Many people don't realize this, because it hasn't come up much lately, but I am part of an acapella group. I am, in fact, one of the three founding members of Lady Mondegreen, an all-female filk acapella group with members all over the world (or at least, all over North America and Europe). Because I live on the West Coast and the other two founding members live on the East Coast, we have not actually performed together since 2007. So when ChessieCon asked us to do a concert, we said sure. Why the hell not?

Batya, Merav, and I rehearsed as much as we could while I was in New York, and made our way to the con, where we took the stage for a surprisingly (dauntingly) large crowd. Our set list was as follows:

Sound check:

Theme from Banana In Pajamas
The shunning of Josh (ala Charlie the Unicorn)
Theme from Disney's The Gummi Bears
Theme from Disney's Rescue Rangers

Actual concert:

"The Three Fine Daughters of Farmer Brown" (Eddie From Ohio)
"Bottom of the River" (Delta Rae)
"Lorelei" (The Pogues)
"Flu Pandemic" (The Flying Fish Sailors)
"If I Had a Boat" (Lyle Lovett)
"Mordred's Lullaby" (Heather Dale)
"Lilo" (parody)
"All In Green" (e.e. cummings, music by Batya Wittenberg)
"Anything For You" (Ludo)
"Bedroom Eyes" (Uncle Bonsai)
"Reunion Hill" (Richard Shindell)
"This Side of the Knife" (Talis Kimberley)
"Don't Go Down to the Quarry" (Peter, Paul, and Mary)
"Leaving On a Jet Plane" (John Denver)

Post-concert:

"We are Wyld Stallions!"
"We are Sex B-Bomb!" (Quoth Batya: "I don't want to be Sex B-Bomb.")
"We are Mouse Rat!" (Cue me bouncing up and down singing "Sex Hair/Sex Bears.")

...all in all, not bad for our first show in years.

Three weeks ago, I was Fan Guest of Honor at Westercon in San Diego. This was a huge privilege, and I am so grateful to the convention for having me. (I am slowly ticking off the Guest of Honorships available to me at Westercon, having been Music Guest of Honor several years ago, when the con was in L.A.)

Two weeks ago, I was back in San Diego as an attending professional at the San Diego International Comic-Con. SDCC is one of the last cons I do "for me," attending because I want to as much as because it's part of my job. It's a big, sprawling, exhausting nightmare of a con, and I love it so.

This past weekend, I was Guest of Honor at Camp Necon in Portsmith, Rhode Island (the only con that involved changing time zones, for which I am deeply grateful). I got home last night, about an hour before midnight.

I.

Am.

Done.

I am not physically as tired as I have been after other adventures, but three weeks of virtually no down time doesn't do good things for my psyche. Right now, I am wiped, I am wasted, I am no longer among the living, and I don't actually get to take a break from things like "the rest of my job." Page proofs must be reviewed; word counts must be made. A book must be edited. Conventions seem like the fun part of what I do, and they are, but they're also the most draining, and I wish I could take a few days to just sleep.

Please don't take this as an invitation to tell me to take care of myself: I am taking care of myself. Part of that is that email responses and the like will be slow for the next week or so, and my social media will be 95% cats and dolls. Please try to use Google or check my FAQs before asking me questions, if you can, just to give me a little more bandwidth, and be patient with me?

I am doing the best I can.

Twenty years ago, I built my world around BayCon from January through May, with flashes scattered throughout the rest of the calendar. I hung my social engagements and scholastic achievements in the spaces between meetings and convention duties, and I felt privileged to do it. In many ways, this is the convention that built me.

It's not that convention anymore. Like everything else in my world, like me, BayCon has changed.

This past weekend, I was privileged to do one of the things I would never, as a teenager, have believed I would one day do: I was BayCon's Author Guest of Honor. (This makes me the only person ever to have been the convention's GoH, Toastmistress, and Chair. In different years, but still.) It's a smaller con than it used to be. They do some things radically differently, to the point that I had to step back and go "this is not your con, even though it has the same name" before I could enjoy myself. That doesn't mean they do things badly, or wrong; it was just like visiting a house where I used to live and seeing what color they had painted my room.

This past weekend, I hung out with friends. I did panels. I gave a concert. And sometimes, for a moment, when the light was right, I went back in time.

Not bad for a girl who started in the Music Department.

And speaking of music, my set list. I was accompanied by Paul Kwinn and Kristoph Klover on guitar; Beckett Gladney on harmonica; and Margaret Davis on flute and harp.

1. "This Is My Town."
2. "Phantoms of Summer."
3. "Maybe It's Crazy."
4. "Preston Miller."
5. "Dear Gina."
6. "Mama Said."
7. "Vampire Slayer Blues."
8. "Death Danced at My Party."
9. "Wicked Girls."
10. "My Story Is Not Done."

Encore: "Jack's Place."

"Preston Miller" is by Dave Carter. "Death Danced..." is by Talis Kimberley. Everything else is by me. We had a preschool dance party and sold T-shirts from a table at the back of the room, and it was an amazing end to a lovely con.

I will always miss being sixteen and thinking it was the center of the world.

So I was just a featured faculty member at the Pike's Peak Writer's Conference (where there was no air). I delivered the Sunday keynote speech. I got a standing ovation, which was pretty awesome. Anyway, here it is for you to read.

Thank you.

( Cut-tagged because speeches are long.Collapse )

So I went to Eastercon recently. Hooray! If you don't know, Eastercon is the British national science fiction convention, held every Easter weekend. This year, I was one of their guests of honor, which meant hey, I got to go to England! Hooray x2!

Only, see...I get the jet lag. I get the jet lag badly. I always have. I wrote an entire romantic comedy about jet lag (Chasing St. Margaret, not coming any time soon to a bookstore near you). I am not a girl who switches time zones quickly or easily. Normally, I deal with this by giving myself time before the convention to adjust. Sadly, this time, that wasn't an option, as I was a Special Guest at Emerald City Comic Con the weekend before. My schedule looked like this:

Monday morning, fly from Seattle back to San Francisco.
Tuesday morning, get my hair done.
Wednesday morning, fly to England.
Thursday morning, land in England.
Friday morning, the con begins.

...not ideal. And maybe it would have been okay if I had been able to sleep on the plane (I usually can), but this time the guy next to me wouldn't stop snoring, and I had a cough from the cleaning products at the airport, and it was no good. I was awake all the way to London, reading and fussing and trying not to be the worst person anyone had ever shared a plane with.

My handler picked me up at the airport and delivered me to the hotel, where I proceeded not to sleep. And not to sleep. And finally to sleep for twelve hours, which resulted in my sleeping through a panel. When I finally woke up, I went looking for her to apologize, and had literally upward of thirty people laugh and tell me they'd missed me.

Things not to do to people with anxiety: remind them thirty times that they are a failure.

I had a full-blown panic attack, complete with inability to breathe, and stopped sleeping again, since sleeping now equated directly to fucking up. HOORAY. I didn't sleep until I got to Teddy and Tom's after the con, where I crashed for thirteen hours, was up for three, and then napped. I never did get quite onto UK time. I've been home for over a week, and I'm barely returning to normal.

Jet lag sucks.

I had never been to Germany before. But since the convention I was going to be a Special Guest at (Filk Continental) was in Germany, it seemed like a good time to show up.

Tom helpfully drove me to the station near the house, where I got a head shake from the station agent, who disapproved of my (admittedly expensive) "take the Heathrow Express from Paddington" plan. I pointed out that I was a clearly foreign woman with a giant suitcase, and that sometimes we pay to not take stairs. He replied that he would have made different choices with his money, and gave me my ticket. Jerk.

Ahem. The Heathrow Express proved to be a quick, pleasant way to get to the airport, and I highly recommend it. Yes, it was more expensive, but the savings in terms of both time and stress cannot be overstated, even if I did promptly get off at the wrong terminal. (This is a big deal in Heathrow, which is one of the largest airports in the world.) I found my way to the right terminal, and then the right gate, and finally the right seat on the right plane, and all was right with the world.

My flight was short and uneventful, and eventually dropped me in Hannover, where I was collected from the arrivals area by Rika and Rachel. I went to sleep in the car. Then I went to sleep on the couch at Rika's lovely apartment. Then I got up for breakfast with some lovely filkers who live in Rika's apartment complex, and whom I would see a great deal of over the weekend (yay!). They had an assortment of cheeses. YAY CHEESES. And then I went back to sleep for several hours. This would prove to be a good thing later.

The drive from Hannover to the convention, which was being held in a lovely little youth hostel near a castle, was lovely, uneventful, and long enough for me to watch two episodes of Leverage. We got there, got checked in, and I went to poke Vixy with a stick, since I had missed her dreadfully during my "out of time zone" adventures. She felt unwell. I still had my cold meds from when I'd first arrived in England. The circle of cold meds closes, and all is complete.

Sunnie and Betsy were in my room when I came back downstairs, making it our room, and the weekend had officially begun.

First up was dinner with the concom, at a local restaurant that had passed their stress test, but did not so much pass the "twenty people would like to be fed and Seanan is about to pass out from low blood sugar" test. Boo. It took about three hours to eat, and by the end of it, I was a murderbunny. I ate half of Betsy's dinner, which helped. Going to bed also helped...although it would have helped more if I'd been able to sleep. Unfamiliar place + thin walls + thin bed = Seanan begins her three-day ordeal of stumbling through life, dreaming of sensory deprivation chambers. Boo.

The next day was Friday, and kicked off the convention. We rehearsed for our various concerts, attended opening ceremonies (awesome), and opening concerts (even more awesome). I went to bed early, in hopes that I would sleep. I did not. Sigh.

Saturday was my concert, followed by Vixy and Tony's concert. Since we both used Sunnie and Betsy extensively, we were basically solid walls of sound, and everything went amazingly. The whole audience stood up and held hands during "We Are Who We Are" (Vixy and Tony's latest song, which is awesome), causing Vixy to wander around looking stunned and asking if that had really just happened. Hee.

Sunday was workshops, more concerts, and the final request concert, where Steve Macdonald and Katy Droege did "Cold Butcher" at my request, I did "Still Catch the Tide," and Vixy and Tony closed the con with a repeat performance of "We Are Who We Are." The Dead Dog that night was awesome, and I even stayed up for several hours to enjoy open filk before staggering off to bed.

The next day, Steve and I got a ride home from Syb, while Katy drove Vixy and Tony home. We all met up in Hamburg, where we had a lovely steak dinner before crashing at Steve and Katy's place. The next day, Steve got me to the airport to begin my incredibly long journey home.

But that's another story.

So from the day I arrived in Europe, when people asked for my itinerary, it included Swindon. And from the day I arrived in Europe, "I'm going to Swindon for two weeks," was greeted with "why?"

At the end of my (glorious, exciting, restful) stay in Glasgow, Stuart drove me and Amal to the train station, where she walked me through the process of getting my ticket and locating my train. This is more complicated than you might think, especially when it's happening in a country where you don't actually happen to live, and which is hence perpetually confusing. My friend Hisham had assisted me with the booking process and told me how to find my seat (also more confusing than you might think), and in short order I was squared away on the train, where I hugged Amal goodbye several times before settling down to watch Leverage for most of the duration of the six-hour trip.

(Kate's old iPad basically saved my sanity on long stretches of this voyage, I swear.)

I was about two hours in when a hand tapped my shoulder and there was Hisham, who had hopped on to ride with me for a while (he works for the trains). He brought me Coke Zero and cookies, thus cementing his position as one of my favorite humans. He also brought me Pokemon, and we passed a pleasant hour or so trading electronic monsters and chatting about all manner of things. It was awesome, and I enjoyed it a lot. I like friends on trains. It makes the time go faster.

Alas, eventually he had to leave me, and I finished the rest of my journey in electronic silence, pulling into the stop at Bristol Parkway about five and a half hours after I left Glasgow. Talis was waiting for me there, wearing a splendid scarf printed with bees. After hugs and happy exclamations, she helped me transfer my suitcase to my second and final train, and we rode on to Swindon, where we caught a cab to my true destination: the village of Wroughton.

Wroughton is close enough to Swindon that it was easier to say I was going there, but in reality, it's a lovely little village where everything is within walking distance (except for the big new Waitrose), and where everyone knows Talis, who has been getting more and more active in local politics over the years. I was staying in her upstairs guest bedroom, on a narrow bed that looked like an ascetic's cot and felt like the clouds of heaven. Her husband, Simon, was in France when I arrived, meaning it was just me, Talis, and their lovely daughter, Pippa, who I hadn't spent any real time with since she was a toddler.

Even the highlights of my time in Wroughton seem so big and complex that they're hard to wrap my mind around. I went to country market. I performed with Talis at the Greener Gloucester Festival. I went to two folk clubs with Talis and her singing partner, Chantelle. I ate a lot of Victoria sponge, and drank a lot of rose lemonade. I made chicken stock and then chicken soup, which was delicious. I went to Cheddar, and saw cheese being born. I stroked the two resident black and white magpie boycats.

I chased and caught so many frogs and toads, and ate eggs I had pulled from under chickens, and harvested raspberries and blackberries from the vine into my mouth, and it was wonderful. It was restorative and peaceful and glorious and perfect, and I am so grateful. So, so grateful.

I love my friends. I love my life. And I loved the frogs.

I'm going back next year.

When last we left our intrepid heroine (me), I was on a plane to Scotland, to visit Amal and Stuart for a week. Basically exactly a week, which was simultaneously a long, long time to go stay with someone I had never stayed with before, and nowhere near long enough to stay with a dear friend in a city I had never visited.

My flight was smooth and uneventful, and landed in Glasgow a little early, which was good, since it had been marred by navigation issues which caused the cabin crew to say "all electronics must be off, yes, even your Pokemon machine, yes, even your iPod." It was a sad, sad situation for a Seanan. When I landed, it became even sadder, as my phone had run out of minutes while I was in Ireland, and I thus could not call Amal to let her know I was there. I mooched back and forth in the airport for a while, sadly, until she materialized, all smiles and hugs and help with my luggage, and got me out of there.

When we arrived at the apartment, everything smelled like home. There was a chicken roasting in the oven and a pot of stock simmering on the stove, and I promptly decided that this was the best of all possible worlds. I was set up in the guest room, added to the wireless, and introduced to the two fabulous resident magpie cats. Amal quickly discovered that she could thrust things at me, and that I would then read them. This became a popular party game over the next few days.

Oh, the places we went! Oh, the things that we did! We visited the two biggest cheese shops in Glasgow, and assembled two glorious cheeseboards, including Bonnet (goat), Isle of Mull Cheddar (yellow), VJ Cabrales (DEATH BLUE), Old Lochnagar (cheddar-ish), and Dunsyre Blue, all from I. J. Mellis, and Isle of Mull Cheddar (white), Killeen (goat-gouda), Basajo (white-wine blue with grapes!), and Coulommiers (Brie), all from George Mewes. There was not a bad bit of cheese in the bunch.

I must, however, take a moment to focus on the Cabrales. This cheese was given in response to my request for an aggressive blue. "Aggressive" does not begin to cover it. This cheese was the Ghost Rider of cheeses, judging your sins and refusing to forgive them. It was so strong it was physically painful to eat more than a sliver at a time. I am in love. I want twenty pounds of it.

Amal and I walked Glasgow, enjoyed cake at Once Upon A Tart, and bought heather gems. She saw me have my first Victoria tart and my first rose lemonade, both of which engendered bliss face. We watched Doctor Who and made plans for the future and chatted about anything and everything, and it was lovely. I cooked her and Stuart goat. I snuggled their cats.

On Friday, we drove two and a half hours to Amal and I could hike off into the fields of Carterha and touch Tam Lin's well. This will be a post all of its own, and soon.

On Saturday, we went to the Scottish Owl Centre, which was perfect and sublime and like nothing I had ever done before. I want to go back.

Sunday we shopped, rested, ate, and made our farewells, and Monday morning, I got on a train bound for Swindon. It was nowhere near long enough. It was the perfect length of time. Scotland was beautiful, and its people even more so.

I want to go back.

All my life, I've known that my mother's people were from Ireland, but apart from one very short stop during a visit to England several years ago, I had never been. The country that shaped my grandparents was a mystery to me. Part of why I was so pleased to be invited to be a Guest of Honor at Shamrokon was the opportunity to see Ireland, and because of that, when James (one of the con chairs) asked if I wanted to stay in Dublin for a week and see a bit of the country, I leapt at the opportunity.

The Monday after the con, I saw Amy off and went to the Porterhouse Central with Wes and Mary for the Dead Dog. We quickly ditched out of there and went first to the bookstore, then to grab a quick bite at The Farm (a local food restaurant) before heading back in. I got to see Charlie, Bill and Brenda, Merav, Terry, and Jon, and a bunch of lovely locals (including one very excited boy who came over to talk Skullduggery Pleasant with me, at length) before James scooped me up for the drive to his home in Drogheda (a small town about forty-five minutes outside the city).

I stayed awake the whole way home, but only barely, and collapsed into bed as soon as we'd finished supper. The next morning, he took me to the grocer's for provisions, and we spent most of the day recovering from the con. Come Wednesday morning, the rest was over. He went to pick up his second houseguest, a very nice woman from Chicago named Leanne, and we basically went straight from unloading her bags to the tombs at Newgrange and Knowth.

Newgrange and Knowth are heritage sites, places where passage tombs still stand. Walking around and into them was like walking into history. Here were these mounds, these great gobs of earth and stone, that were there long before America existed; long before the Christians came to Ireland. We went into the passage tomb at Newgrange, and it was so quiet and still, even full of tourists, that it was more than a little sobering. I wasn't sure how exactly to feel about it. I'm still not. Absolutely gorgeous, and I'm so glad I went.

There were blackberries on the way to the tombs, and sheep in the roads. It was glorious.

Thursday we lounged about. Friday we went into Dublin so I could get souvenirs for my mother, and while we were there, we met up with Brian and Shevy and went to the Leprechaun Museum.

Yes, you read that correctly.

It was a really lovely little museum, with some very engaging storytellers who were happy to enlighten us about the sidhe. Also, there was giant furniture I could climb on, and I appreciated that.

Saturday was Doctor Who and laundry and mailing things and bidding Leanne farewell, as she was leaving early the next day. Sunday was packing and figuring out what needed to happen before I could head for my next stop: Glasgow.

Monday morning, James and I both got up early, and he drove me to the airport before heading to work. I wound up in the longest airline line I've ever been in (hooray for always being two hours early), and then it was off to Scotland. Yay, Scotland!

It was a good trip. I'm glad I went, and would like to go back sometime with friends, so that we can explore all the wonders the country has to offer.

Next up, GLASGOW.

Amy and I left France on Thursday morning, following a ride in a cab operated by a surly but talented driver (we didn't die!), and some exciting airport escapades that I have already detailed in the "Paris" post. Our flight, operated by Aer Lingus, was short and pleasant, although I had never encountered "pay for your soft drinks" on a plane before (I prey Southwest never starts doing that). We landed in Dublin a little early, and made it to the car park with the assistance of a very nice local wheelchair operator. (Airport wheelchair services, for those who've not used them, generally consist of young, athletic people who are willing to push people who need it from one terminal to another. We tipped well, and everything was lovely.)

Gareth from Shamrokon met us at baggage claim, and loaded us into his car for the first of our odd transits. See, Sheila—my editor—and Betsy—my publisher—had both come to Dublin, and Thursday night was the only night that was really good for us to have dinner together. So Amy and I needed to be dropped off at the restaurant, while he took our luggage on to the hotel. Good thing he's a good sport! We wound up in a Michelin-starred French restaurant attached to their hotel, where we spent four and a half hours eating, drinking, talking, and enjoying cheese. So much cheese. It was a really divine dinner, and I completely understand why people make such a big deal about the place.

So much cheese.

Friday kicked off the convention. I had a panel with Tim Griffin and Jordan Kare, during which we talked about filk and how to be comfortable in the filk community; Kathy Mar attended, as did Teddy and Tom, and we had a lovely time making them do the heavy lifting for us. After that was opening ceremonies, and then, concert prep!

Yes, we did a concert, largely due to the tireless efforts and incredible talents of Dr. Mary Crowell, who herded all the cats so that I could look good. She is amazing. My band consisted of her, Amy McNally, and the Suttons, and everyone was splendid. We did basically the same set as Loncon, which was fine, because there wasn't that much audience overlap between the two cons, and it was really lovely. Brenda sang my part on "Wicked Girls," while I sang Vixy's, and a good time was had by all.

The next item was "In Conversation With Seanan McGuire," the solo version of the panel I like to do with Cat, where I will answer everything I am asked. We ran about ninety minutes over, and it was beautiful. Some very serious topics were discussed, like depression and OCD and the difficulty of talking about feeling suicidal. (One well-meaning man asked "Well, have you tried being sad without hurting yourself?", and while I hate the question, it opened the door for some very good discussion.) It was uncomfortable but important, and no one left the room, so I'm calling it a win.

Saturday, I had my Guest of Honor interview, with Janet as my interviewer, who had smartly brought Kinder Eggs. Every time she felt I'd answered a question sufficiently, I got chocolate. A+ interviewing technique, would be interviewed again. My panel on pseudonyms went well, and ended early enough that Amy and I were able to go out and grab dinner before the Doctor Who season premiere at eight, or the filk jam at nine.

I did not stay up to close out the jam. I am weak.

Sunday, I signed stuff; talked about zombies with great enthusiasm; and talked about toys with equally great enthusiasm. Then we closed the con, and I darted off with Amy and Wes to join the fabulous dinner already beginning at the Winding Stair, where the food was traditional and delicious.

Monday was the off-site Dead Dog at the Porterhouse downtown, and Wes and Mary and I had a lovely time, after bidding our beloved friends adieu. We swung by the nearby bookstore, which had my picture in the window, and bought books, before handing me off to the con chair, James, to go back to his place for a week's Irish tourism.

On the whole, Shamrokon was absolutely lovely. A good con, well-run, by extremely friendly people. Would guest again.

Next up, IRELAND.

When last we left our intrepid heroes, they were arriving at the Aloft, hence to set up base camp for the convention. Hooray! Only...not so much hooray, as my bank had turned my credit card off for fraud after seeing it used at Heathrow Airport and our initial hotel. In England. Where I had told them I would be.

I called the bank and had a borderline hostile conversation, ending when they turned my card back on and I was able to check us into the hotel. Wes and I then went to pick up the wheelchair Amy had booked for me. (My walking difficulties are continuing to improve, but "improving" doesn't mean the same as "better," and we very much wanted to be sure that I would be able to walk both in Paris and at Eurocon the following week.) It turned out that, despite us having put the booking in ultra-early, there were no independent mobility (IE, "big round wheels") chairs left, and I was put into a hospital-style chair that required someone to push me. Not so awesome.

We got me checked in and were off to my first panel, on pseudonyms. While I was there, Wes took the hospital chair back to the mobility desk and got me upgraded to a mobility scooter, on account of I did not have the independent movement I had been promised and no one wanted to have to help me get to the bathrooms. Everybody wins! (Vixy and I did not have a fully handicapped-accessible room, but had decided that parking the scooter in the shower was better than, again, no independence at all.) The panel went well, and we borked off for supper with a lot of my favorite people—Mary and Simon, Talis and Pippa, Brooke and Amy and Vixy and Wes—at the Indian restaurant at the end of the walk. We ran into Wesley Chu on the way back, and a good time was had by all.

That night was I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue, hosted by Lee Harris, and we had a splendid time. It was me and Cat "vs." Paul and Emma, and everyone acquitted themselves handsomely. I was still struggling with the tail end of my cold, and so made plans to tap out if necessary (Heath was ready to be our stunt Seanan), but I was able to get through the whole session, and only coughed so hard I stopped breathing once. Meg was seated in the front row, and was able to interpret my pantomime and get me my cough syrup. Life was very good indeed.

Friday passed in a blur. For my reading, I did half of "We Are All Misfit Toys in the Aftermath of the Velveteen War," and followed it up with an impromptu hallway signing that lasted no shit half an hour, courtesy of my not having an actual signing. (This was not the fault of the convention; I was the one who mis-booked the train tickets.) The queue was remarkably orderly, and crowned by Hisham walking over and offering me Pokemon. I LOVE YOU HISHAM. Pokemon: the way to my heart.

Saturday's panel on girl scientists was excellent, and I basically used Amanda as my guide. "Does this piss Amanda off?" I would ask myself, and then ask the question.

My concert was splendid and the filk track organizers were brilliant when they forced me to accept the big room (I had said I would be perfectly happy with the normal filk concert space). It held three hundred people, and we near to filled it. Dead Sexy was wonderful, as always. (Dead Sexy is the version of my backing band consisting of Bill and Brenda Sutton, Amy McNally, Dr. Mary Crowell, and Michelle Dockrey.) We scrapped "What A Woman's For" at the last minute, due to concerns about my voice and our arrangement, and dropped in "Still Catch the Tide," because it's something we can do without lyric sheets or practice. Talis was in the audience.

She'd never heard us do it live before.

I made Talis cry.

It was a good night, overall, and I am very glad to have been there.

I stayed on Sunday, just long enough for my panel on fan works, and then it was off to the rail station to catch the Eurostar to Paris. Vixy and I "watched" the Hugos over Twitter from our Parisian apartment (the wireless wasn't good enough to stream), and while I was sorry not to be there, Sunil was so happy to be me that I was honestly glad to have mis-booked the train: he glows in all the pictures I've seen, and I am always happy when I can give good experiences to my friends.

Congratulations to all the winners, solidarity to all the losers (of whom I am one), and I'll see you all next year.

Next up: DISNEYLAND.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

England!

So last weekend was Emerald City Comic Con. Lots of fun stuff there, lots of big things coming from some of our favorite creators, and lots and lots and lots and lots of walking. Ugh. I spent the weekend in the walking boot, and I still felt like someone had been beating my left foot and ankle with iron bars by the time it was all over. I had a great time; I can't wait for next year; I got home in dire need of a nap. That has basically been my week: "Seanan is in dire need of a nap."

As always happens when I'm sleep-deprived, pretty much anything that wasn't word count or absolutely essential business has fallen by the wayside. I'm behind on email, LJ comments, various accounting bits...everything. I managed to book my tickets to Europe (I'm going to DISNEYLAND PARIS!) and continue dealing with my taxes, but everything else? Hoo nelly, no. It's all been put off until I could say, with sincerity, "I am awake, and will not accidentally slice my fingers off."

On the plus side, I'm staying current with word count, and I'm on track to finish A Red-Rose Chain (aka "Toby book nine") this month, allowing me to get it off to the Machete Squad and move on to the next items on my list. I will never finish the list. The list is an endless road stretching off into the ever-moving future. But the list is a guide and a map and a benediction, and nothing makes me happier than knowing that it's always growing. I'll reach the end when I die.

Also on the plus side, I have finished copies of Sparrow Hill Road and Robot Uprisings, and they're both gorgeous. I have now filled two long shelves just with books I've written, and I'm about to have to rearrange my shelves again. So I'm doing okay at my job.

How's everybody else?

(Comment amnesty is on. I genuinely want to know how you are, but I don't want to put myself any further behind than I already am.)

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.)

I just got back from Jordancon, aka, "an excuse to hang out in Roswell, Georgia with awesome people for four days." I've never been to Georgia in the late spring/early summer before. It was exciting and strange and new, and these are all things that I treasure, regardless of the circumstances surrounding them. Hooray!

Thanks to my uncanny ability to sleep on planes, I don't really remember the flight to Georgia; just getting up ridiculously early to travel to the airport, waking up once in midair to eat my lunch, and then touching down on the other side of the country. I was worried about finding the car that had come to collect me. The car solved this problem by containing Michael Whelan, who waved enthusiastically when he spotted me. Many hugs were had.

I ate dinner with the guests and staff, retreated to my room, watched Glee, wrote, and slept. Friday morning, a very sweet lady named Michelle drove me to breakfast (since my West Coast clock had kept me in bed until the end of East Coast breakfast hours). In the car, she said, "You smell nice. What's your perfume?"

"Old Roswell Cemetery," I said.

It's a funny world.

The con marched on from there. I met awesome people (John Hartness and Delilah Dawson and Alex Bledsoe, oh my). I spent time with people I already knew and adored (Patty and Deborah and Andy and Michael and Audrey and Indigo, hooray). I talked on panels, sang karaoke, critiqued new writers, and bought cupcakes for half the convention. And then I went back to the airport, and came home.

I love my life sometimes. Anything that lets me spend a beautiful weekend in the Georgia summer can't be entirely bad.

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.

I am home from Chicago (again), and fighting my way out from the massive piles of paperwork and detritus that built up while I was at Windycon. I had a fantastic time, and I got to rock the house with one of my favorite temporary backing bands, Dead Sexy, which consisted of Wild Mercy, the Suttons, and Dr. Mary Crowell. Seriously, I am the luckiest girl in the world.

As is the custom around here, I now present the Windycon set list, with arrangement notes. It was a great show, and our song choices went as follows:

1. "Counting Crows." (Seanan, vocals; Debbie, Brenda, vocals; Bill, Barry, guitar; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle; Brenda, Sally, Debbie, percussion; Jen, bass.)
2. "The Sealskin and the Story and the Sky." (Seanan, vocals; Debbie, Brenda, vocals; Bill, Barry, guitar; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle; Brenda, Sally, Debbie, percussion; Jen, bass.)
3. "How Much Salt?" (Seanan, Debbie, vocals; Barry, guitar; Mary, piano; Bill, mandolin; Amy, fiddle; Brenda, Sally, percussion; Jen, bass.)
4. "Ten Years." Talis Kimberley cover. (Seanan, vocals; Barry, Bill, guitar; Mary, piano; Jen, harp; Amy, fiddle; Brenda, Debbie, Sally, percussion.)
5. "Fly Little Bird." (Seanan, Barry, Debbie, Jen, Sally, vocals.)
6. "Mother of the Crows." (Seanan, vocals; Mary, piano; Bill, Barry, guitar; Sally, creepy thunder noises; Brenda, percussion.)
7. "Silent Hill." (Seanan, vocals; Mary, piano; Sally, creepy thunder noises.)
8. "Landslide." Fleetwood Mac cover. (Seanan, Mary, Brenda, Debbie, Jen, vocals; Bill, Barry, guitar; Amy, fiddle; Mary, piano; Brenda, Sally, Debbie, percussion; Jen, bass.)
9. "Dare to Dream." (Seanan, vocals; Bill, Barry, guitar; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle; Brenda, Sally, Debbie, percussion; Jen, bass.)
10. "Burn It Down." Vixy and Tony cover. (Seanan, vocals; Bill, Barry, guitar; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle; Brenda, Sally, Debbie, percussion; Jen, bass.)
9. "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves." (Seanan, Jen, vocals; Bill, Barry, guitar; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle; Brenda, Sally, Debbie, percussion; Jen, bass.)
10. "My Story Is Not Done." (Seanan, vocals; Bill, Barry, guitar; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle; Brenda, Sally, Debbie, percussion; Jen, bass.)

The bridge for "Wicked Girls":

Brenda beats bodhrans and Vixy's run off with the fairies,
And Debbie will pour you red wine pressed from sweet poisoned berries.
Jen poses riddles and Mary plays tricks,
While Sally makes music by banging with sticks,
And the rules that we live by are simple and clear...

As always: "Counting Crows," "How Much Salt?" "Mother of the Crows," "My Story Is Not Done," and "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves" are on Wicked Girls. "Silent Hill" is on Red Roses and Dead Things. "Fly Little Bird" is on Pretty Little Dead Girl (out of print).

"Ten Years" has not yet been recorded, but you should check out Talis Kimberley's latest album, Queen of Spindles. "Burn It Down" has not yet been recorded, but you should check out Vixy and Tony's latest album, Thirteen.

"The Seal Skin and the Story and the Sky" and "Dare to Dream" have not yet been recorded.

Huge thanks to the sound crew, to the Windycon filk programming department, and to all my wonderful musicians, who uplift me to a level I could never reach without them. I am honored, I am grateful, and I am going back to bed.

I am home.

I am recovered.

I am well-rested.

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

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

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

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

Message received.

I'm a little under the weather (and totally exhausted) following Chicon 7, the 2012 World Science Fiction Convention, but that doesn't mean that I get to neglect everything forever. More's the pity. I had a wonderful time, when I wasn't a giant vibrating ball of stress, and I am remain honored and delighted by all the great things people said and did in my presence.

As is the custom around here, I now present the Chicon set list, with arrangement notes. It was a great show, and our song choices went as follows:

1. "The Sealskin and the Story and the Sky." (Seanan, vocals; Vixy Dockrey, vocals; Tony Fabris, guitar; Mary Crowell, piano; Betsy Tinney, cello; Amy McNally, fiddle; Brenda Sutton, bodhran.)
2. "Counting Crows." (Seanan, vocals; Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Mary, piano; Betsy, cello; Amy, fiddle; Brenda, bodhran.)
3. "Mama Said." (Seanan, vocals; Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Mary, piano; Betsy, cello; Amy, fiddle; Brenda, coconut shells.)
4. "The Ghost of Lilly Kane." (Seanan, vocals; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)
5. "Dear Gina." (Seanan, creepy vocals; Vixy, extra creepy vocals; Mary, creepy piano; Betsy, creepy cello; Amy, creepy fiddle.)
6. "Still Catch the Tide." Talis Kimberley cover. (Seanan, vocals; Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Mary, piano; Betsy, cello; Amy, fiddle; Brenda, bodhran.)
7. "Dare to Dream." (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Mary, piano; Betsy, cello; Amy, fiddle.)
8. "Tanglewood Tree." Dave Carter cover. (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Betsy, cello; Amy, fiddle; Brenda, bodhran.)
9. "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves." (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Mary, piano; Betsy, cello; Amy, fiddle; Brenda, bodhran.)
10. "My Story Is Not Done." (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Mary, piano; Betsy, cello; Amy, fiddle; Brenda, bodhran.)

ENCORE:

1. "The Seal Skin and the Story and the Sky." Arrangement as above; we did it again for Cat Valente, who had missed the start of the set.
2. "Archetype Cafe." Talis Kimberley cover. (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Mary, piano; Betsy, cello; Amy, fiddle.)

I did not actually get a written copy of the "Wicked Girls" bridge. I'm sorry! But I'm sure it was lovely.

As always: "Counting Crows," "Mama Said," "The Ghost of Lilly Kane," "Tanglewood Tree," "My Story Is Not Done," and "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves" are on Wicked Girls. "Still Catch the Tide" is on Stars Fall Home (out of print). "Dear Gina" is on Red Roses and Dead Things.

"Archetype Cafe" appears on Talis Kimberley's album of the same name, currently available on CD Baby. "Tanglewood Tree" also appears on the Dave Carter and Tracy Grammar album of the same name, currently available from retailers everywhere.

"The Seal Skin and the Story and the Sky" and "Dare to Dream" have not yet been recorded.

Huge thanks to the sound crew, to the Chicon 7 filk programming department, and to all my wonderful musicians, who uplift me to a level I could never reach without them. I am honored, I am grateful, and I am going back to bed.

I'm starting to wake up after the sheer awesomeness of Confluence 2012, where I appeared as their combo Author Guest and Filk Guest. I am the peanut butter cup of cool! I had a wonderful time in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the only city to greet me at the airport with a full-sized T. Rex skeleton. These people know how to party. I ate great food, met great people, hung out with Tamora Pierce, Michelle Sagara, and Jonathan Maberry, and basically partied like it was 2399 and human sacrifice had just been legalized on Jupiter's second moon.

I remain totally grateful to have been Confluence's Guest of Honor. It was an honor, and I had a fantastic time. The Confluence set list, with arrangement* notes, was as follows:

1. "The Sealskin and the Story and the Sky." (Seanan, vocals; Rand Bellavia, guitar; Gary Ehrlich, djembe; Kathleen Sloan, shaky things.)
2. "Counting Crows." (Seanan, vocals; Rand Bellavia, guitar; Gary Ehrlich, djembe; Kathleen Sloan, vocals.)
3. "Mama Said." (Seanan, vocals; Rand Bellavia, guitar; Gary Ehrlich, eggs; Kathleen Sloan, vocals.)
4. "Modern Mystic." (Seanan, vocals; Rand Bellavia, guitar; Gary Ehrlich, djembe; Kathleen Sloan, vocals.)
5. "Phantoms of Summer." (Seanan, vocals; Gary Ehrlich, guitar; Rand Bellavia, guitar; Cat Faber, mandolin; Kathleen Sloan, vocals.)
6. "In the Foam." (Seanan, vocals.)
7. "Dear Gina." (Seanan, vocals; Rand Bellavia, guitar; Gary Ehrlich, djembe; Kathleen Sloan, vocals.)
8. "Maybe It's Crazy." (Seanan, vocals; Cat Faber, mandolin; Gary Ehrlich, guitar; Cat and Rand, maniacal laugh.)
9. "What A Woman's For." (Seanan, vocals; Rand Bellavia, guitar; Gary Ehrlich, tamborine; Kathleen Sloan, vocals.)
10. "Evil Laugh." (Seanan, vocals; Cat Faber, mandolin; Gary Ehrlich, guitar; Kathleen Sloan, vocals and shaky things.)
11. "Burn It Down" (Vixy & Tony cover). (Seanan McGuire, vocals; Rand Bellavia, guitar; Gary Ehrlich, djembe.)
12. "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves." (Seanan, vocals; Rand Bellavia, guitar; Gary Ehrlich, djmebe; Kathleen Sloan, Cat Faber, Judi Miller, vocals.)
13. "My Story Is Not Done." (Seanan, vocals; Cat Faber, mandolin; Rand Bellavia, guitar; Gary Ehrlich, guitar; Kathleen Sloan, shaky things; everyone on stage, vocals.)

The bridge for "Wicked Girls" was:

Mandy's a pirate, and Judi signs songs for the fairies,
While Deborah will pour you red wine pressed from sweet poisoned berries.
Dee poses riddles, while Erin plays tricks,
And Kaia builds towers from brambles and sticks...

As always: "Counting Crows," "Mama Said," "My Story Is Not Done," and "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves" are on Wicked Girls. "Evil Laugh" is on Stars Fall Home (out of print). "Modern Mystic" and "Phantoms of Summer" are on Pretty Little Dead Girl (out of print). "Maybe It's Crazy," "Dear Gina," and "What A Woman's For" are on Red Roses and Dead Things.

"The Seal Skin and the Story and the Sky," "In the Foam," and "Burn It Down" have not yet been recorded.

Again, I am so very grateful to the Confluence concom for having me. I had a wonderful time, and I can't wait to go back.

(*It was a big band and a lot of skin-of-our-teeth arrangement, so I may get some of my instrumentation notes wrong. I will fix if this is pointed out to me, and mean absolutely no offense of any kind. I am simply a frazzled blonde.)

10. Tired. So very, very, very, profoundly, mind-warpingly tired. I didn't sleep on the plane today, for a variety of reasons, and have thus effectively been awake for seventeen hours.

9. But I'm still up because I have to work tomorrow, and that means not allowing myself to become stuck on East Coast time.

8. I had a lovely time! I got to spend time with old friends and new ones, and unexpectedly with John Joseph Adams, who sat and read slush in the hotel lobby, like the diligent editor that he sometimes pretends to be.

7. Hugo voting closes tonight. I am trying to distract myself from thinking about this by shopping for the jewelry to wear with my Hugo dress. This is working. Sort of.

6. I'm too tired to write, so I've been processing Machete Squad edits instead. If I'm too tired to understand the sentence as it was originally written, it probably needs work.

5. The cats are ecstatic, and clingy. Like briars that purr.

4. I think I just found my Hugo necklace, and it is judging you.

3. I'm about to get off the internet and go watch TV until it's safe to go to bed, because oh, Great Pumpkin, the tired. It burns.

2. But I thought you might like to know I was alive.

1. Zombies are love.

Well, it's official: as of this past Sunday (when I was a bad monkey, and had abandoned my beloved cats for the dubious comforts of Comic-Con), Thomas Price Lynn Rhymer Taylor McGuire, my blue classic tabby and white male Maine Coon, is two years old. This means he has ceased to be a kitten, and has become an official cat. Not that he seems to have noticed. Most of his time is still spent racing around the house like a loon, collapsing in my arms and purring loudly, and demanding to be fed. With any luck, this is his adult personality, and I have finally fulfilled my childhood dream of having a twenty-pound kitten.

The cats, all three, are still very clingy and unsettled about my recent trip to San Diego, which went on rather longer than any of them wanted it to, and has resulted in my spending my nights beneath roughly eighty pounds of fluff. This is why I am going to be slaughtered in my sleep Sunday night, since I'm leaving work early today and flying straight to Portland. Alas. On the plus side, I intend to have a good time while I'm there, and I'm only gone for three nights this time. Maybe they won't notice.

...no, that's silly. They're going to eat me.

(Portland is not a public event, by the way, which is why it's not listed on my Appearances page. Always check there if you want to know if I'm going somewhere for social and sharable reasons.)

Naturally, I am totally exhausted, which has led to things like poor Vixy getting told all about the Tyrannosaurus leech. (She took it better than Shawn did when I told him about the axolotl.) I've managed to shower, do laundry, and pack a suitcase that's actually cleared for flight, containing no weapons of any kind. This is an accomplishment in my current condition, and I want you all to be very, very proud of me.

San Diego was lovely, and I'm going to keep promising to write a con report right up until too much time has passed and I forget about it. (This fate has claimed so very many trips in recent years. Disney World anyone?) Right now, I'm going to take a few deep breaths and prepare to plunge back into the fray. Because it never, never ends.

See you when I get home!

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.

1. First off, for those of you who may have missed it yesterday, the cover of Ashes of Honor has been posted for your viewing pleasure. Chris McGrath has done it again, and I am totally overjoyed by the ongoing evolution of Toby. (Also by the fact that I am now six books into an urban fantasy series, and the most sexualized my protagonist has been was on the cover to book five, where she had no pants on. She was also a fish at the time. I am overjoyed.)

2. I am home from Emerald City Comic Con! Yay! I am too tired to die, and there's a very good chance that I am going to bed without any supper tonight because I will be herded by the cats (to my doom), but it was a great weekend, I got many, many hugs, and I am now safely back in the Bay Area. Life is good.

3. Welcome to all the new people who got linked here via my post on diversity in fiction! I'm thrilled that you're here, and promise not to be upset when you realize that I'm rarely that intellectual and go off to do something more useful with your time. I hope you enjoy us while you're at the party. We are already enjoying you.

4. Speaking of not being intellectual all the time...If anyone out there is collecting the blind bag My Little Pony figures, I have all of them except for the basic, non-glittery Rainbow Dash. I have many doubles I can trade, including the special edition Twilight Sparkle. Inquire within. Please.

5. Shirt post coming this week.

That is all. Now I must nap.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am fresh home from my appearance at Consonance, where I got to shake my money maker as their Ghostmistress, eat a lot of goat at the Indian buffet across the street—I mean a lot of goat—and generally have a wonderful time. I'll do a bit more of a proper con report later, although since I still haven't done my Disney World write-up, "later" may not be here for quite some time. Anyway, I thought I'd try posting the set list for my concert in a timely fashion for once, just to confuse people. My backing band was epic, and encompassed multitudes. I am so blessed.

I remain totally grateful to have been Consonance's Ghostmistress. It was an honor, and I had a fantastic time. The Consonance set list, with arrangement* notes, was as follows:

1. "The Sealskin and the Story and the Sky." (Seanan, vocals; Vixy Dockrey, Maya Bohnhoff, backing vocals; Tony Fabris, guitar; Brenda Sutton, bodhran; Teresa Powell, bass; Dr. Mary Crowell, piano; Amy McNally, fiddle.)
2. "The Ghost of Lilly Kane." (Seanan, vocals; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)
3. "Mama Said." (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Brenda, coconuts; Amy, fiddle; Mary, piano; Teresa, bass.)
4. "Dare to Dream." (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)
5. "Small Mended Corners" (Talis Kimberley cover). (Seanan, Mary, Vixy, vocals; Maya, backing vocals; Tony, guitar; Amy, fiddle.)
6. "Rain King/Still Catch the Tide" (Counting Crows/Talis Kimberley cover). (Seanan, vocals; Vixy, Mary, Maya, backing vocals; Jeff Bohnhoff, guitar; Brenda, bodhran; Teresa, bass; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle; Gwen Knighton, harp.)
7. "Landslide" (Fleetwood Mac cover). (Seanan, vocals; Mary, Vixy, Teresa, Maya, backing vocals; Teresa, bass; Jeff, guitar; Amy, fiddle.)
8. "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves." (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Brenda, bodhran; Teresa, bass; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)
9. "My Story Is Not Done." (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Brenda, bodhran; Teresa, bass; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)

ENCORE: "Evil Laugh." (Seanan, Vixy, Amy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Teresa, bass; Mary, piano.)

The bridge for "Wicked Girls" was standard for a change, because we are unpredictable like that.

As always: "The Ghost of Lilly Kane," "Mama Said," "My Story Is Not Done," and "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves" are on Wicked Girls. "Evil Laugh" and "Still Catch the Tide" are on Stars Fall Home (out of print). "Small Mended Corners" is on Talis Kimberley's amazing Archetype Cafe. "Rain King" is on August and Everything After by the Counting Crows.

"The Seal Skin and the Story and the Sky" and "Dare to Dream" have not yet been recorded.

Again, I am so very grateful to the Consonance concom for having me. I had a wonderful time, and I can't wait to go back.

(*It was a big band and a lot of skin-of-our-teeth arrangement, so I may get some of my instrumentation notes wrong. I will fix if this is pointed out to me, and mean absolutely no offense of any kind. I am simply a frazzled blonde.)

I am home from Conflikt! I got up at 4:08 am this morning in order to catch my commuter flight back to San Francisco, and managed to stay awake long enough to read most of the way through Graveminder by Melissa Marr, after finishing Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear. And this is why Seanans always travel with lots and lots of reading material. Nothing brings on insomnia like having nothing to read.

I'd like to say that it was a good convention, but I'll be honest: I don't know. For me, it was a series of charms strung on a silken cord, and some of them were brilliant, and some of them were bright, and some of them could have used a spot of polish, and very few of them went together in a logical way, because that is what a convention while already exhausted and overworked looks like. I had fun. I am awake enough to be quite sure of that.

But oh, there were amazing things. Talis came, white horse girl all the way across the water, one of the oldest denizens of the Babylon Wood, and she sang "Still Catch the Tide" and "Ten Years" in her concert, and I cried like a very crying thing, as did Vixy. There are very few people in this world who can break my heart like Talis can, or who I love half so much for doing it. And she had her new album! Queen of Spindles, and she put it in my hand like a promise or a prayer, and I listened to it all the way home.

Pin-trading with Jovanie and Anne, and stealing Anne's Companion Cube pillow over and over again. Dinner with Brooke and Judi and Ryan, followed by chocolate books. Lunch with Jennifer. Fringe with Ryan and rooming with Brooke and going to Old Navy (as always). The Suttons, tearing up the stage, and Sunnie's Mama Gitka, and Katie Tinney writing the "Wicked Girls" parody I think I shall everafter love most of them all. And rain, and 7-11, and hugs, and friends, and home. I went home this weekend. I will go back soon.

Perhaps then I will be able to stay.

So this is my charm bracelet of a weekend. It flashes lovely in the light, and I can work the clasp even when I'm tired. Soon I'll go to my bed, and my cats, and my dreams of the wood, but for now, I am still partway on a plane, and I am very very far away from home.

It's been a week since my guest slot at Conclave—how time does fly!—and I'm almost back to a state of semi-normal. Michigan was beautiful, and filled with cornfields, which is always a good way to endear yourself to me. (Also endearing: the number of truly awesome meals I was taken for during the convention. I usually under-eat at cons, resulting in low blood sugar and a look of puzzled misery. This con had the opposite problem, resulting in the strong desire to take a nice long nap.) This means that it's time to post the set list for my concert, accompanied with lyric links and helpful notations. My backing band was the truly awesome Wild Mercy, plus the lovely Dr. Mary Crowell. I am a very lucky girl.

I am so grateful to have been Conclave's Literary Guest of Honor. It was, to repeat myself a bit, a true honor, and I couldn't have had a better time. The Conclave set list, with arrangement* notes, was as follows:

1. "Counting Crows." (Seanan, vocals; Barry Childs-Helton, guitar; Sally Childs-Helton, drums; Jennifer Midkiff, bass; Debbie Gates, piano; Amy McNally, fiddle.)
2. "The Sealskin and the Story and the Sky." (Seanan, vocals; Barry, guitar; Sally, bodhran; Jennifer, harp; Dr. Mary Crowell, piano; Amy, fiddle.)
3. "How Much Salt?" (Seanan, Debbie, vocals; Barry, guitar; Sally, drums; Amy, fiddle; Mary, piano.)
4. "Take Advantage." (Seanan, vocals; Debbie, Jen, backing vocals; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle; Jen, harp; Barry, guitar; Sally, drums.)
5. "Build A Chain." (Seanan, vocals; Debbie, Jen, backing vocals; Debbie, piano; Amy, fiddle; Jen, harp; Barry, guitar; Sally, drums.)

BONUS: "The Ghost of Lilly Kane." (Seanan, vocals; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)

6. "Jack's Place." (Seanan, vocals; Debbie, Jen, backing vocals; Debbie, piano; Amy, fiddle; Jen, harp; Barry, guitar; Sally, drums.)
7. "Fly Little Bird." (Seanan, Barry, Sally, Debbie, Jen, Amy, vocals.)
8. "Still Catch the Tide" (Talis Kimberley cover). (Seanan, vocals; Barry, guitar; Sally, drums; Debbie, bass; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle; Jen, harp.)
9. "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves." (Seanan, Jen, vocals; Barry, guitar; Sally, bodhran; Debbie, bass; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)
10. "My Story Is Not Done." (Seanan, vocals; Barry, guitar; Sally, drums; Jen, harp; Debbie, bass; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)

The bridge for "Wicked Girls" was standard, except for...

"Marnie serves scotches, and Mary plays tricks,
While Amy calls music from wires and sticks,
And the rules that we live by are simple and clear..."

As always: "Counting Crows," "How Much Salt?," "Jack's Place," "The Ghost of Lilly Kane," "My Story Is Not Done," and "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves" are on Wicked Girls. "Take Advantage," and "Still Catch the Tide" are on Stars Fall Home (out of print). "Fly Little Bird" is on Pretty Little Dead Girl.

"The Seal Skin and the Story and the Sky" and "Build a Chain" have not yet been recorded.

Again, I am so very grateful to the Conclave concom for having me. I had a wonderful time, and I can't wait to go back.

(*It was a big band and a lot of skin-of-our-teeth arrangement, so I may get some of my instrumentation notes wrong. I will fix if this is pointed out to me, and mean absolutely no offense of any kind. I am simply a frazzled blonde.)

First:

I have leveled up in Real Author. How do I know? I know because I actually managed to miss a publication date. Not a deadline; a publication. As in, "something got released, and I completely missed it." So! My poem, "Clockwork Chickens," was published in issue #25 of Apex Magazine, which previously published the stories "Dying With Her Cheer Pants On" and "The Tolling of Pavlov's Bells." Hooray!

You can read my poem here, for now. Apex takes down back issues in a sort of rolling pattern, so you should read soon, or better yet, buy the e-book download of the issue so that you can keep it forever and for always. Apex is a company that does good work, and they keep buying my stuff, which naturally endears them to me. I would like it if they would keep doing that. And also, I like this poem.

In other news, I am safely home from Ohio, and attempting to figure out where I left my head. I sadly suspect it may have been in the Houston airport, where I was so hungry that I ate an entire cheeseburger in approximately four bites and an inhale. I think I scared the waitress. I know I counted my fingers when I was done. Just in case. So I am tired and I am grumpy, and I am getting tired of being tired.

I am almost done packing the most recent run of poster orders, and should be getting those in the mail this week. Better yet, the lovely Deborah has finished collating all the T-shirt orders, and I am working with the printer now to get everything submitted and start the production process. We wound up with over three hundred shirts on the order. My house is going to be one hell of a shipping party.

I am also almost done with the technical revisions on Blackout, which I will be shipping off to my publisher Real Soon Now. And thus do I buy myself time to finish the other three books I need to be working on, and perhaps someday, one day, take a nap.

Onwards and upwards.

Zzz.

I am home from Reno! Finally. I think I may be half-dead, and I definitely need a lot more of a nap than I'm going to be getting in the near future. Here, then, is my extremely truncated and specialized convention report.

The Good.

* Joe's Diner! Kate, Victor, and I arrived early, and were able to wander around, running errands. This led us to discovering an awesome little diner, just far enough from the convention center to be inaccessible if you didn't have a car (and thus entirely uncrowded throughout the weekend). Cheap, delicious food, real malts, and a waitress who came to know us all by name as we returned again and again for delicious meals. Yay!

* Also during our running around, I found a hardcover copy of Hellspark, one of my favorite hard-to-find books. (Actually, Victor found it. But he is a loving Victor, and he gave it unto me.) I will love it always.

* I wound up in two hotel rooms, one shared with Kate (and connected via adjoining door to Victor), one shared with Wes, Mary, and Amy. Both rooms were awesome in different ways, and I couldn't have asked for better roommates.

* "Just A Minute," where I not only became the new champion, I got to do it while hanging out with awesome people (including two of my favorite people, Paul and Caroline). Betcha John regrets telling me that lists were legal...

* Lauren Beukes's sloth! I nearly stole that thing. I still want to.

* Delivering an impassioned verbal smackdown during the zombie panel.

* Interviewing Tricky Pixie, Bill Wellingham, and this year's COMPLETELY AWESOME Campbell nominees. All on different panels, but still. I could not have shared a stage with more delightful people.

* Kaja hugs.

* Having a signing line longer than George R.R. Martin. It was bizarre and confusing, and totally fantastic.

* Brunch with Daniel and Kelly.

* Breakfast with Sheila.

* Surprise DDR with Kate and Vixy and Lauren and Amy.

* Dinner with Mike and Marnie and the posse, during which I received my official Barfleet tags. They're orange and green! I am truly loved.

...honestly, there were a lot of amazing people at WorldCon this year, but if I try to list them all, someone will be left off, because I am exhausted, and then we will all be sad. So please believe that I love all my friends, and I am so excited to have seen them, and I would not have survived this convention without them. Seriously. I would be dead.

The Bad.

* The one day when I didn't have, basically, a team of people handling me, I was unable to get any food for eleven hours, was repeatedly grabbed by people I don't know, and was even followed into the bathroom stall. Not the bathroom. THE ACTUAL STALL. Needless to say, I was not left alone again, resulting in my friends feeling put-upon, my feeling like I had to hide in my hotel room to have any privacy, and everyone being tense. Being grabbed is bad. It scares me.

* Smoking is allowed indoors in Reno. We were in Reno. I am not as sensitive to smoke as some of my friends, but I still feel pretty lousy, even after being home for almost two full days.

* The convention center was almost a mile away from my hotel, resulting in lots of walking back and forth in the extreme heat. Also, if I managed to forget something at the room, it stayed gone until I went home in the afternoon. This decentralized layout prevented a single Barcon from coalescing, and I am hence still faintly sad.

* The decentralized layout also meant that I saw some people I really care about rarely, if at all. Kate put it best when she noted that if you weren't part of the amoeba, we barely saw you.

* Finding things was almost impossible. I didn't even figure out where open filk was until Friday night, when I was doing "Whose Line?" across from it (an 11pm to 1am panel, so no, I didn't join the circle afterward). I made it to the dealer's hall twice, both times for under twenty minutes.

The Unhappy.

So. The Hugos. That happened.

You're not supposed to talk about being sad that you lost; it's considered poor form. Unfortunately, in this internet age, it's impossible to avoid addressing it at least a little if you have any sort of decent web presence. Not only is it obvious that you're avoiding an elephant, people keep hijacking other posts and other threads to tell you how sorry they are. That's worse for my sanity than having a few people sigh meaningfully at me, so I'm going to talk about this once, and have done.

Yes, I lost.

Yes, I am very sad about that. I wanted to win. Everybody wants to win. Wanting to win is human nature, and if you don't want to win, you decline the nomination. End of story.

Yes, I am aware that I lost by a very narrow margin. This doesn't make it easier. If anything, it makes it harder; what could I have done to make my book just twenty votes better? Rationally, I know this isn't a quantifiable thing, but, well. Me and numbers. It's a thing.

Yes, I hope that I get another shot next year.

No, I will not be responding to comments directly relating to the Hugos. I hope you understand why not. Congratulations to all the winners, and huge, huge thanks to everyone who voted. I came in second. I beat Bujold in the voting. That's a damn big deal. Maybe next time, we can win.

That was WorldCon, and now it's not. See you next year, in Chicago.

First, go and read this post from Wil Wheaton. It's okay. I can wait.

You're back? Cool. Okay, so...

The San Diego International Comic Convention (and really, any of the large media conventions, but SDCC more than most) is simply crawling with famous people, ranging from your stealth famous (most directors, producers, and writers) and formerly famous (the obscure character actors and aging child stars selling autographs near the rear of the dealer's hall) to your currently huge famous (the cast of True Blood) and your geek darlings (the cast of Eureka). Where someone falls on this scale during the convention may have absolutely no relation to where they'd be on the scale out in the non-convention world, although it mostly works as an enhancement of fame, not a reduction. Britney Spears would be mobbed at SDCC, no matter how few fans admit to liking her music, but I doubt Felicia Day is going to get stalked by paparazzi if she tries to go out for a burger.

If you attend SDCC, the odds are good that you will see famous people. Buying breakfast at the deli! Crossing the street! Trying in vain to get some shopping done in the exhibitor's hall! Walking really, really fast toward the nearest bathroom! Standing on the sidewalk with a stranger's arm around their shoulders, smiling graciously for a camera! This is going to happen. It is unavoidable. And I, from the bottom of my heart, make this request of you:

Don't go batshit because you're breathing the same air as a famous person.

Nathan Fillion is awesome. He's a funny guy, he's nice, he's considerate, and he worked on one of my favorite horror movies. He does not, however, give off a chemical signal in his sweat that causes my ladyparts to explode and my brain to stop functioning above a third-grade level. Stephen King is one of my personal heroes, and wrote three of my five favorite books. That does not mean that he intended Annie Wilkes from Misery to be taken as an ideal of fan behavior.

I am, by the standards of any media convention, a fourth-string celebrity at best. I'm a writer, which makes me invisible; I don't wear miniskirts or preach controversial opinions or have a TV show based off my work; I'm relatively new on the scene. I'm a very small fish, and I appreciate that, because even at my current, erm, fish size index, I've been stopped while walking someone, interrupted while very clearly doing something, and, my personal favorite, grabbed—physically grabbed, by people I do not know, and did not consent to being grabbed by—on my way into the bathroom.

Now, I don't know about you and your strange Earth ways, but on my planet, when someone is walking briskly toward a bathroom, they probably intend to do something involving bodily wastes and a toilet. Consider that I drink roughly four liters of Diet Dr Pepper a day during the average con. Now consider the danger of grabbing me while I'm on my way to make some room for more soda.

And there are people who say "well, you signed up for this" when a famous person, regardless of fish size index, has issues with being grabbed or interrupted or otherwise poked at in public. But at the end of the day, no one, no matter how famous, no matter how big of a fish, signed a contract saying "anyone who wants to can now grab you at any time, have a nice day."

These are the circumstances under which it is acceptable to touch a stranger:

1. If they have a hornet or something on their shoulder and you're brushing it off.
2. If you're shoving them out of the way of a Martian ray gun blast.
3. If they're standing on your foot and you need to tap them in the shoulder to get them off you.
4. If they just dropped, like, their wallet or something, and shouts of "Sir? Sir!" or "Ma'am? Ma'am!" aren't getting their attention.

There may be others for this list, but you get the idea. These are the circumstances under which it is NOT acceptable to touch a stranger, regardless of whether they're famous:

1. Because you want to.
2. Because they're there.
3. Because you feel like you have a personal connection to them, even though you've never met.
4. Because then you can tell your friends about that person you touched.

...again, there may (will) be others on this list, but you get the idea. Saying "Excuse me? Mr. Whedon? I love your work, could I get your autograph?" when you see him in the hall is cool. Following him into the men's room is not. Camping out in front of his hotel, also not. And the coolest thing of all is taking "no" as a legitimate, and understandable, answer.

Please, treat everyone with the same respect you want applied to you, whether they're famous or not. Do not separate people from their friends and family, or grab them, or stop them from getting to the bathroom. If you wouldn't let someone do it to you/your significant other/your kids, don't do it to someone else.

Don't let proximity to fame make you batshit, and these conventions will be a lot more fun, for everyone.

Every year in July, I go to the San Diego International Comic Convention. It's huge, it's crowded, it's complicated, it's messy, and it's still, for all its faults, one of my favorite conventions (the other being OVFF). I love SDCC. I've been going since I was a teenager, and if the con has changed, well, so have I. I can be happy there. I feel like the rest of the world gets to wait a little while.

Which is not to say that the con is without its problems. One, that's been getting more extreme with every passing year, is the issue of THE COMICON EXCLUSIVE (dun-dun-DUUUUUN). These are toys made for and offered solely at the con. They can't be obtained anywhere else. There have been My Little Ponies, special perfumes from the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, and action figures, action figures, action figures. Oh, the action, oh the figures, without end. Collectors swarm the exhibit hall the second it opens, rushing to get the exclusives on their list.

I, it must be said, am no different. I went to SDCC 2011 with the following exclusives on my list: diamond form Bishojo Emma Frost, Waid-era Bishojo Susan Storm, the SDCC 2011 My Little Pony, and the Deadfast cosplay Ghoulia Yelps. I got there early on Wednesday, and hit the floor while the throngs were at their lowest pre-Sunday ebb, ready to stand in lines, fork over cash, and get my goodies. There is nothing wrong with being a collector of things. I have been a collector of things my whole life. Some of the things I collect now, I started collecting when I was four years old. Four years old. My ability to throw stones at collectors died a long damn time ago.

That being said, there are limits.

People were getting mean this year. There was a weird sort of mass hysteria sweeping the floor, where totally reasonable, rational people that I would normally enjoy having a chat with suddenly became consumed by the crazy-pants need to be at THE FRONT OF THE LINE RIGHT FUCKING NOW. Part of this may be due to the steady increase in toy scalpers, people who come to SDCC just to buy the exclusives and resell them on eBay at a hefty markup. Think I'm kidding? Look at eBay. The Monster High doll I bought for twenty dollars two weeks ago now has a base "buy it now" of sixty dollars...and people are paying it. The market has stabilized, and the people who bought as much as they could carry at the convention are reaping the benefits.

Because the scalpers were clearing things out as quickly as they could, the people who wanted those toys for their own collections acquired a new sense of urgency—suddenly, it wasn't "walk briskly," it was "run." And when the scalpers started running, too, "run" turned into "stampede."

Saturday, after being asked to pick up a Monster High doll for a friend, Amy and I went over to the Mattel booth to get in line. The line was...ugly. Basically, a single guard was doing crowd control at the mouth of the actual line, and letting people in one at a time, right to left. Amy and I were on the far left; four people literally shoved past us to get into the line before we could. Shoved past us. But we were there for girl toys (which always sell slower than boy toys), so we waited until we could get past the guard, and we got into the lineup without major incident.

About six people behind us in line (and thus right next to us, due to the amusement park ride setup being used for people moving) was a mother and her seven-year-old daughter. The daughter was pretty clearly upset. The daughter was also dressed as Draculaura, one of the major characters from Monster High. I asked what they were in the line for, and guessed that it might be Ghoulia. The little girl, still looking miserable, confirmed.

I asked her mother what was wrong.

"We've tried to get into this line four times," she replied.

Why so many tries? Because people were pushing her child. People were stepping on her child. So when the crowd was crazy, they had to withdraw—no doll is worth injuring a little kid, period. And the girl was, naturally, very concerned that she wouldn't be able to get her toy.

I asked the mother if they wanted to go ahead of me. She looked stunned. She asked, several times, if I was sure; Amy and I both affirmed that, if one of us was getting the last Monster High doll, we wanted it to be the little girl. (None of the six people between us and the kid were there for Monster High toys; like most collectors, they wanted the "boy toys," which always sell out before anything else.) We let the girl and her mother go ahead of us...and the mother's level of gratitude was so far out of proportion with the cost of the gesture that it made me want to go around yelling at people. Don't step on kids! Cheese and crackers, that's just common sense!

Most of the kids at SDCC are very well-behaved, possibly because they're too terrified by the size of the crowd to do anything else. It's pretty easy to believe that the bogeyman will get you if you're bad when you can see the bogeyman, he's right over there and he's buying comic books. Maybe he needs a snack! It could be you. So they're pretty cool, those con kids, the next generation of our species. I mean, unless someone in a giant Perry the Platypus costume has just walked by. There are limits.

And I'm not saying kids get everything. I didn't give the girl my toy, I just let her go ahead of me to get hers. But there are moments where you really need to pause and ask yourself "is my eBay profit worth stepping on this little girl?" And if the answer is ever "yes," maybe it's time for some serious soul searching.

Here's a goal for all of us who are planning to attend San Diego Comic Convention 2012: let's not be dicks. And when we're buying cool stuff, let's make sure we're buying it for ourselves or our friends, not for our burgeoning eBay business. Okay?

Cool.

Back to New York!

Tuesday morning found me oversleeping, since all that puking the night before had left me totally exhausted. I eventually staggered out of bed and made my way downtown to the convention center where BEA was being held. Luckily, it was in the same convention center as New York Comicon, so I was able to find my way with relative ease, and did not wind up wandering lost through Manhattan for the rest of time. It could happen!

Alex at Orbit had already given me my badge, so I swung by registration to pick up a lanyard (v. important, lanyards) and called The Agent to let her know I was on-site. She promptly swooped in, grabbed me, and whisked me hither and yon to see people that needed seeing—including Toni and Charlaine, which was a wonderful way to begin the convention. Hugging and happiness followed, and then they settled in to do a signing while The Agent and I ran over to the Orbit booth to acquire copies of Deadline for their enjoyment. Happiness is giving early copies of books to your friends.

With the hauling about portion of our program complete, The Agent freed me to wander where I would. So I wandered.

Book Expo America is a lot like New York Comicon, scale-wise, which probably explains why they fit in the same convention center. Only instead of toys, you have books. And instead of media goodies, you have books. And instead of scantily-clad booth babes, you have booth librarians, which is kinda more awesome. And did I mention the books? It's like lit-geek Disneyland, only without the teacup ride.

Which is sort of a pity.

All too soon, I had to leave the convention center and head for DAW. Because I was running late, I cleverly decided to take a taxi. Unfortunately, my streak of "always pick the taxi with the driver you have no languages in common with" continued, and my request for the PATH station resulted in my being dropped at Penn Station. Argh. I found my way to the PATH (only about three blocks away) and hopped on a train, which delivered me promptly and without fuss to the correct locale. Hooray for trains!

Better yet, hooray for DAW, which was exactly as welcoming and familiar and wonderful as I hoped it would be. DAW is one of my favorite places to spend a day, and not just because I can usually cadge someone into taking me to visit the "take" shelves of free books scattered around the building. I love everyone there, and I'm comfortable there, which is rare for someone as twitchy as I am.

I had a nice talk with The Editor, and got my revision notes for Discount Armageddon, which is next on my agenda for working on. Eventually, The Agent showed up, and we all went out for delicious Indian food dinner, where I ate goat and chicken and mushrooms and fish and naan and om nom nom Indian. Seriously, we ate so much Indian food it ached. I wanted to go home and collapse.

...which was naturally the cue for me to be hauled through half a dozen BEA after-hours parties. Good: I saw (and hugged) Cat and John Scalzi, who looked as terrified of the noisy crowds as I did. I also saw (and hugged) Tempest, who had a fan, and looked totally at ease. And I met Scott Westerfeld! Serious awesomeness.

Eventually, The Agent noticed that I was wilting, and I was loaded into a cab with a driver who understood where I wanted to go and took me to the PATH station. I returned to Jersey City, staggered home, and collapsed into bed too tired to die. Which meant, of course, that Wednesday was going to be the big day in town...

Next: Wednesday at BEA, mojitos in my eye, and signing Deadline.

So, um, hey.

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

Things I did this weekend:

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

Things I did yesterday:

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

Things I will do today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See you next time!

I thought fairly hard about whether or not to make this post, as I generally try not to say negative things that can't be veiled behind a lovely shimmering curtain of "no details here." In the end, I decided that the details I had were vague enough to be borderline-generic, with a few careful omissions. And this is an important "please don't be this guy."

On Sunday at Arisia, I was on a panel called "Fanfic As Writer's Workshop," for discussion of how the skills and techniques learned from writing fanfiction can be applied to writing original fiction. (Yes, Virginia, you can learn how to write by writing fanfic. But that is another post for another day.) I was, at the time, incredibly sick, due to exposure to mango (which I am highly allergic to), but I was determined to soldier through. It's probably a good thing that I was as sick as I was, since it prevented my becoming annoyed enough to shout. See? Vomiting has value!

The panel consisted entirely of women (myself, three other writers, and Diana). The room, while small, was quite well-filled, with a nice mix of people who wanted to discuss learning about writing through, well, actually writing. And, in the front row, was That Guy. He was fairly large; fairly unkempt; had not brushed his hair; appeared to be wearing basic black for its stain-concealing properties, rather than out of any goth sympathies; and was, when first sighted, vigorously picking at his teeth.

Please don't be That Guy, part one: If you're sitting in the front row of a panel, in full view of the panelists, please don't pick your teeth. If you must pick your teeth, please use a toothpick, or something, rather than using your fingers. We'd really rather not watch.

The panel began with enthusiasm, as each panelist explained their views on our topic, and we began taking questions from the attendees. That Guy stopped picking his teeth, which was a mercy, and began, instead, picking his ear. With the same finger.

Please don't be That Guy, part two: Sometimes we have itches. I get that. I, too, am an itchy person. But if you're sitting in the front row of a panel, and have already been seen to be picking your teeth, please do not stick the same finger in your ear. It makes the panelists very uncomfortable.

More questions from the audience. This is the point at which That Guy began truly interacting. "How do I get more readers for my fanfic?" he asked. "I wrote an alternate universe [SHOW] [SEASON], where instead of [MAN] killing [WOMAN], he rapes her."

Cue horrified silence. The fanfic community is largely female, for better or for worse, and that sort of statement is rarely going to go over well in mixed company. Diana, who was by that point far more diplomatic than I, tried pointing this out, along with the note that maybe, if he wanted people to trust him writing about rape, he needed to get them to trust him writing about other things, first. He countered with the fact that he had received good feedback from women. We moved on as quickly as possible.

Later in the panel, the topic of porn came up. Porn is, after all, the stereotypical reason people write fanfic, and that's not entirely a bad thing. So all of these women are now saying the word "porn," with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Please don't be That Guy, part three: If you think there is ANY CHANCE that you might become visibly aroused by live women saying the word "porn," please DO NOT sit in the front row at a panel on fanfiction. They're going to say it, and what's going to happen is going to happen, and then I'm going to have to fight the urge to eject you from the room.

That Guy attempted to drag the panel back to a recounting of the plot of his fanfic several times, to the point where I actually asked him "How is this relevant?" (If you've ever been on a panel with me, or attended a panel with me, you'll know that I'm not opposed to topic drift, so long as it remains interesting and vaguely tangential. If I'm the one shutting you down, it's because you're so far off topic that you're no longer even in the topic's time zone.)

So please. This is a plea for everyone, male and female, who attends conventions and goes to panels: Please don't be That Guy. Don't sit to take up three chairs, sticking fingers in your facial orifices, and try to engage women in discussions on how rape in literature is awesome and not inappropriate in the least. Don't look offended when the panelists don't want to hand the panel to you, so that you can tell us about your magnum opus and why we all need to read it. And please, please, don't be creepy. For the rest of the weekend, if I saw That Guy, I moved to another elevator.

Let's play nicely with the other fans, and only creep them out with their permission, okay? I've done my best to be general here, but this one specific incident really drove home why this is something that needs to be said. No one was touched, cornered, or specifically harassed, but I had three people who attended that panel tell me how uncomfortable That Guy made them. Beyond that, I know how uncomfortable he made me.

I'm just saying.

ETA: Because this has come up twice, and is hence distracting: "please don't take up three chairs" does NOT mean "please don't be fat at a panel." You may be as fat as you do or do not wish to be, and as long as you're happy and healthy, I'm happy for you. But as I say on a regular basis, your backpack does not deserve a chair of its own. Neither does your leg, unless you are injured and require elevation. Neither does your arm. And if you're taking a chair each for your leg, torso, and arm, you have perhaps crossed a line.

I am not going to write an Arisia con report. I'm not good at them under the best of circumstances—they either wind up obscenely long and take six months to finish, turn into a series of comic strips, or make no sense—and these are not the best of circumstances, what with the "two conventions in two weekends" and "under a whole lot of deadlines" parts of our program. So these are the summarized highlights, for your amusement and edification.

Arriving in Boston! Persis picked me up from the airport, because a) Persis loves me, and b) I had made it quite clear that fuck you people, I am not going outside in the snow unless it's to enter a private car. No, I am not a prima donna; I simply refuse to take the bus or other forms of public transit when you have A FOOT OF SNOW on the ground. My sunny California upbringing can't handle the reality shift. I did, in fact, remain entirely inside the hotel until Monday afternoon, when I went outside in the snow, entered a private car, and returned to the airport. So screw you, New England winter; I am not your chew toy.

Hanging out with Rene! My room wasn't ready yet when we got to the hotel, so I wound up sitting with Rene, the Fan Guest of Honor, in the lobby Starbucks for about an hour. Rene was conchair for the Montreal WorldCon, and is a really neat guy. Plus he helped me get my luggage up to my room. Class act, yo.

Cat and Diana! My roommates for the weekend were the lovely Cat "The Crusher" Valente, and the equally lovely Diana "The Destroyer" Fox. They both arrived Friday afternoon, and seriously, it was like spending the entire weekend having an awesome slumber party with awesome people and our own private bathroom. Our hotel room looked like it had been hit by a localized tornado. A tornado of RAW AWESOME. I couldn't have asked for a better time. Plus? They brought me presents. (I also brought them presents. I like to share.)

The Paranormal Romance Weather Report! My first panel of the weekend was on the appeal of paranormal romance and the flirtation with the mainstream. The only panelist I'd met prior to sitting down at the table was Kelley Armstrong, which was sort of neat. We talked for an hour, and it was a lively and engaged discussion, but didn't come with as many book recommendations as people expected...so I used my closing comments to provide a cable-news style weather report on offerings in the urban fantasy and paranormal romance genres. Yes, complete with a "and next, here's John with sports!" closer. It was more fun than it should have been. Seriously.

Shawn! My good friend Shawn lives in Massachusetts, and swears he actually likes New England winters. This is because Shawn is insane. He actually came to the convention to see me! It was awesome. He is a good Shawn, and shall be renowned in song and story.

Shaenon Garrity, big-time star! Shaenon was the Webcomics Guest of Honor, which meant that her adorable mad science illustrations were all over the program book (awesome), and that she had the big box of Skin Horse strips available for people to paw through and purchase. I got one of my favorite strips. And also? A hug.

Ellen and Delia! Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman are a) mad awesome, b) very sweet, and c) just plain cool. They're also involved with the Bordertown revival, about which I will blog more very, very soon. And Ellen? Ellen gave me an ARC of the new Bordertown book, about which I will also blog more very, very soon. So who has an ARC of the new Bordertown book? THAT WOULD BE ME. Dude, the trip was worth it for that alone, I swear.

Having an Irish pub attached to the hotel! One of the two hotel restaurants was an actual Irish pub, with actual Irish pub food. I basically ate shepherd's pie for every "real meal" I had during the weekend, and while that may not have been awesome from a Weight Watchers standpoint, it was pretty damn cool from a "don't flip out and kill everyone in a ten-mile radius" standpoint. You may now thank the Irish pub for saving mankind.

...okay, so even when I'm doing the quick-and-dirty highlights version of a con report, I can't condense it very well. Tune in next time, for more things that were awesome, or at least interesting, since "Seanan has an allergic reaction to some lady's perfume and spends the bulk of Sunday yearning for death" is totally making the list.

I am home from Georgia and Massachusetts! I am no longer stranded in the snowy South or New England! This is awesome. Also awesome: the traditional posting of the set list from my most recent filk convention, accompanied with lyric links and helpful notations. My backing band was a little unusual, since it was assembled at the Absolute Last Minute, with lots of awesome people stepping up to make sure that my guest of honor concert wasn't a total disaster. Big, big thanks to Dr. Mary Crowell, Amy McNally, Bill and Brenda Sutton, Dave Rood, and Jodi Krangle, for saving my bacon.

I am so grateful to have been GaFilk's Guest of Honor. It was, to repeat myself a bit, a true honor, and I couldn't have had a better time. The GaFilk set list, with arrangement* notes, was as follows:

1. "The Sealskin and the Story and the Sky." (Seanan McGuire, vocals; Bill Sutton, guitar; Brenda Sutton, bodhran; Dave Rood, bass; Dr. Mary Crowell, piano; Amy McNally, fiddle.)
2. "Counting Crows." (Seanan, vocals; Bill, guitar; Brenda, bodhran; Dave, bass; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)
3. "Mama Said." (Seanan, vocals; Bill, guitar; Brenda, coconut shells; Dave, bass; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)
4. "Mother of the Crows." (Seanan, vocals; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)
5. "Still Catch the Tide" (Talis Kimberley cover). (Seanan, vocals; Jodi Krangle, backing vocals; Bill, guitar; Brenda, bodhran; Dave, bass; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)
6. "The Ghost of Lilly Kane." (Seanan, vocals; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)
7. "Dear Gina." (Seanan, Katie vocals; Mary, piano, creepy demon vocals; Amy, fiddle.)
8. "Silent Hill." (Seanan, vocals; Mary, piano.)
9. "Dare to Dream." (Seanan, vocals; Bill, guitar; Brenda, bodhran; Dave, bass; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)
10. "Evil Laugh." (Seanan, vocals; Bill, guitar; Brenda, dinosaur shaker; Dave, bass; Mary, piano; Amy, Merav, backing vocals.)
11. "Burn It Down" (Vixy & Tony cover). (Seanan, vocals; Bill, guitar; Brenda, bodhran; Dave, bass; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)
12. "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves." (Seanan, Jodi, vocals; Bill, guitar; Brenda, bodhran; Dave, bass; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)
13. "My Story Is Not Done." (Seanan, vocals; Bill, guitar; Brenda, bodhran; Dave, bass; Mary, piano; Amy, fiddle.)

The bridge for "Wicked Girls" was...

"Now Brenda beats bodhrans, and Vixy's run off with the fairies,
And Deborah will pour you red wine pressed from sweet poisoned berries.
Autumn signs secrets, and Amy plays tricks,
While Sunnie calls music from wires and sticks,
And the rules that we live by are simple and clear..."

As always: "Counting Crows," "Mama Said," "Mother of the Crows," "The Ghost of Lilly Kane," "My Story Is Not Done," and "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves" are on Wicked Girls. "Evil Laugh," and "Still Catch the Tide" are on Stars Fall Home (out of print). "Dear Gina" and "Silent Hill" are on Red Roses and Dead Things.

Again, I am so very grateful to the GaFilk concom for having me. I had a wonderful time, and I can't wait to go back.

(*Dave Rood was actually moving around behind me quite a lot, so if I accidentally left him off something, or added him to something incorrectly, please let me know. Assuming you know. Which you may not.)

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for everything.

While there will be a slightly more detailed con report later, right now I'm too tired for anything but the standard "here is my set list, isn't it beautiful?" I had some incredible backing musicians: Tony Fabris on guitar, Vixy on vocals, and Sunnie Larsen on fiddle. Autumn signed pretty much the whole thing, and added a beautiful dimension to the performance. Thanks to all of them, and I am so very grateful to have been OryCon's Music Guest of Honor. As is the standing tradition around here, I now present my concert set list, including annotation and lyric links, because that's what makes it useful.

The OryCon set list, with arrangement notes, was as follows:

1. "Counting Crows." (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony guitar.)
2. "Mama Said." (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony guitar.)
3. "Preston Miller" (Dave Carter cover). (Seanan, vocals; Vixy, vocals; Tony guitar.)
4. "Carnival Glass." (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar.)
5. "Dear Gina." (Seanan, Katie vocals; Tony, guitar; Vixy, creepy demon vocals we're all gonna die.)
6. "Paper Moon." (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Sunnie, fiddle.)
7. "Evil Laugh." (Seanan, vocals; Tony, guitar; Vixy, backing vocals.)
8. "Tanglewood Tree" (Dave Carter cover). (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Sunnie, fiddle.)
9. "Still Catch the Tide" (Talis Kimberley cover). (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar.)
10. "Archetype Cafe" (Talis Kimberley cover). (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar.)
11. "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves." (Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Sunnie, fiddle.)

The bridge for "Wicked Girls" was...

"Now Lauren's a ninja, and Torrey weaves silk shrouds for faeries.
Angelica pours you red wine pressed from sweet poisoned berries.
Autumn signs secrets, and Amy plays tricks,
While Sunnie calls music from wires and sticks,
And the rules that we live by are simple and clear..."

As always: "Counting Crows," "Mama Said," "Carnival Glass," "Tanglewood Tree," and "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves" will be on Wicked Girls. "Paper Moon," "Evil Laugh," and "Still Catch the Tide" are on Stars Fall Home. "Dear Gina" is on Red Roses and Dead Things.

This was a very cover-intensive set. "Archetype Cafe" appears on Talis Kimberley's CD, Archetype Cafe. "Tanglewood Tree" appears on Dave and Tracy's CD, Tanglewood Tree. "Preston Miller" appears on Tracy Grammar's CD, Flower of Avalon.

Two quick CD notes: I actually did fine a mis-shelved box of Stars Fall Home...and after this weekend, it's all gone. Most filk dealers still have a few copies left in stock; CD Baby has three. I have about eight, and they're all going to GaFilk with me, since I'd like to have them when I'm Guest of Honor. So that's it. Get them before they're gone.

We have sold 258 of a possible 300 pre-orders for Wicked Girls, leaving 42 pre-order slots remaining. I'm hoping to go to print in time for the holidays, but I can't promise anything yet. Please order soon if you were planning to, so I know how many envelopes to buy.

See you next con!

Treat: a new interview is up at Papercut Reviews, and there's a chance to win a signed copy of either Rosemary and Rue or An Artificial Night. So whether you're a new reader or a long-time friend of the series, you can maybe win the book that's right for you!

Treat: Cory Doctorow has posted his thoughts on this year's Hugo Awards, and has some really sweet things to say about my acceptance speech. It's nice that other people remember it. I barely do. I was sort of out to lunch that day.

Treat: Katie Babs has posted about the New York Comic Con, and has a picture of a rare public Mira Grant sighting. The lovely Miss Mira is neither covered in gore nor decapitating anyone, which makes this picture doubly rare.

And today's big treat, which comes better late than never, I give you the September 2010 issue of Geek Speak magazine. Why? Because, well, it includes a fantastic interview with me (conducted in Australia, no less), which asks me a lot of fun things I don't get asked very often, a cracking good review of An Artificial Night, and a sweet, passionately lovely review of AussieCon IV, including, yes, my Campbell win. Seriously, I was like, 30% of this issue, it's awesome.

Those are your treats for this lovely Halloween morning. Stay safe tonight, and remember, always check your candy.

My last full day in Australia dawned bright and clear, and best of all, WorldCon-free*, which meant Jeanne and I could get in some high-quality TOURISM before I had to go to the airport and catch my flight back to the United States. FOR GREAT JUSTICE. Our plans for the day involved hitting the Melbourne Zoo (renowned among zoos for being TOTALLY BITCHIN'), and then driving a gazillion miles** to Phillip Island to witness the Penguin Parade.

We got up stupid-early in the morning to meet Mal and his very sweet friend whose name I have since forgotten, because I Am Crap With Names. They had rented a car for the day, because they are wonderful, thoughtful people. And it was off for the zoo! Well. Off for breakfast. But after that, the zoo! Hooray the zoo!

Sadly for us, several school groups had also decided that this was a yay the zoo kind of day, and the place was swarming with children. I do not question the right of children to go to the zoo, nor, in fact, the need for children to go to the zoo. But when it's one adult to thirty small boys, I start to feel a little bit like a cat surrounded by Aeslin mice, and that isn't a fun sensation. We chose the path that seemed least likely to intersect with the school groups, and started wandering.

The Melbourne Zoo is just as awesome as its press implied it would be. Within the first twenty minutes, we'd seen snow leopards, cougars, bears, and tigers, and I had decided that this was the zoo where the fourth InCryptid book would be set. SURPRISE. We went on to see an enclosure containing only male lions, who were, um, rather dedicated to finding some females; a large pack of African wild dogs; some cool birds; giraffes; a bunch of wild turkeys; and the biggest damn tortoises I have ever seen in my life. Seriously, people could live in those shells. If they weren't, y'know, already occupied.

And then, wonder of wonders, miracle and miracles...the Reptile House. Which was full of glories untold and miracles unnumbered, including several species of snake that I had never actually seen before. Because I love my snake-fearing friends, I will not go into explicit detail, save to say that I had a powerful bonding experience with a taipan, and small boys who taunt rattlesnakes should be put out of the Reptile House at once.

We wandered the zoo a bit more, with a stop for lunch before we entered the Australian wildlife exhibit. Kangaroos roamed free, wombats burbled, and Jeanne and I finally got to see an echidna. Yay! We stopped the admire the echidna. At great length. A zookeeper noticed us clustered there, and came over to announce that she'd be doing a koala show in five minutes at the (connected) koala enclosure. We allowed as how this was very nice for her, and kept watching the echidna, I don't know, echid. Whatever you call what an echidna does. Ten minutes later, the zookeeper came back and asked, if she told us all about the echidna, would we come and see the koala show. Would we ever!

I got to touch an echidna. My life is now complete.

The koala show turned out to be pretty cool, too, and their young female koala—named "Alice," nicknamed "Devil Spawn," which proves that there's an Alice everywhere—was spritely and fun to watch, unlike her wild cousins. Totally worth the stop.

We also saw: manta rays with awesome leopard spots on, platypuses swimming (and being way smaller*** than I expected them to be), elephants taken VERY SERIOUSLY, lemurs, orangutans, fish, seahorses, and penguins. And then it was time to leave the zoo, so that we could spend hours upon hours in the car, driving to Philip Island. Mal's friend left us then, as he did not want to spend hours upon hours in the car. Mal's friend is a smart guy.

I kept myself amused during the drive by counting Australian magpies, as they were everywhere. One's for sorrow, two's for joy—does anybody know what seventy-eight is for? Because there were a lot of magpies. It was like being escorted across Australia by Vixy in spirit guide form. Hi, Vixy!

We reached Philip Island fifteen minutes before the Penguin Parade began. Now, this is not a tightly scheduled thing; the term "penguin parade" actually refers to the completely natural life cycle of the Fairy Penguin. They go out to sea in the morning, and return on the evening tide, whereupon they parade up the beach to get back to their nests. Humans sell tickets to watch this happen. The penguins don't get it. But hey, if we want to freeze our asses off sitting on the bleachers and watching them walk, more power to us.

It was like something out of The Last Unicorn. Waves would roll in, and leave behind little foot-high penguins when they rolled out again. Then the little penguins marched up the beach, making fantastically loud noises. It was magical. It was bizarre. It was freezing. We ran for the hot cocoa stand when it was over, and that stuff did NOT last long.

Signs in the parking lot requested that we check under our car for penguins. That's Australia, all over. Hello, welcome, please do not flatten a penguin when you leave.

I am so glad I got to go.

(*I loved WorldCon, and had a fantastic time, once I started actually sleeping again. But it was awfully nice to be done with all my "official" duties that didn't involve enjoying the native wildlife and putting horrific things in my mouth.)

(**As a native Californian, I tend to view most places as being somewhat small and quaint. Yes, I realize this is insane, and potentially insulting, but I can't help it. My state is gargantuan, and it's messed up all my ideas about scale. Well, Australia is a continental FUCK YOU to this tendency, being as it is, I don't know, A CONTINENT, and is thus FUCKING ENORMOUS. Australia could eat California as a nice snack with some tea and scones and maybe a side order of Greenland. Australia is AWESOME.)

(***Sorry, Perry the Platypus.)

Monday morning, I woke up, and I had still won the Campbell. This was...something of a relief, since part of me had been vigorously insisting that I was going to wake up and it was going to have all been a VERY CRUEL DREAM. Because that is the sort of shit my brain thinks is funny. Well, at this point, if it's a very cruel dream, it's been going on for almost two months, and when I wake up, I'm kicking the living shit out of the Sandman.

After dressing, abluting, and giggling a lot, Jeanne and I made our way over to the convention center, where I had been added to the "Disreputable Protagonists" panel. I...didn't have that much to contribute, honestly. Toby is disreputable, but she's disreputable due to very world-specific things, not because she's actually a roguish naif. Ah, well. What I remember of the panel was fun (I had, remember, not slept much for almost a week).

We wandered around the convention a bit. We peered at stuff. And we made our way to my reading, which was governed entirely by consensus. What was I going to read from? Feed. Okay. Which part? The first part. Again, okay. I read the first chapter. And then I gave away books, so I wouldn't have to take them home.

We wandered around a bit more. I gave away more books, including one to Crystal, a very nice lady associated with Arisia in Boston. I ran out of books. We hooked up with what had become the Usual Suspects—Cat, Rob, Liz, Mundy, Mal, and a gentleman whose name I have since forgotten—and took cabs downtown, where we ate Italian food and threw things at each other and made fun of Scotland. Then it was back to the Hilton, where we drank cocktails and talked about many things, and flung cookies at each other, and generally were silly buggers until the time came for sleeping.

That's the end of AussieCon IV. To everyone who made my weekend so amazing, thank you. To everyone who would have done the same if they could have been there, thank you. And to Jeanne and Cat, thank you twice, because you made the weekend magic.

Australia!

When last we left our intrepid heroes, Jeanne and I were heading to the auditorium where the Hugo Ceremony was being held, so that we could acquire a sufficient number of seats for our (admittedly large) group of people. We had, by that point, myself, Jeanne, Cat, Gretchen, Jay, Shannon, Daniel, and Keli, all of whom were basically "required human to prevent destruction of mankind." This is quite a lot of seats, so really, it makes sense that we took off the way we did.

Even with our early arrival, we wound up two seats short. Cat and I took the seats in the main row (where we would have a clear shot at the stage, should it be needed), while Jeanne and Gretchen sat right behind us, allowing for hand-holding and hysteria, despite the technical separation. Hyperventilation commenced.

Eventually, everyone was present and in their seats, and the lights were dimmed for the Hugo Ceremony to begin. Garth Nix, the MC, came out and told a funny story about how he was chosen to be the MC. At least, I think it was funny. I was mostly focused on hyperventilating without passing out. It's fun! Then came the video presentation of the year's "highlights in science fiction." This included, among other things, the book covers and author pictures of all the year's nominees.

They showed my book. And my face. On the big big big screen at the Hugos. This would be the point in the ceremony where I started to cry for the first time.

After the video came the First Fandom Big Heart Award, which, while not a Hugo, is given out during the Hugos. Please note that the Campbell Award is given before any of the actual Hugos (but after the Big Heart Award), and this little additional delay was enough to make me more of a nervous wreck than I already was. Now consider that Cat's category, Best Novel, was the last of the night, and she was still together enough to make soothing noises and pat my hand. Woman is a rock when she's gotta be, that's all I'm saying here.

The Big Heart was given. John Scalzi and Jay Lake took the stage, along with Kathryn Daugherty, the year's administrator (and someone who's known me since I was fourteen), who was holding the actual Campbell, turned against her chest to hide the writing. Jay and John explained the award, along with fun facts like "where the Campbell pin came from" (thank you, Jay and Spring), and "who thought up the tiara" (thank you, Elizabeth Bear). The names of the nominees were read out. I discovered the heretofore unknown ability to taste sounds and pray in sign language (hint: I can finger-spell "please, Great Pumpkin" faster than I can spell my own name).

(Also, wow, the screaming when they said my name was amazing. I mean, everyone got cheers and applause, but if you listen to the ceremony on playback, I think people actually blew the levels screaming when they said my name. Cue second tears of the evening.)

"And the winner of the 2010 Campbell Award for Best New Writer is..."

I clutched Cat's hand so hard my fingers hurt.

"...Seanan McGuire."

I kept clutching Cat's hand, because let's face it, when you can taste sounds, you're going to be like Cordelia in that episode where she was in the running to be Homecoming Queen: you'll think they said your name even if they've just announced "No Award" as the winner. Cat pushed me to your feet. "That's you."

The processional music for the Campbell was the theme from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Kathryn, Jay, and John were all beaming like they'd been the ones to win. I was mostly chanting "Oh my God" over and over again, that being roughly the limits of my mental acuity at that particular moment in time. They put the tiara on my head, and I was rightly crowned the Princess of the Kingdom of Poison and Flame.

All hailed.

My acceptance speech was a bit disjointed, at least in part because I was so focused on clinging, lamprey-like, to the Campbell. I did say that John and Jay were mistaken when they said that people wearing the (star-shaped) Campbell pin weren't the sheriff: "I just think y'all should know, I actually am the sheriff." So congratulations, my six-year-old self: you got to wear a pretty dress, become a princess, and be sheriff, all in one night. Next up, the planet of eternal Halloween, and maybe a pony.

I explained how, when I was seven, I said I wanted to grow up to be a Timelord, and everyone was okay with that, because no one knew what that was, and how everyone was a lot less okay a few years later, when I said I wanted to be a science fiction writer, because "girls don't do that" (and also I would wind up living in a cardboard box). I thanked the Great Pumpkin, which may well be a Hugo first. I thanked some other people. I lost the ability to form coherent words, and fled the stage as quickly as three-inch heels and a floor-length skirt would allow.

I admit, I spent the rest of the ceremony watching my award as much as I watched the stage (and also, getting the tiara caught in Cat's hair, at one point during the proceedings). People won things; we cheered. I cheered especially loudly when Will McIntosh won Best Short Story, since I'd had dinner with him the night before, and he was an absolute doll, and when Phil and Kaja Foglio won Best Graphic Story, because c'mon, it's Phil and Kaja. Favoritism? On occasion, yes. But at least my biases are public knowledge.

Cat didn't win Best Novel. But she did clutch my hand just as hard as I'd clutched hers, and thus was symmetry maintained.

After the ceremony, the winners and presenters had to stick around for a lengthy photo session on the stage (some of the pictures appear in this month's issue of Locus, which I need to buy multiple copies of, since otherwise, my mother will end me). Meanwhile, the other nominees, and their plus-ones, decamped for the Hugo After-Party. After all the pictures were finished, Jeanne and I joined them, dragging John Grace (my audiobook publisher) in our wake.

At the party: booze! Yay! Also prizes from next year's WorldCon, in Reno, and trays of actual food, which I finally felt competent enough to consume. Ellen Kushner came over and admired my Campbell. I squealed a lot, and wound up at a big table full of people I adored, sipping champagne, wearing my tiara, and loving the night.

Every time someone asked me if I was ecstatic, I replied, "I'll be ecstatic tomorrow, when I wake up and it's Monday." Ah, the joys of feeling vaguely like you're living in a dreamworld. Nothing is every quite as real as it seems, until it's over.

When we were all champagne-ed out, we went back to the Hilton Bar for more serious drinks (which were serious). On the way, I stopped to use the bathroom, and was then waylaid by a lookout for the filkers. "Are you going to come up?" he asked. "Kate's waiting for you to sign her book."

I said I could, but only for a few minutes, as Jeanne had my shoes, and up we went. The circle was singing "Hope Eyrie" when we entered the room. Half of them stopped singing to applaud, making me turn beet red and flap my hands in negation. (Thankfully, no one was mad at me for interrupting the song, since I clearly hadn't meant to.) I signed Kate's book. I was asked to sing before leaving, and, since Kathleen was there, sang "Burn It Down" with more fervency than I had ever managed before. My fear was on the fire, baby, and it was going down.

Fleeing, I rejoined the others at the Hilton, and had another round of hugs and joy with the folks who hadn't been able to attend the after-party. Then it was up to Cat's room to put our real clothes back on (and pluck the pins from my hair) before Jeanne and I walked back to our own hotel, to sleep.

Jennifer woke up long enough to say "Congratulations, lady," and went back to sleep.

For the first time in days, so did I.

(Yes, part of me is still in Australia. Specifically, the part of me that's responsible for writing up this trip report. This entry is going to take us through Sunday, right up until the end of the pre-Hugo Cocktail Party. Not because I'm trying to be a tease. Because the Hugos themselves need a whole entry, just so I can explain, in depth, what was going through my messed-up little head.)

Sunday dawned bright and early, again, with an extra dose of sheer blind "oh sweet Great Pumpkin the Hugos are TONIGHT, they're giving out the Campbell Award TONIGHT, why am I not drinking heavily RIGHT NOW?!" panic. I love my psyche sometimes. Anyway, blah blah, showers, blah blah, straightening my hair into a shiny, manageable state. Fun for the whole family.

Once we were ready to leave our hotel room, Jeanne and I packed up everything we were going to need for Hugo prep in the smaller of my two pink-camo suitcases. That may sound like overkill, but once you factor in dresses, underclothes, makeup, brushes, small appliances, shoes, makeup, and other items needed by the two of us, well...if either of us had been wearing a more fabric-heavy dress, we would have needed a larger suitcase.

The suitcase accompanied us to breakfast, and from breakfast, to Cat's hotel, where we checked it with the concierge. All hail good hotels! With this accomplished, it was time for the second order of business: confirming that I had been removed from my five o'clock panel. I hate to do that sort of thing, but I really needed to be getting ready for the Hugos by then, since the pre-Hugo reception started at six. (Basically, it was "drop the panel" or "attend the Hugos naked.")

After dropping the panel, we swung by the Green Room, where I had one of my few unpleasant at-con experiences as a woman informed me, with great good cheer, that the Hugos were on Sunday night because they wanted to see how many of the nominees would actually break down and cry. Thanks, lady. Jeanne didn't hit her. I was very proud of Jeanne, and not just because "get thrown out of the Green Room" wasn't on my list of things to do that day.

We wandered the convention for a while before proceeding to my one remaining panel of the day, "YA Urban Fantasy." I was happy to be on the panel, if only because it provided a window into that beautiful future where I've sold the Clady books and can legitimately call myself a YA author. Plus, it meant I got to hang out with Karen Healey (best last name ever). I brought her a My Little Pony from my stable, because she'd expressed a fondness for Ponies, and I like to share. She was properly appreciative of the Pony, thus securing herself an eternal place in my heart. Yay!

The panel was cool, too.

After the panel, Jeanne and I made our way back to Cat's hotel to start getting ready. Cue increasing terror. Cat met us at the door in her bathrobe. "Close your eyes," she commanded.

I am an obedient blonde. I closed my eyes, and let her lead me into the room...where an entire bed was covered in tiaras. Big tiaras, little tiaras, fancy tiaras, less fancy tiaras (because all tiaras are inherently fancy, at least to some degree), tiaras.

"We wanted to make sure that no matter what, you went home with a tiara," she said.

I laughed because it was that or start crying, and I knew that if I started, I was never going to stop, ever. The tiaras were beautiful, and just made moreso by the sentiment behind them. You guys. Thank you so much.

Cat's friend Gretchen was also there, and the four of us started our respective "getting ready" cycles. Four fairy tale girls, no waiting. Gretchen looked like a punk-rock Red Riding Hood. I could easily have believed Jeanne spinning straw into gold. Cat, as always, was my sweet and stained Snow White, and I was a Grecian Lily Fair, with ice on my eyelids and a prayer pressed to my heart. Cat didn't have any good luck charms on her; I gave her my silver sixpence, and taped it to her foot with a Band-Aid. I put on earrings made by Beckett and tucked the two-dollar coin I found in San Francisco into the front of my strapless bra.

After checking Twitter, Cat announced that the Night Kitchen in Seattle was having a Hugo party. All those people, staying up just to find out what happened. It was amazing. So much love from across the world. I can't describe what it meant to me to learn that. No matter what, we were nowhere near alone.

Gretchen and Jeanne did a very good job of juggling their high-strung pumpkin princesses until Susan arrived to do our hair, and put on her Sooj playlist to provide background music. We all sang along with "Ship Full of Monsters" as Susan got me pinned into place, and "Pixie Can't Sleep" while she worked on Cat (who looked amazing, by the way, in her gown of royal oceanic blue). It took forever to get us all ready to go. It took no time at all. It was like we blinked, and we had to go, because the pre-Hugo reception was getting ready to start. After days and weeks and months of wondering, the hour was finally nigh.

Dude.

Aussiecon 4's pre-Hugo reception was sponsored by Orbit, which meant that the owner of my publishing house was there, and also that there was a lot of free champagne. I mean a lot of free champagne. It's a measure of my Irish heritage (and unwillingness to force myself to visit the restroom in my floor-length dress) that I did not wind up roaring drunk, given my tendency to drink cold liquids really, really fast, and the way people kept trying to hand me fresh glasses.

We milled around, admiring people's outfits, posing for pictures, and generally being sociable, until it was time to do the photo ops for the various trade publications. Unfortunately, the microphone really didn't work well enough for a room that size, and, well...let's just say that those of us who have served as SCA Heralds in the past rapidly came out of the medieval closet, yelling our heads off as we herded nominees into place. I got to have my picture taken with my Campbell class. It was amazing.

And then it was time to go. Time for the Hugos. Jeanne and I struck out at the head of the party, so that we could grab a sufficient number of seats.

Wow, was I nowhere near ready. And wow, did that not matter anymore.

Saturday continued the "early comes the dawn" trend, with Jeanne and I both out of bed by seven. Jennifer and Jeff didn't murder us for our sins against the sleeping, and that's probably a sign that they're in line for sainthood. (Then again, we didn't murder them for snoring, so maybe the scales are just nicely balanced.) This was already shaping up to be my busy day, and just got busier once we got to the convention center and discovered that my three o'clock panel had been moved to noon. Yay for the fluidity of time!

(Footnote: Originally, I was supposed to be on the eleven o'clock panel about female superheroes. For some reason, it wasn't printed on my badge, and I wound up not attending, since once the convention starts, my back-of-badge panel list is about the only thing that can make me change directions. While this was deeply disappointing at the time, all recountings of the panel have made me glad to have missed it, as I might have killed someone. Hint: telling me that there is no sexism in comics is a good way to get your head bitten off. I am a vermicious knid when provoked.)

The time-shifted panel was that glorious old standby, "What Is Filk?", and consisted of me, Bill Sutton, Kathleen Sloan, and Terence Chua. If you want a bunch of people to talk about filk and the definitions of same for an hour, well, you could do one hell of a lot worse. It was a lot of fun, watching all the local filkers realize that no, really, They Are Not Alone. We are filk. We are legion, yo.

I went literally straight from my panel-on-filk into an hour-long two-person panel with Paul Cornell, titled "Fringe: Paranormal Investigations in SF Television." I adore Paul. I adore geeking madly with Paul. And I adore paranormal investigations in science-fiction television. This panel was like the delicious chocolate bonbon of my weekend, and the only way it could have been better is if Jeanne had delivered a ham, cheese, and tomato croissant to me at the panel's end.

Oh. Wait. BEST PANEL EVER.

My signing was scheduled for four, right after Cat's signing. I went over and kept her company for a while, until her line began to form and she was occupied by her fans. Ah, the trials of stardom. Or something. Her signing ended, mine began, and I signed a bunch of stuff (as one does), while inking during pauses between people. Someday, this damn mermaid will be finished.

The AussieCon V filk concert was arranged a lot like the UK Filkcon Main Concert: everyone piled into a single room and performed two or three songs during the multi-hour slot. Kathleen Sloan was my stunt guitarist, and we went on after (among other people) the Suttons, Terence, and Nan Freeman. NO PRESSURE. I performed my own "Wicked Girls," and Vixy and Tony's "Burn It Down," both of which went over very well, before running to get changed for dinner.

Dinner! It was me, Jay and Shannon, Daniel and Kelly, and two people whose names sadly escape me right now (I'm sorry!). We went to a very nice place attached to the casino attached to the hotels attached to the mall, where we spent several hours chatting, enjoying decadently good food, and, in my case, eating a big bowl of bugs. Bay lobster! It's delicious! And looks like a horrible cross between a lobster and a trilobite, which made it EXTRA DELICIOUS.

There was some unpleasantness about the service, but Daniel was able to resolve it with a minimum of fuss, and we all decamped back to the Hilton to resume Barcon. While there, I got to meet Ellen Kushner, and tell her that she's a big part of why I write urban fantasy now. Also, there were cocktails. Which made it easier for me to actually fall asleep when I finally made it back to my hotel, since, well...

Saturday night. That meant it was almost time for the Hugos.

I did not sleep through the night.

Australia!

Having had our wacky outback adventure (tm), it was time to turn my attention to more mundane topics, IE, "checking out of the hotel, moving over to our convention hotel, and attending a signing." Yes, a signing. I was supposed to be at the Southlands Dymock's bookstore by mid-afternoon, which was super-fun, especially considering that I had no living clue where that was.

Jeanne and I managed to get packed and out of our first hotel in a reasonable amount of time, after bidding a fond farewell to our newly-familiar surroundings. (Had we been aware that we were also bidding farewell to the only free Internet in the ENTIRE COUNTRY, we might have been a little more tempted to stay where we were. I'm just saying.) Because we are not idiots, we took a cab between hotels. Because our room wasn't ready yet, we checked our bags with the concierge, picked up our taxi vouchers from the front desk (thank you, Orbit!), and were off.

Where were we going? Why, the Westfield Mall. You know. The biggest mall chain on the west coast of the United States. Because that is what every tourist should do. GO TO THE MALL. We found the bookstore, along with a Safeway, and basically every store I would expect to find in a large suburban mall. Humans. We're all essentially the same.

The store manager, Chuck, was truly thrilled to have me, and made a point of getting his picture with me. This is because Chuck is awesome, and his store now has many signed copies of Feed (alas, only my evil twin was represented in the store's stock). We hung out for a few hours, and I got to meet a few awesome people I'd been hoping to meet while in Australia, including Tez. Yay Tez!

Before we left, I bought the UK edition of the latest Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight, because that's just how I roll. We had lunch at TGI Friday's, and made our way back to the hotel, where our room was still not ready.

We made our way to the Crowne Plaza to collect our badges. The woman who gave me my badge all but wanted a blood sample, which was...fun. (Seriously, I was like the only person in line asked to produce photo ID. Apparently, my life is very steal-worthy. Who knew?) I ran into several friends, and much hugging happened. We returned to the hotel, where our room was still not ready. Grumble.

Eventually, we were able to get into our room, greeting Jennifer and Jeff with great glee in the process, and then we were out, to have dinner with John (my audio book producer), a bunch of his other clients (including Phil and Kaja, and Cat, all of whom would be very central for me over the course of the weekend), and some awesome last-minute additions: Rob and Mundy. Rob and Mundy made my convention infinitely more awesome, and I am so beyond overjoyed to have met them. Seriously, there are not words. Even if our dinner conversation had rather more circumcision than I was expecting.

After dinner, Jeanne ran off to meet some friends, and I went off with Rob, Cat, and Mundy, to crash someone's cocktail birthday party. Cat and I wound up sitting on the cool veranda overlooking downtown Melbourne, sipping rum cocktails made with pomegranate liqueur, and going "Holy shit, this is our real life."

Maybe it's worth stealing after all.

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?

So my "take four days to recover from jet lag" plan appears to have been a good one, except for the part where it wasn't actually long enough, and I am still passing out at inopportune moments. In the kitchen while making lunch. In my desk chair while writing. In the theater while watching Resident Evil: Afterlife (because the T-virus is apparently soothing unto me).

I need to take a shower. I'm afraid I'm going to drown.

So here: have an open thread. Talk about whatever, post whatever, do whatever (although it would be nice if you could keep the Campbell congrats on the "I won the Campbell" post, just to make them easier to answer). Do not expect prompt replies, as I may be asleep. If you do not see activity from me for twenty-four hours, I have drowned in the shower, and the cats have eaten me. I expect it will take them a week or so to figure out the LJ interface and begin posting.

Game on!

My concert at Spocon was just incredible, due, largely, to my amazing assortment of backing musicians. With Brooke Lunderville on banjola, Mike Briggs on guitar, Desiree on violin, and Char MacKay on backing vocals, there was no chance of failure. I am so very grateful to have been their Music Guest of Honor. As is the standing tradition around here, I now present my concert set list, including annotation and lyric links, because that's what makes it useful.

The Spocon set list, with arrangement notes, was as follows:

1. "Counting Crows." (Seanan, vocals; Mike Briggs, guitar; Brooke Lunderville, banjola; Desiree, violin; Char MacKay, backing vocals.)
2. "Modern Mystic." (Seanan, vocals; Mike, guitar; Brooke, banjola; Desiree, violin; Char, backing vocals.)
3. "Last Call." (Seanan, vocals; Mike, guitar; Brooke, banjola; Desiree, violin; Char, backing vocals.)
4. "Cartography." (Seanan, vocals; Mike, guitar; Brooke, banjola; Desiree, violin; Char, backing vocals.)
5. "Oh, Michelle." (Seanan, vocals; Mike, guitar; Brooke, banjola; Desiree, violin; Char, backing vocals.)
6. "The Black Death." (Seanan, vocals; Mike, guitar; Brooke, banjola; Desiree, violin; Char, backing vocals.)
7. "Dear Gina." (Seanan, vocals; Mike, guitar; Brooke, banjola; Desiree, violin; Char, backing vocals.)
8. "Silent Hill." (Seanan, vocals; Mike, guitar; Brooke, banjola; Desiree, violin; Char, backing vocals.)
9. "Washington Rose." (Seanan, vocals; Mike, guitar; Brooke, banjola; Desiree, violin; Char, backing vocals.)
10. "Evil Laugh." (Seanan, vocals; Mike, guitar; Brooke, banjola; Desiree, violin; Char, backing vocals.)
11. "Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves." (Seanan, vocals; Mike, guitar; Brooke, banjola; Desiree, violin; Char, backing vocals.)

The bridge for "Wicked Girls" was...

"Now Susan's a pirate, and Vixy's run off with the fairies,
And Tanya keeps careful account of the treasure she buries,
Char poses riddles, and Patty plays tricks,
While Brooke conjures music from wires and sticks,
And the rules that we live by are simple and clear..."

As always: "Modern Mystic" is on Pretty Little Dead Girl. "Counting Crows," "Cartography," and "Wicked Girls" will be on Wicked Girls. "Oh, Michelle," "The Black Death," "Dear Gina," and "Silent Hill" are on Red Roses and Dead Things. "Evil Laugh" is on Stars Fall Home.

Two quick CD notes: I am sending my last restock of Stars Fall Home to CD Baby. If you don't order it from them, you'll need to track down a friendly local filk dealer. If you don't have a friendly local filk dealer, you'll probably want to order a copy before they're all gone. Barring sudden discovery of a mis-shelved box, this is it.

I have the final cover art for Wicked Girls, and will be opening pre-orders soon. Because of postage costs, pre-order CDs will be $18 each; I'll see if there's a way for us to combine postage on multiple CD orders, but I don't yet know. International costs TBA. Watch this space for details.

See you next con!