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

This is where you come in.

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

Thank you.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Catch you when I wake up.

Words: 4,226.
Total words: 146,291.
Estimated words remaining: 4,000.
Reason for stopping: I am sick even unto death.
Music: really, really LOUD rock and roll.
Cats: Alice, flat on the lower tier of the cat tree; Lilly, on the windowsill; Thomas, on the top level of the cat tree.

As expected, I did not finish the book today. Also as expected, the book is going to run a little over my first draft estimate, putting us, oh, probably closer to 155,000 than 150,000 words. That's fine. Soon, I will finish this draft, process my pending edits, and ship the whole messy thing off to the patient Machete Squad for hacking into bits.

I am truly and genuinely almost done with my first series as Mira Grant. I am getting ready to write "THE END" on this huge, sprawling, amazing story. I am delighted. I am terrified.

I am also sick even unto death, so I'm going to go sleep now.

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

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

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

It was not enough to stave off the inevitable.

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

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

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

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

We now return you to your regularly scheduled babbling.

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

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

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

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

Too sick to die.

Hey, guys. I realize I've been as scarce as a quality script in a box of direct-to-video horror franchise installments, but I have a totally valid excuse: namely, the plague. I came down with a cold on Tuesday morning that I thought was in the "spend a day in bed and be all better" category, and turned out to be in the "have no memory of Wednesday or Thursday, don't start feeling human again until Sunday morning" category. Seriously, it was just a cold, but I haven't felt this bad due to an infectious agent in years. I wasn't even together enough to whine about the speed of viral amplification. It was scary. Amy arrived Friday morning, and says, of my condition, "You'd just crawled out of a somnolent alien slime pod."

See? I was too sick to even remember being abducted by the aliens! My germs have all the fun. Anyway...

Rebecca at Dirty Sexy Books—which you may remember posted a truly awesome review of Rosemary and Rue, saying, "I predict that this new series will be an urban fantasy powerhouse"—was kind enough to let me come back for a really fun and funny interview. I'm really enjoying the opportunity to do interviews around the Internet, especially since everybody keeps coming up with such different questions. (Questions I have yet to get, sadly: "How do you say your name?" "Do you really sleep with a chainsaw?" "What was the cause of the Black Death?")

Meanwhile, Erin (of Erin-Go-Blog!) decided to go ahead and throw her two cents into the ring, with a rockin' Rosemary and Rue review. Erin says...

"Seanan McGuire's first novel, Rosemary and Rue, is for anyone who has ever believed in faeries, for anyone who has ever wished to step into a wardrobe and out into a world that is magical and every bit as real as our own."

...and...

"If you like paranormal fiction, grown-up faerie tales, urban fantasy, tight prose, well-drawn worlds and characters, sarcasm, murder mysteries, or any combination thereof, pick up Rosemary and Rue. You won’t be disappointed."

Yay, Erin!

It's not a review roundup without a LiveJournal review, and today, markbernstein is filling that role, with his thoughtful and considerate review of Rosemary and Rue. Mark says...

"The things that most matter to me in a book, that draw me in if done well, are world building, characterization, and humor. McGuire is strong in all of those areas."

...and...

"Rosemary and Rue is about more than the detective plot. It's about re-establishing connections, dealing with guilt, and (to steal a phrase from the book) finding the way home. This adds a depth, a feeling of meaning, that far too many series books lack."

Closing out tonight's review roundup, we have Doug at Sci-Fi Guy, posting his fabulous and shiny Rosemary and Rue review for the consideration of the world at large. Doug says...

"Rosemary and Rue has a rich undercurrent of menace and constant threat of implied violence in its' portrayal of the fae creatures and customs that creates an atmosphere ripe with tension that perfectly complements the action. The fae world is a harsh one and the life of the Changelings even more so. Toby's pursuit of the truth is relentless and I can't remember the last time a main character was put to the test with such fervor. The central mystery and final outcome has enough surprises and twists and turns to satisfy serious mystery buffs."

Swoon. Also...

"Rosemary and Rue also has a delightfully fresh narrative voice. Every page has interesting turns of phrase and observations. It would have been easy to select dozens of quotations to share. The writing style alone would have been enough to keep me turning pages."

...oh, and...

"Rosemary and Rue is a startlingly good debut novel and destined for my top 10 list for 2009."

...and...

"With a dark, edgy mystery, plenty of magic and mayhem, humor and horror, Rosemary and Rue has something for everyone."

My yesterday, in review:

5:30 AM: Get out of bed, go to work.
6:30 AM: Become vilely, graphically, and messily ill. Attempt to work anyway.
9:00 AM: Determine that this is absolutely not working. Go home.
10:30 AM: Go to bed.
3:30 PM: Wake up.
5:00 PM: Take some Tylenol, go back to bed.
8:30 PM: Wake up.
11:15 PM: Go back to bed.

I woke up at eight o'clock this morning with the distinct feeling that I had somehow traded Friday to the fairies for a handful of magic beans and a plush velociraptor. At least I like the plush velociraptor.

On the plus side, for all that I now have that faintly draggy 'you slept too much, you moron' feeling, combined with a double to-do list -- since I did basically nothing yesterday, and my average day's to-do is between fifteen and fifty items -- I no longer seem to be sick. It may just be that my body figured out that if it hit me hard enough, I'd lay down already. The possibility must be admitted to exist.

This is totally the way to make me miss my word count goals for a day. Make me too damn sick to die.

Bleargh.

I am mad sick. I went to work, put in almost three hours before I could put in no more, and then proceeded to stagger home and fall over. I just woke up, largely, I think, because Lilly somehow turned on my iTunes. (On the plus side, iTunes is playing the Counting Crows Live at Elysee Montmartre. So at least it's an album I'm fond of.)

I am basically too sick to die. But I am not dead.

That's all.

I had a great many plans for yesterday. In fact, I had two complete plan 'packages,' allowing me the choice of a) spending the day at the Sacramento Zoo with my mother, my sister (Melissa), my sister's wife (Mary), and my sister's three step-kids, or b) staying at home sipping faux-Mimosas -- Crystal Light orange mixed with Diet 7-Up, DON'T JUDGE ME -- while starting the end-to-end rewrite on Late Eclipses of the Sun and prepping the next few 'Velveteen vs.' stories.

Instead, I spent the day either a) face-down in the toilet, praying for the sweet embrace of death, b) face-down on my mattress, praying for the sweet embrace of death, c) passed out on the bathroom floor, praying for the sweet embrace of death, or d) at the urgent care, where they gave me IV fluids and scolded me for spending so much time unconscious before seeking medical care. Being as I don't have a car, and the buses on Sunday are practically non-existent, I bore my scolding with valiant disdain, and concluded by throwing up on one of the attending nurses. Sorry about that.

The zoo would have been a lot more fun.

In other news, all of my deadlines for the week have officially been pushed back two days on account of plague, which ate my Sunday and has turned Monday into 'invalid recovery zone' territory. I am keeping fluids down at this point, and may even risk such extravagant splurges as Saltines and a shower. Sometime. Soon. Not now, however, as my head is still full of angry weasels, and I'm still not sure I'm over that whole 'praying for death' thing.

Plague: much more fun to read about than it is to experience. Seriously.