepared an update to my Handy-Dandy Comicon Survival Guide. See? It's both handy and dandy, and that means it must be good! This guide includes tips on:

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

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

Ready? Okay!

( Click here for Seanan's handy-dandy Comicon survival guide! Read and be enlightened in all the ways that matter, which is to say, all the ways that Seanan actually thought of. Freshly updated for 2010.Collapse )

Remember when I posted all glowingly about a web comic called Skin Horse, and kept saying everybody should read it?

Remember how one of my big selling points was the first year of strips was now available in convenient dead tree format that you can take anywhere?

Good.

Shaenon and Jeff are now funding volume two through Kickstarter, which is a sort of crowd-funding aggregation service. You say how much you need by what date, and then people kick in what they can to make your project happen. The Skin Horse fund opened yesterday, with a $3,000 goal and an end date of, well, July.

It hit $3,000 last night. See what can happen when people believe that you're real?

Anyway: The volume two Kickstarter sponsorship fund is still open, and comes with some really awesome bonuses for sponsorship, including character sketches, side-stories, and more. The $20 sponsorship level gets you a signed copy of the book, for what would have been the book's cover price anyway—it's basically pre-ordering with a guaranteed signature, which is pretty neat.

If you like Skin Horse, consider sponsoring volume two. If you can't figure out what the hell I'm talking about, go read the comic, and then consider sponsoring volume two.

We're the shadow government.

We're here to help.

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real."

Flashback: I was attending the Alternative Press Expo (APE) in San Francisco when I came across a table, staffed by a friendly, curly-haired brunette woman in round geek-girl glasses, which boasted a wide assortment of mad science-themed images, all centering around a pretty, realistically-proportioned mad scientist named Helen Narbon. This was relevant to my interests. I grabbed some of the hand-outs, chatted briefly with the brunette—who turned out to be the strip's creator, Shaenon Garrity—and moved on, unaware that I had just discovered a six-year obsession.

Narbonic turned out to be an epic tale of mad science, romance, destruction, and, of course, gerbils. I visited Narbonic Labs every day for six years. When I was in Europe, paying for DSL in exotic cafes staffed by people who liked to dodge the crazy American, I paid about half-a-quid for the privilege of my mad science fix. I have no regrets. And yes, "Oh, Helen" on Red Roses and Dead Things was inspired by this comic strip.

Narbonic eventually had to end, coming to a solid and satisfying conclusion. The strip was collected in dead tree editions, each with lovely bonus features; sadly, some of them are now out of print. Not so sadly, there are plans in the works for a single omnibus edition, which will doubtless blow a whole lot of socks off. In the meantime, the full archives of the strip are available online, along with Shaenon's ongoing Director's Cut (she's going back and adding commentary to every single day). It's so, so worth reading, although I warn you, you're gonna lose some time. (Yes, the art starts out fairly primitive. Watching it improve is one of the true joys of the strip, since the art gets more complex even as the story gets more addictive.)

But that's not the point.

After Narbonic, Shaenon teamed up with Jeffrey Wells on a new project: Skin Horse, the story of a Black Ops Civil Service Agency dedicated to helping—and almost entirely staffed by—non-human transgenic individuals. The main team consists of a genetically-engineered Siberian Husky named Captain's Fancy Valentine Sweetheart, a dangerously unstable and heavily medicated necrotic-American named Unity, a cross-dressing ex-Army psychologist named Tip, and their boss, Gavotte, who is, well, a swarm of bees.

Yes. A swarm of bees.

And did I mention the huggy cobras?

The first year of Skin Horse is available now in dead tree format, and seriously, that was the best fourteen dollars I've spent all year. (Some other amounts may have been equally awesome, but fourteen dollar amounts? Nothing beat it.) Talking lions! Killbots! Opera-singing silverfish! HUGGY COBRAS! Seriously. If you like fun, you'll love Skin Horse. Also, if enough orders come in unexpectedly, Shaenon's head may explode. You like making people's heads explode, right?

You can view the strips included in the book at the Skin Horse website totally for free, but you can't take the website in the bathtub (unless you feel like living dangerously). Go, read, enjoy, and experience the HUGGY COBRAS.

Ssssssss.

My mother survived her first day at a comic book convention! Well, mostly: she had to leave early because her back was bothering her (although I suspect the real culprit was my little sister's legs, since my little sister doesn't walk, and none of them believed me about the sheer scope of even a small comic con). She bought a chicken hat and wore it with pride. And people wonder why she admits that I'm her daughter.

I lined up for the Esplanade early enough to get really awesome seats for the sneak preview of next week's Fringe (although this did require sitting through an episode of V, and dude, what the hell?). Sunil came and joined me after he finished shopping, and since I had nothing better to do, I stayed and watched Kevin Smith's Q&A with him. Gotta love any man whose response to "How are you?" is "I'm so glad you asked! I had the best fucking sex of my life last night!" followed by a lengthy explanation of how a fleshlight works. Ah, Kevin Smith, if you weren't real, we'd have to invent you.

Now I'm up, packed, and going back for another day.

We're almost done with the current round of the Fourth Annual BSC Review Tournament. So far, Rosemary and Rue has managed to defeat Heart's Blood, The Warded Man, and Turn Coat, but Toby's having a contested battle against catvalente's Palimpsest. Please consider casting your vote to keep Toby in the tournament. It's fun!

One thing I didn't say before, and will say now (because it hadn't come up before): Please play nicely, whether you vote for me or for Cat, and don't say things that will make the other author feel bad. "It took me a while to get into this" or "It just wasn't my thing" are cool. "This author sucks" or "If I wanted to read _______, I would just go read _______" are not cool. Thankfully, no one who's voted for me has said anything like that, but some of the people playing tourney are starting to get personal, and that makes this a hell of a lot less fun. Someone's always sad when there has to be a winner and a loser, but there's being a loser, and then there's being a loser who's been told they suck at the same time.

Girl fight tonight!

I'm off for Wondercon, in sometimes-sunny San Francisco! I have no official programming this year, but will definitely be attending the following (unless I get bored, or find something else to do, or need lunch):

Friday at 4:30, Fringe screening.
Saturday at 12:00, Disney sneak peeks.
Saturday at 1:45, Resident Evil 4 panel.
Saturday at 2:30, the future of the X-Men.
Saturday at 4:00, Trailer Park.
Saturday at 4:30, Kick-Ass presentation.

I have no specific plans for Sunday, and may or may not attend, depending on my word counts. I'll have my mother and my younger sister (and my younger sister's girlfriend) in tow for much of the weekend; if you spot us, feel free to say hey, and get anything you might be carrying signed. There will be shiny new bookmarks on the freebie table. I'll post when we have a time for the cupcake run.

Whee!

I am a total comic geek, and I'm not ashamed. I'm also a Marvel girl, and—as seems to be increasingly unusual in some circles—I'm a superhero fan. I like my flying men in tights and my women in impractical shoes. No matter how insane the storylines become, at the end of the day, it's pretty easy to make me happy.

We start, of course, with comics. For the X-geek in your life, or for the geek who just wants people to understand your love of all things X-Man, the Grant Morrison run on New X-Men is a fantastic place to start. It has enough backstory to "fill in the gaps" for people just joining, while being an incredible, world-spanning story that it's hard as heck not to love. The Grant Morrison run has been collected into three massive volumes. New X-Men: Collection I [Amazon] kicks things off with the bombing of Genosha, the world's only all-mutant country. New X-Men: Collection II [Amazon] ups the ante in a dozen different ways, and New X-Men: Collection III [Amazon] brings things to a screaming, ass-kicking conclusion. I highly recommend these books, and not just because Emma Frost features heavily.

If you're looking for something a little outside the mainstream of the superhero world, Robert Kirkman's Invincible is an amazing title from Image, one that dares to show superheroes as a little more human than most publishers will dare. It's a painful, beautiful story, and since it's relatively new (IE, "this century"), catching up isn't all that hard. Invincible: The Ultimate Collection, Volume I [Amazon] is a big, beautifully sturdy hardback introduction to Mark Grayson and his world. If that's a bit too big for your budget, Invincible book one: Family Matters [Amazon] and Invincible book two: Eight Is Enough [Amazon] include the first issues of the series, and are more than awesome enough to get you hooked.

My current favorite superhero title is a lot darker. Garth Ennis—the man who brought us Preacher, which really tells you something about how dark we're talking here—has turned his attention the superhero world, and the resulting title is...disturbing, to say the least. Start with The Boys, volume one: The Name of the Game [Amazon]. Proceed from there to The Boys volume two: Get Some [Amazon]. With fantastic art, a gritty storyline, and an all-too-plausible superhero community, The Boys is a great antidote to all that four-color brightness. (If you need still more dark-but-awesome superheroics, look up Incognito [Amazon] and Wanted [Amazon], which really has nothing to do with the movie. But don't say I didn't warn you about the dark.)

Important note: All of the above are graphic novels, and can be obtained from your local comic book store. The Amazon links are for reference, and for people who don't have a local comic book store. Buy local. It's awesome.

Soon I Will Be Invincible [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] by Austin Grossman is a brilliant piece of superhero fiction that looks at the heroic and the villainous at the same time. I can't recommend it highly enough. I also can't say much about it without spoiling the surprise. Check it out, it's awesome.

If you enjoy the "Velveteen vs." series, you absolutely have to take a look at Black and White [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] by Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge. This is the start of a bad-ass series about a world where superheroes are under corporate control, and stepping outside the lines costs you more than you could possibly imagine. It's an awesome treatment of a superhero world, and the contrast between good and evil has never been more blurred.

Sometimes you want your superheroes to be fluffy and fun, and those are the times when you should reach for the Bigtime books by Jennifer Estep. Karma Girl [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy], Hot Mama [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy], and Jinx [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] are superhero romance cotton candy with a sharply sweet bite, like cocktails that look completely innocent until they knock you on your ass. They're more fun than a barrel of radioactive monkeys, and I hugely recommend them.

I've tried to avoid movies in today's gift suggestions, but I can't resist slipping one in here: Krrish [Amazon]. It's sort of the Bollywood answer to the big-budget Hollywood superhero movie, with a dash of Tarzan and several large dance numbers. It's incredibly fun, and incredibly weird, and really, really worthwhile. For seriously.

Got any heroes or villains to recommend? Tell me about it!

1. Remember that voting is still open for the second A Local Habitation ARC giveaway, and while there are a few clear favorites, it's still anybody's game. I'll announce the third giveaway as soon as I figure out exactly what it's going to be.

2. A Local Habitation gets a little closer every day, as this page on the Penguin Group website can attest. It's still weird and wonderful and a little terrifying to look at websites and go "wait, that's my book, I wrote that, oh whoa, that's Toby." I am assured this feeling will eventually pass. I'm...not sure I want it to.

3. If you want to see me compared to an Emma Frost-esque diamond golem, click here and join the giggling. I don't object to being a golem, or being made out of diamond, and I admit it, my productivity is occasionally terrifying even to me. I am also assured that this phase in my life will eventually pass. That idea scares me.

4. Things about this weekend that I'm really excited about: the first holiday party of the season. Getting more time to work on Blackout. The premiere of the Alice miniseries on Syfy. It's by the people who did Tin Man last year, and while it doesn't star Zooey Deschanel (a definite minus if you ask me), it looks absolutely incredible. Plus it has Connor from Primeval, and he is mad hot.

5. Matt Fraction has declared that Emma Frost is the love of Scott Summers's life. Matt Fraction is my new favorite person, at least for right now.

Tonight, I'm going out with my cousins to do something mysterious which required me to buy two rolls of quarters from the bank. I am wary but interested to learn what lies in store on the misty streets of San Francisco. Here's hoping you're planning for a wonderful weekend of your own, and feel free to let me know what you have going on!

One of the few black spots on an otherwise shining weekend involved...a shirt. A shirt, and an attitude that went with the shirt in question.

See, there was a lot of stupid pre-con surrounding the fact that OH NOES TEH TWILIGHT FANS ARE INVADING!!!! Never mind that Twilight, whether you like it or not, is speculative fiction, full of My Little Vampires, and has spawned a massively successful movie series. Never mind that this same complaint came up about the Harry Potter people, the urban fantasy people, and lots of other "not our kind" groups, before they became "our kind." TEH TWILIGHT FANS ARE INVADING!!!! IT IS TEH END OF DAYZ!!!! Worse yet, they're girls! Icky icky girls! The mainstream press—which still views the female geek as a charmingly endangered species, one which is potentially a myth—grabbed this and ran with it; if you go digging, you can find some...charming...articles about "the female invasion of Comic-Con" and "girls meeting geeks."

I first "invaded" Comic-Con thirteen years ago. Pretty sure I was a girl at the time. My boyfriend at the time definitely thought so, and as he had more opportunity to perform practical examinations than anybody from the mainstream press, I'm going to place bets that he was right. But anyway.

The Twilight girls, understandably, took offense, since they were being presented as fluff-brained bimbos who wouldn't know a comic book if it bit them on the booty. The general populace of Comic-Con wasn't offended, per se, although some offense started brewing when the Twilight fans started speaking up, since the cycle o' slag went media -> them -> us. But there was still the chance that everybody would be able to just get along. I know that I'm a lot more focused on getting where I'm going, at-con, than I am at playing Sharks vs. Jets in the middle of the Exhibit Hall.

But then came...the shirts.

Shirts on Twilight girls all over the convention. Shirts which read, in large, easy-to-read lettering, "Yes I am a real woman / Yes I am at Comic-Con / Yes I love Twilight." As a "real woman" who's been attending Comic-Con since before she could legally drink, these shirts awakened in my breast the deep and abiding desire to force-feed them to the people wearing them. I did not do so. Be proud of me. Be especially proud of me since large groups of the shirt-wearers—not all of them, by any means; I'm sure there were Twilight fans who were having a fantastic time without trying to piss in anybody's Cheerios—chose to stand around near the Exhibit Hall cafes and out by the Heroes carnival, making snotty comments about the costumes, figures, and overall appearance of the non-Twilight girls who went walking by.

Not cool.

I am a girl who likes the X-Men. I am a girl who likes horror movies. I am a girl whose favorite comics currently in print are Hack/Slash, The Boys, and Creepy. I am a girl who has spent a long damn time fighting for respect in her chosen geeky social circles, because we are still the minority in a lot of places, and it's difficult to convince your average horror geek that the female IQ is not calculated by taking the national average and subtracting her bra size. Twilight aside, there aren't enough of us to start playing this sort of game. Yes! You in the shirt, you're a real woman! And so am I! And so is every other girl at this convention! I did not give up my right to femininity just by deciding that I like to keep my My Little Ponies and my blood-drinking monsters separate, nor did you get a double-dose by combining the two. Women have been fighting for respect in comic and media fandom for a long time. Undermining that fight, even if you're doing it because you were provoked, just undermines us all.

No one has to like what I like. I try not to judge the likes and dislikes of others, and even when I can't avoid it, I try not to wander around in T-shirts that say things like "Every time editorial brings back Jean Grey, Magneto kills a kitten" or "Women Opposing More Bad Adapted Terror: JUST SAY NO TO STEPHEN KING MOVIES." All this could have been avoided if people hadn't been dicks to the Twilight fans in the first place...but I really do wish the Twilight fans hadn't felt compelled to be dicks to the rest of us in return.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...and finally...

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

How's by you?

We're now solidly into convention season—hooray!—and it has come to my attention that there are quite a few people reading this journal and planning to attend the San Diego International Comic Convention for the first time this year. There are also quite a few people who don't regularly read this journal, but have been pointed in my direction, since I have been known to post obsessively-detailed Guides to Comicon in the past. Hello, and welcome, one and all. Since I love you all (those of you I know, anyway; I am well-inclined by mildly indifferent towards those of you who just came in out of the cold), and want you to have the best convention experience that you possibly can, I've prepared this handy-dandy Comicon survival guide. See? It's both handy and dandy, and that means it must be good! This guide will include tips on:

• Reaching the convention alive.


• Getting a hotel room.


• Enjoying/surviving the con.


• Things to do at the con.


• Eating food.


• Staying healthy and sane.


• Not getting killed by your friends.


• Budgeting.


• Bathing.

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

Ready? Okay!

( Click here for Seanan's handy-dandy Comicon survival guide! Read and be enlightened in all the ways that matter, which is to say, all the ways that Seanan actually thought of. Freshly updated for 2009.Collapse )

1. Home from Friday at Wondercon.

2. Friday at Wondercon was every bit as awesome as I'd hoped! I wandered the floor, saw old friends, made new friends, bought cool shit -- I mean, seriously, comic book conventions are where I go to discover cool shit that I didn't know I was incapable of living without -- attended a panel on the future of Marvel's Ultimate Universe (it's not pretty, but it should be awesome), and managed to land on the commission list of an artist I admire. Major wins all around.

3. Alas, some other artists and authors I was really hoping to see didn't make this year's convention, for reasons ranging from 'the economy sucks' to 'twisted his ankle and didn't want to make with the massive lugging of crap through a crowded convention center.' So that's a little bit disappointing. Fortunately, most of them are scheduled to attend San Diego, so I'll get to see them there.

4. As an addendum to the last, I finally got the professional registration information for San Diego, and it's going to be my very first mass-media convention as an actual attending pro. Signing things. Things like, I don't know, maybe things related to Rosemary and Rue. You could actually get your hands on actual text, maybe. If you came looking for it...

5. I do still have art cards, and they will still be distributed first come, first serve throughout the remainder of the con, or until I run out, whichever comes first. Also, since I've been asked, I'll probably wind up selling whatever's left over, thus fueling my eternal need for more art supplies (and more cool crap I only seem to find at comic book conventions).

That's all for now. Now we must rinse.

1. If you wander on over to my website -- which is getting shinier and more functional every day as the back-end code comes online, all hail porpentine, who has slaved over a hot keyboard for our delight -- you may find a few truly awesome things waiting for you. Specifically, we now have icons and wallpapers, designed by the splendid taraoshea. All icons and wallpapers are free for use! Print them out, stick them to things, do whatever makes you happy. Well, except for posting them to your Deviant Art account and claiming that you made them. That would make the Tara sad, and she knows where I keep the chainsaws.

2. As you explore the site, you may see that there is now a landing page for the 'Velveteen vs.' stories. Yes, the link currently takes you to the big COMING SOON graphic, but its very existence means that, before too terribly much longer, there will be an online archive of the adventures of Velma 'Velveteen' Martinez as she struggles to survive the foul mechanations of the Marketing Department without giving in to the urge to just kill somebody already. Because the best way to show you care is with random semi-comic superhero stories, you know. My comic book store tells me so.

3. Speaking of my comic book store, the new best thing ever is walking into the place where I go for my weekly fix (I am such an X-junkie) and being greeted by Joe (the owner) with a cheery "Do you have CDs for me?" That moment, right there, was enough to validate my entire musical career.

4. Oh, and as an FYI for those who share my comic book habit -- Monday was a holiday, but it wasn't a shipping holiday. So today is still new comic book day, day of comic book-y goodness. Although according to the release lists, very little has come in that holds any actual interest for me. That's probably for the best, what with Wondercon right around the corner. Ah, sweet Wondercon. I wonder how I've lived so long without you.

5. I spent several hours last night at Borderlands Books, hanging out with Ripley, the freaky demon suede alien kitty-face (aka, 'the elder of the store's two resident hairless cats'). The more time I spend with her, the more I start to think that maybe life with a Sphinx wouldn't be so bad. Sure, they're naked and weird-looking, but they're also smart, friendly, and incredibly soothing to hang out with. This is probably a sign that I need some sort of 'cats are not like Pokemon, you do not need to collect them all' intervention.

6. While I was at Borderlands, I chanced to notice their list of top sellers for January, and jimhines grabbed the #10 slot with The Stepsister Scheme! Way to go Jim! The weird naked cats were very impressed.

7. For those of you who missed the (admittedly rather quietly delivered) memo, I will be leaving California for a short time in March, as I hop on a plane and fly out to New York for more fun with my friends at DAW. I love visiting my publisher, largely because it gives me an excuse to say 'my publisher' a lot, and that's still a sort of shiny-and-new thing for me. I am assured that by the time An Artificial Night (the third Toby book) hits the shelves, I won't find it all quite so exciting, but I really hope not. We all need things that make us irrationally happy. Anyway, my schedule is pretty packed while I'm there, so I'm not going to be looking to host a meet-and-greet or anything, but it's definitely going to represent a break in my standard routine.

8. Zombies are still love.

9. I have now managed to go three months without starting a new novel. For some people, this may seem like an unremarkable 'I just went three months without bursting into flame' or 'I just went three months without unleashing a global pandemic'-type statement, but for me, it's the result of Herculean efforts in the arenas of focus and restraint. I love starting books. The freedom and the scope of it all is just a wonderful thing. But I can be strong. I can be controlled. I can keep myself from getting beaten by my editing pool.

10. This coming Sunday is the official release date for Ravens In the Library, a benefit anthology assembled to help with SJ Tucker's unexpected medical bills. It's got an awesome list of authors, and, on a more personal note, it's got my first official this-is-in-print anthology appearance: my short story, 'Lost,' will be the final piece in the book. I'm very excited.

That's my wending for Wednesday. What's yours?

Last week, before I left for Conflikt, I stopped in at Flying Colors to pick up my comics for the week. Mmmmm, delicious comic-y goodness. I had a copy of Red Roses and Dead Things in my purse, so I pulled it out to show around, with the accompanying squeals of "My new album came!"

Andy -- one of the counter monkeys -- asked, "Is this for us?"

Being a sensible girl who loves her comic book store, I promptly replied with "Sure!" I left the album, picked up my comics, and went on my merry way home, hence to head for the airport, fly to Seattle, and basically forget the entire thing.

Wednesday, I went to the comic book store again, since, well, Wednesday is new comic day, and I'm basically a fixture. Joe (the owner) told me how much he'd enjoyed my CD, and how pleasantly surprised* he was to discover that it was awesome. I thanked him, and went back to seeking comics...only to have Brian stop me to do the same thing, and Andy, and Jasmine, and basically, the entire staff of Flying Colors. (Andy described it as 'totally cornball and campy, but in the good way.' High praise for a girl who grew up worshipping at the shrines of Marilyn Munster and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.)

And then Joe asked if I might want him to carry a few for me on consignment.

My comic book store -- the comic book store I've been going to almost my entire life, the comic book store I wish I could put in my pocket and just take with me to Seattle -- is going to carry my CD. In my comic book store. My CD. Later, possibly, my books (Joe's considering it).

I am a real girl.

(*Let's face it -- nothing's more awkward than having someone you like and respect hand you something they've made, and then finding out that the whatever it was sucks rocks. What are you supposed to say to them? 'Gosh, your CD sure was shiny?' 'Gee, there were a lot of words in that book?' It's an awesome surprise when awesome people make awesome things. I'm using the word 'awesome' a lot today. Maybe I should stop watching so many back-to-back episodes of Chuck.)

10. I appear to have started doing art cards. (Because, as Brooke said, I need something to do with all that spare time that I had just lying around.) For those of you who are unfamiliar with the art card 'concept,' they're little pieces of original artwork, done on 2.5"x3.5" cards. Mine are Micron and Prismacolor on bristol paper. I've done three so far, one to go with Grants Pass, one to go with Ravens in the Library, and one of Velveteen and Sparkle Bright during their first year with the JSP. I figure I'll use them as book giveaways. Right now, they're just being colorful and soothing; two things that I need more of in my life.

9. My reboot on Late Eclipses of the Sun appears to have done exactly what I was hoping it would do; the new first chapter is about ten times stronger, faster, better, and generally bionic in all possible regards. Now I'm working on the revisions to chapter two, just to really lock down the changes to the continuity, and once that's done, I can start processing my editor's notes on An Artificial Night. I'm spending so much time with Toby these days that we should really start charging her rent, I swear.

8. I write more poetry than is strictly healthy, sometimes in batches of two to five hundred poems at a time. (These batches are called 'Iron Poet' rounds, and are a variation on a standard writer's workshop exercise. They make me happy. I may be crazy.) I managed to write five poems yesterday, including a counted devan (although I skipped the internal rhymes on the zipper, because I didn't feel like giving myself a migraine) and a counted technical terza rima. Take that, everyone who said there was no use for structured poetry in the modern world!

7. My story in Ravens In the Library is getting an accompanying illustration. This is...this is amazing. Not just because the illustration itself is amazing -- I saw the sketch, and it is -- but because I didn't expect an illustration at all. It made me cry. More and more, I begin to believe that 2009 is the universe giving me one big incredible birthday present.

6. It's not entirely visible to the naked eye, but my website continues to creep closer and closer to being entirely done. We should be getting the first few essays up there soon, and Chris is working on the functionality that will allow me to update and edit the front page all on my lonesome. Meanwhile, Tara works secretly behind the scenes on Wonderful Surprises that only a golden graphics girl could possibly provide. Prepare to be amazed.

5. I get to spend the weekend working on Discount Armageddon! (Quoth Dan: "I don't know anybody who gets as excited about being told what to work on as you do.") I love deadlines, I love directions, and I love Verity. She's so happy to see you. And so happy to kick you in the head. Pleasantly, I just put together my Verity playlist last night, consisting almost entirely of dance music and things with a BPM of over 120. Because Verity just looooooves the beat, yo.

4. It's new comic book day! Always the most wonderful day of the week. At least in theory -- other days are sometimes surprisingly awesome.

3. All my television is coming back on the air. I'm a huge TV freak. It's what lets me decompress after a hard day of working and writing and worrying about working and writing; it's also what I do with the other half of my concentration when I'm inking. (Most of the shows I watch are more verbal than visual, and have clear cues when I actually need to be paying attention to the screen.) I really appreciate the fact that the things I watch are staggered enough to make sure I almost always have something new.

2. This time next week, I will be heading for the airport, heading for the sky, and heading for Seattle, baby.

...and the number one good thing about today...

1. Oasis just called me, and THE CDS ARE DONE!!!!! They're mailing them out from the Oasis warehouse today, and they should supposedly hit my doorstep on Friday. This gives me time to actually arrange for CDs to reach Seattle, prep the first batch of pre-orders to mail out (probably the first twenty or so, more if I can possibly swing it), and generally get my hysteria out of the way. It also gives me time to use the CD boxes to build myself a little fort and crawl inside it to hide from the universe.

What's new and awesome in the world of you?

Divalicious! volume one and Divalicious! volume two, by Amy Mebberson and T. Campbell.
TokyoPop, paperback
232 pages, bubblegum bimbo pop princess American manga musical madness
Currently in print

( What's it like to be Tina Young, arguably the most famous pop-star princess in the known universe? And can a comic book about a pop princess really be awesome enough to be worth reading? Absolutely, and you'd be surprised. Click here for details.Collapse )

Step one: Get off work. Go to Target. Buy microwave lunches for the next week, because Target is the only damn store in the damn Bay Area that reliably carries the kinds that I'll actually eat. Is it so hard for Safeway to keep Chicken Mirabella, Shrimp Marinara, and Tuna Casserole on their shelves? Apparently, yes. Yes, it is. (I'm only willing to eat like four kinds of microwave meal, and even I eventually get tired of spaghetti.)

Step two: Go to the comic book store. Engage an annoying patron in a vigorous discussion of why, perhaps, declaring "Fuck the Gemworld!" in a store containing, well, me, is not the world's very best idea. Amuse the counter monkeys immensely. The counter monkeys like me, as I am reliable, polite, and very, very addicted to comics. The counter monkeys have no such fondness for annoying patron, hereby referred to as 'the cat-toy.' The cat-toy survived our encounter, but did not linger.

Step three: Go home. Set the kitchen on fire making cranberry sauce.

Step four: Put out the fire.

Step five: Read Hack/Slash while eating dinner. After the dinner part of the program is done, ink and watch two episodes of Big Bang Theory (season one). Mr. Memory and The Human Labyrinth are now fully inked, as is the masthead. Most of the Ragnaroctopus still needs to be finished. But I found my zip-a-tone, so all will be well.

Step six: Process the final edits for my Grants Pass story, which is pleasant and nice and not at all disturbing.

Step seven: Muck around with my clicky Vampire Wars game on Facebook. Damn you, Jennifer, damn you.

Step eight: Make this entry.

Step nine: Retreat to the back room for Leverage and more comic books.

* I'm writing my world description outline for the InCryptid books, which is a lot of fun, since it lets me make statements like 'insect-derived exothermic placental mammals with a decentralized circulatory system' in a completely serious, sincere way. (I love my insect-derived exothermic placental mammals. They're so wonderfully creepy. Also, I would not want them in my house, and neither do you.)

* The Brightest Fell -- also known as 'Toby Daye, book five,' also known us 'uh, Seanan, isn't book one due out next year?' -- is now well underway; I finished chapter seventeen last night, with a great deal of giggling and clapping of my hands. This is also why I haven't been posting many word counts recently, since every time I think 'well, I'll just hop projects now,' The Brightest Fell slaps me upside the head and drags me back in. I think this is because the book really, really wants to be finished. And who am I to argue? I like it when books want to be finished. It makes me feel productive.

* I am seriously considering writing a book about zombie virology. Just because it would give me an excuse to go and hang out at the CDC asking weird questions without getting looked at funny. Also, if you haven't read Zombie CSI by Jonathan Maberry, you totally should. The slowly developing zombie non-fiction genre for the win, yo. (It's true facts about fictional things. This makes it, bizarrely enough, non-fiction. I love the world sometimes.)

* Lilly's best silly parlor trick is once again seasonal: yes, my cat will sing 'Baby, It's Cold Outside' as a duet if you simply start the song and pause at the right places. Behold the beauty of the Siamese. Unfortunately, this means she gets pissed off if you try to sing the duet with another person. The point in Elf where Will Farrel and Zooey Deschanel sing it together drives her into a furious rage. Which is actually really adorable, as long as she's not in your lap when it starts.

* Yes, I am intending to clip her claws before we go to see Santa, in the hopes that this will prevent her from clawing Santa's balls off. Be good to Santa. Let him keep his balls.

* I have decided to use Zip-a-tone on the Conflikt program book cover, to give it that little extra 'zing.' I haven't actually used Zip-a-tone in years, since digital coloring has largely eliminated the need for it, but really, who doesn't love an art supply that requires use of an exacto knife? I'm gonna have me a slice-and-shade party, and it's going to be awesome. The awesome doubles if I don't have to go to the emergency room afterwards. I'm hoping for double awesome.

* The second Hack/Slash omnibus comes out this month, along with a reprint of the first omnibus edition. Hack/Slash is the ongoing story of Cassie Hack, a horror movie final girl who fought back and then kept on fighting. Imagine Buffy if she'd been created by James Gunn and Vincent Price instead of Joss Whedon. And if they'd been doing acid at the same time. This is pretty much my favorite currently on-going comic book, and I highly recommend it. A Christmas gift for the ages!

* Evil Dead: the Musical opens in Martinez, California on January 6th, 2009. Tickets are $25 for cabaret seating, $30 for splatter zone seating. The splatter zone is awesome, but make sure you finish eating (it's a dinner theater) before the song 'Look Who's Evil Now,' as the fake blood tastes terrible. It also smells weird, which could totally kill your appetite.

* The growth of my website continues. It's like an evil alien weed, come to destroy all within its path. The latest addition: you can now access the 'review' page from the discography. Yes, there's a lot of text there right now. I'm going to trim it down to about half that, and increase the font size. We're just getting what exists in place before we start messing with content.

And that's my today. What's yours?

So periodically, I spend time thinking about the best of all possible worlds -- I call it the world of sunshine and rainbows and zombie ponies, where it occasionally rains candy corn -- and what I'd like to have someday happen there. Beyond the million-dollar book deal, the New York Times best seller, and the death of the previously unknown, fabulously rich relative who leaves me the deed to his sprawling Victorian estate, I mean. Being an enormous comic book geek, I've actually considered who, in my perfect world, would get the chance to adapt my books. And because I'm a nice person, I thought I'd share.

Upon A Star should absolutely be adapted by Amy Mebberson (As If!, Divalicious, my princess icon). Not only is she a joy to work with, but her particular blend of gonzo-Disney and manga-inspired comic layouts would be absolutely perfect for illustrating the story of Corey Markham, accidental teen queen. It would rock my world in the most thorough of manners.

Lycanthropy and Other Personal Issues would ideally be adapted by Chynna Clugston (Blue Monday), whose Archie-gone-wrong approach would be fantastic applied to Clady and company. Given Clady's horror movie fixation, having a slightly comic edge to the illustrations would keep things from getting too-too-bloody. Plus, Chyna draws awesome plaid. Plaid is key.

Now that I've had the silly, let's have the sublime: I would absolutely love to have Discount Armageddon (and sequels) adapted by Carla Speed McNeil (Finder, Mystery Date). Who else could do proper justice to a large colony of pantheistic demon mice? Or to the various cryptids and horrible things that litter Verity's world? She'd be totally ideal. If you don't believe me, check out Finder and be enlightened.

Newsflesh owes a lot to Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan, which was the work that introduced me to the idea of gonzo journalism (and unlocked a whole new world of possibilities). So I would totally want Darick Robertson, the man who drew Spider Jerusalem and company, to be the one to handle bringing the Masons into an illustrated universe. It would be insane. Insanely awesome.

Toby is the series I have the most time, energy, and love invested in; I guess that means it would naturally be the hardest to select someone for. After a lot of angst and waffling, I'm going to say Pia Guerra (Y: the Last Man) probably comes the closest to what I see inside my head. Although I could be totally wrong. I don't know. It'd make a gorgeous comic, but only if drawn right.

What works, of your own or other people's, would you like to see in comic form? And who would you want to see behind the pencil? Rock me.

I tend to develop a somewhat...familial...attachment to the stores that I frequent on a regular basis, to the point that they monitor the status of my projects, warn me when things that may upset me have happened (my comic store guys are hysterical on days when certain X-titles come in), and generally know exactly what they're dealing with when I walk in the door. We argue, gossip, chat, and generally just have a good time together. It's pretty awesome, and I appreciate it.

My normal comic store, Flying Colors, is very much a family establishment, and the owner, Joe Fields, doesn't order anything of an 'adult' nature. This is a good thing, as there are a lot of unsupervised kids browsing at just about any given time. This is a bad thing, because when they advertised the new Hack/Slash special issue -- a crossover with the Suicide Girls -- it got listed as 'adult,' and was consequentially not ordered. (Believe me, I made sad noises when I got to the store on Wednesday and discovered this dismaying fact. I sort of figured that the existence of the title 'Hack/Slash' would make it an automatic order. Sad cat...is trekking to her alternative comic book store in Berkeley.)

Luckily for me, I have a backup comic store: Comic Relief, which has the added bonus of being located right next to the Other Change of Hobbit. I stopped in yesterday, and was gratified to find that yes, they had the issue in question, even as I confused the heck out of the on-duty staff, who see me about once every three months (when Flying Colors either sells out of something or, as in the case of my Hack/Slash-with-boobies issue, fails to order it). If they didn't know me from local comic conventions and geek meets and forums, they'd probably think I bought six comic books a year. Tops.

With the latest installment of the adventures of Cassie Hack (more on this later) firmly in my possession, I went next door to let Will know that I'd been assigned a cover artist. He and I (and some random store patrons, that being the way at the Other Change of Hobbit) had a fairly vigorous discussion of cover design about a month ago, which covered everything from 'marketing,' 'eye-catching design,' and 'current trends' to 'yeah, but that looks stupid' and 'I just can't understand why all these ass-kicking heroines have nothing better to do with their time than go around crouching on rooftops while wearing uncomfortable-looking latex catsuits.' (My ass-kicking heroines -- I'm currently working with three -- wear, respectively, jeans and T-shirts, track gear, and whatever she can manage to grab before the goddamn flying monkeys break her bedroom window again. Note the lack of inexplicable latex catsuits.) Anyway, as a consequence of this conversation, I wanted to tell him who the Toby cover artist was going to be.

Pathetically, as soon as I finished waving my hands and going 'we got a cover artist and he's awesome!', I forgot a) his name, b) Jim Butcher's name, and c) the name of the series Butcher writes and McGrath draws the covers for (IE, the Dresden Files). We eventually managed to fix this, and then there was much joyful dancing in the Other Change of Hobbit.

I was sitting down to spend some quality time with the two loaner kitties that the shop cat-sits for during the week -- Clearsword and Patch, a Siamese and his Oriental shorthair brother -- when Patch went Very Still And Quiet. I turned around to find myself looking at...

...a dog. A truly awesome dog, of a breed that I had never seen before. She was short-haired to the point of seeming to be made of suede, except for the ridge down the middle of her back, dark blue in color (which, for non-pet-people, means she was a very pretty sort of gunmetal gray), and had a long, intelligent face that made her look a lot like artistic representations of Anubis. I promptly threw myself upon the altar of dog-worship, and grilled her owner about her origins. Turns out she's a Thai ridgeback. So. Cool.

Yesterday, I got a new comic book, a happy dino dance party, and a new dog breed.

How was your Thursday?

So far, of all the people I have told about my wonderful adventures in the world of publication, the best two reactions have come from my mother, which is sort of to be expected...and Joe, the man who owns my comic book store.

See, when I was a kid, most of the book stores and comic book stores and retail stores with magazine racks didn't trust children anywhere near the precious, precious reading materials. We might touch things. We might breathe on things. We might, heaven forbid, learn something that our tiny brains weren't yet prepared to handle. I didn't think much of this attitude then, and I don't think much of it now. If you can be respectful of books, you should be allowed to have access to them.

Joe was the owner of the only comic book store in the area that not only allowed me access, they encouraged me to take advantage of it. When we visited my Aunt Debbie, who lived a quarter-mile from the store, I would beg quarters off every adult I could find and walk down to the comic book store, where I would dig through the quarter bin looking for treasures. I always found them. I discovered the X-Men that way; Spider-Man; the Teen Titans. I also discovered the Omega Men, the Wanderers, Amethyst Princess of Gemworld, and a lot of others that people who aren't fans of comic books have probably never heard of. I learned a lot about storytelling -- both good and bad -- from that quarter bin, and I learned a lot about generosity with stories from Joe.

Yesterday, I went to the comic book store I've been going to since I was a kid, and went up to Joe, and said, "I sold the books." And he held my hands, and he laughed, and he hugged me, and he understood. And we're probably going to have a party, in my comic book store, when the first one sees print.

I have given stories back to the man who gave stories to me.

That's the best thing in the world.