I have a move date now. Actually, I have a stacked succession of move dates, all of them coming one right after the other, like evil demon ducklings on their way to nibble me to death. And to make things SO MUCH MORE FUN, literally all but one of them happen while I am traveling for work. Seriously. Truck arrives in the Bay Area to get all my stuff loaded into it? New York. Cats are transferred to Kate's so they don't escape during the packing process? New York. Truck leaves for the Pacific Northwest? New York.

I get home, I go to where my cats are, I surrender my keys to the California house (my housemate, who is staying in the area, will be handling the sale with the help of a realtor we both trust), and then Kate drives me to my new home.

The day the truck arrives to be unloaded, I am, in order, heading for the airport, on a plane, and flying to San Diego to launch my combo book tour with Sarah Kuhn and Amber Benson. BECAUSE THIS ISN'T STRESSFUL AT ALL. (I am lying. I am lying through my teeth. This whole process feels like a huge psych test to see how much pressure I, as a person with OCD, can take before I snap and hide under my bed for the duration of, oh, forever.) All the unloading, all the checking that things aren't broken, is going to happen before I get home.

Vixy is organizing the helpers on the Seattle end of things, and if you're someone I know well enough to be all "hi, want to come and empty a truck that contains all my earthly belongings while I'm, you know, not there, also there will be pizza," you'll probably be receiving an email from me soonish.

I do have a short-term Patreon set up to help with moving costs, located here: https://www.patreon.com/seananmcguire?ty=h

I'll be honest: I would feel guilty about reminding people that the Patreon exists, given how high pledges already are (thank you, thank you, thank you), but moving turns out to be really, really, really, horrifyingly expensive, and all figures are actually 1/3rd lower, due to taxes. So every little bit helps (and our June story, "Stage of Fools," will be a return to the Londinium-era Tybalt--one of my favorite subjects!).

Please expect me to be scattered and a little twitchy for the next few months, while I survive this process. Thank you all so much for being here.

Well, here we go.

As many of you have no doubt heard, through one channel or another, I'm getting ready to move to the Seattle area. The move is becoming increasingly, terrifyingly real, and at this point, I'm not sure I could slow down the process if I tried. (Which is probably a good thing, because let's be honest here: if I thought I could slow down something this stressful, I very well might.)

As part of my prep, I am opening a short-term Patreon called The Toaster Project, which you can read about here. The formal launch will happen in late May/early June, but as physical rewards are limited, I wanted to give all y'all the first crack at claiming them. A banner image and welcome video and all that good stuff will be forthcoming. In the meantime, Tara made me some snazzy welcome images, and also there are cat pictures.

Hooray for cat pictures.

Today is January 15th, 2016. My last day of full-time employment for someone other than myself was January 15th, 2014. The last time I set an alarm for anything other than a trip to the airport or a convention was two years ago.

Two years. Where does the time go?

Two years ago today, I came home from work and crawled pretty much directly into bed. I wanted to be overjoyed. I wanted to be elated. I wanted to feel like I was free at last, finally free to write all the books I wanted to write and see all the places I wanted to see. Instead, I went straight to bed. I stayed there for about three weeks.

That sort of marathon of sleep usually indicates depression, at least for me. Not then. That was the sleep of being broken, of trying to fix myself. This last weekend Brooke said to me, sincerely, that my job--which had been a reasonable desk job, with reasonable people--had been killing me, and she wasn't wrong. I needed to either stop writing or stop working, and since there was no chance I was going to stop writing, I needed to stop working for someone other than myself. Or I was going to die.

(This is not hyperbole. I was sick constantly. I was stressed to the point of panic constantly, trying to figure out how to get enough money to let me quit so I could stop working all the time and actually get some sleep. I was miserable constantly. If my body hadn't broken and killed me, the thin line in my brain over which I usually manage not to step would have shifted, and I would have done something stupid.)

It's been two years of self-employment. I'm still learning. Budgets aren't easy, either of time or money. I'm still figuring things out. But I'm still moving, and I'm still not bored.

Saying "I quit" was the smartest thing I ever did.

It's the end of year review! (This is not the same as my awards eligibility post, which will come later.)

Short stories...so many short stories. Like, I am actually not sure how many short stories, because there are the ones that were written in 2014 and came out in 2015, and so are firmly fixed in my head as "2015 stories," and then there are the ones that were written in 2015 and haven't come out yet, and anyway. Short stories. So many, many short stories. My head hurts if I think too hard about the short stories.

Novellas, only really six to speak of. "Every Heart a Doorway" was written in 2015, as was "Dawn or Dusk or Dark or Day," my first two Tor.com novellas. I wrote a Limbus, Inc. novella. I wrote the last two novellas that will be included in Rise. I also wrote an unannounced October Daye-universe novella, which I am listing here for the sake ofcompleteness, but please do not ask me about it or comment saying how you can't wait. You'll get more details when I can give them, and anything before that will just make me feel bad.

Novels! This is where I get a little head-cocked-and-contemplative, because, well. On the one hand, I think I only wrote four novels this year: Once Broken Faith, Magic For Nothing, The Nativity of Chance, and a fourth, as yet unannounced Mira Grant novel (I finished it yesterday, so I'm still feeling all fancy about it). On the other hand, two of those books (Nativty and the new Mira Grant project) were in excess of 150,000 words. That's their "I have written a book, look at it, look at how shiny it is" length, not their "put this baby in the printer machine, it's gonna be a book now" length. I have no idea how publication-long they're actually going to wind up being.

So that's six novellas, or roughly a book and a half's-worth of words, and four novels, two of which were a book and a half long. Which gives me, sans short stories, roughly the number of words that you would find in seven and a half books of average (101,000 to 120,000 words) length. If I look at it this way, I feel less like I spent 2015 slacking off.

This is why I sometimes need a nap.

So I have just finished my guest editor slot with Queers Destroy Science Fiction!, the latest special issue from Lightspeed Magazine. It's a follow-up to last year's Women Destroy Science Fiction!, and I am so excited for all of you to read it. So very, very excited.

I am going to have a longer post about the experience of editing and the things I observed (with no "and then this person did this thing," because that is not helpful), but this is a distinct thing, and so I wanted to talk about it first, in isolation. And here it is:

The other night I was out at dinner with a bunch of friends and friends-of-friends, which meant that some of the people there didn't know who I was. Arley, who was one of my editorial assistants on the issue, was there, and he and I started chatting a little about QDSF. At which point someone else at the table, who didn't realize I had been the editor, said, "Oh, I was told not to bother submitting unless I knew the editor."

Someone told her, straight up, that she would not make it into the issue if she didn't know the editor—which is to say, me—personally.

Um.

I did not burst into tears or throw a chair, but I thought of both things. I thought it loudly enough that any local telepaths were probably frightened.

There are eleven stories in this special issue, selected from more than four hundred submissions. Of those eleven, two were solicited, because you need "marquee names" before you can expect people to support a Kickstarter. One, Amal, was (and is) a friend of mine. The other, John, is someone I know in passing and am professionally friendly toward, but he's not a friend. Of the remaining nine stories, one was written by a friend of mine. Before I was willing to accept it, I asked both my editorial assistants and one slush reader to read it, to make sure that I was not unduly favoring someone with whom I had a social relationship. The other eight stories were by people I don't know. People I've never met. Some were by people who have never had a sale before. I was able to help people accomplish their first sales, and that's something that I'm really, really proud of.

John Joseph Adams, who is the publisher and editor of Lightspeed, knows me. He considers me, so far as I know, a friend. He buys my shit all the time. You know why? Because it's good, and because my name sells magazines. Not because he is my friend. When he first started buying my shit, it didn't necessarily sell magazines, but it was good (she said, modestly). He has refused to buy some of my shit. Why? Because it was not good enough, or because it didn't fit the guidelines, or because he needed something different to fill that space. Because despite being my friend, he is also a professional.

No one got into Queers Destroy Science Fiction! with a story that was not good, or did not fit the guidelines, just because they were my friend. No one got in just because they were my friend, period. Because I am a professional, and I wanted to put together the best issue possible. That was my job.

Telling people "oh, you've got to know the editor" is completely counter to the purpose of the Destroy projects, which are all about throwing the doors open and encouraging the underrepresented group in the title (first women, now QUILTBAG individuals) to come in, since so often it's felt like the door said "keep out." That would be completely undermined by a policy that required the writer to know the editor in order to make a sale. That sort of policy would break my heart, and would definitely have kept me from accepting the position.

The submissions periods for Queers Destroy Horror! will end May 1st; the submissions period for Queers Destroy Fantasy! will open May 1st. Both will be edited by professionals (Wendy Wagner for QDH; Christopher Barzak for QDF). Anyone who makes it into those issues will be there because they wrote good stories that fit the needs of the issue, not because they have an "in." There is no one with a secret "in."

I can't help but be somewhat hurt by the idea that writers may have thought this was the case, or have been telling people that it was. I've been struggling to think of what I could have done to give this impression, and I've come up with nothing. I can promise you that the doors were wide open for QDSF, and that anyone queer-identifying was welcome. The same is true for QDH and QDF. If you fall within the QUILTBAG and you have a story for them to consider, please submit. Do it whether you know anyone at the magazine or not.

We need your stories.

Shirt update.

Mailing continues! I would estimate that I have three trips to the post office left to go, one domestic, two international (since I am only allowed to bring so many international shirts to the post office at one time). This has taken so very, very long, and for that I am genuinely sorry. This batch was more than twice the size of the last, with the associated administrative headaches (people asking for color/size/cut combinations that didn't exist, shirts not included in the batch from the printer, people not paying when prompted, which meant that we couldn't send the order to the printer in the first place, etc.), and as a consequence, it ran headlong into my convention season, which slowed me down like whoa.

There are a lot of reasons we're never going to do this again—this batch was the last, or at least the last "bespoke"—but the biggest is the scale. When I did the first T-shirt run, I was still a relatively new author, and so there were fewer people who cared enough to want to wear me on their chests, so to speak. The number of interested parties has increased with each run, and it's just become unmanageable. Thank you all for your patience. For the most part, you have all been incredibly kind.

The missing shirts have finally arrived, and are in their nicely sealed box, waiting for me to finish getting the first batch out the door. I will not open this box until I have cleared the space for immediate packing and shipping, to prevent excessive cat hair (or possibly a cat) from accompanying the shirts to their final destination.

Shirts!

The point of apparently vital clarification.

This past week, someone who knows me well enough to know my overall living situation, asked if something could be sent priority. I said that wasn't going to be possible, as I wasn't going to be able to get to the post office immediately, and would be putting stamps on the item and shoving it in my mailbox. My friend responded with, essentially, "Have your PA do it."

Y'all, there is no PA for this sort of thing. There is only me.

I have two functional PAs: Kate and Vixy. On a day to day level, this means they go through my website email before I see it, so that we don't have to deal with me going into a tailspin the next time someone decides to tell me that they're going to kill my cats. (A real thing, that people have really emailed me about, because humans are sometimes awful.) Vixy has a good grasp of my schedule, and while she cannot accept convention invitations for me, she can usually say whether or not a thing is likely. Kate knows when I am over-committing myself, and will smack me with a rolled-up newspaper. Kate is local enough that I see her about once a week (roughly). Vixy lives two states away from me.

When I talk about mailing things, I am talking about me, just me, going to the small, rural post office near my house, and mailing them. When I talk about doing inventory, or packing things, or sending CD reships, I am saying "these are all things I do personally, after I have finished making my word count for the day." And this is why sometimes CDs go out of stock, or it takes a long time for me to carry a large shipping batch, ten or twenty items at once, down to the post office.

I don't want sympathy, and I don't mind doing what I do; I wouldn't volunteer if I minded. But I would like people to keep in mind, when their giveaway prizes take a while or their customs forms are filled out sort of sloppily, or when I say "this is not open to international winners, I am so sorry, I just can't handle the customs forms right now," that it's just me, and I am just one person, with two hands, trying to climb an avalanche.

Thank you.

Today is January 15th, 2015. My last day of full-time employment for someone other than myself was January 15th, 2014. The last time I set an alarm for anything other than a trip to the airport or a convention was a year ago.

A year ago today, I started sleeping.

It's sort of remarkable: I hadn't realized how much of myself I had sold for health insurance and a desk with my name tacked to the wall next to it until I started to sleep again, and started to wake up. Because seriously, that's what sleep allowed me to do. I slept ten, eleven, twelve hours a night, with two-hour naps every day, for three weeks. Not out of depression; out of the sheer joy of sleeping, the restorative delight of starting to feel like myself again. The sleeping tapered off. These days, I go to bed at 11:00, go to sleep at 11:30 (slow sleep insomnia), and wake up between 7:00 and 7:30. Naps are rare.

I have had two major illnesses in the past year, versus ten to fifteen a year for the last several. One was a twenty-four hour stomach bug that could have hit anyone, regardless of how rested they were; the other was a cold brought home by my housemate and incubated on my flight to London. I have slept through the night almost every night. I have become happier, more stable, and more productive.

(The more productive has actually been a problem, as I'm flooding my poor proofreaders with material. I was always fast. Now I'm working at more what I consider my "normal" speed, and it's terrifying.)

A lot of people asked how I was going to stave off boredom. The answer was, and remains, that I will let them know when I actually get bored.

It hasn't happened yet.

...home.
...safe.
...covered in cats.

Goodnight, moon.

Well, here we are: in twenty-four hours I will be at the airport, going through security, getting ready to board a big metal sky-bird that will carry me away to England. Most people know this, since the Great Pumpkin knows, I've been talking about it a lot. What many people do not seem to have put together is that I will not be flying back until October 7th. Yup. October.

(Why am I doing this? Well, because I am Guest of Honor at Filk Continental in Germany the first weekend in October, and staying in Europe made more sense than flying home, financially, time-wise, and seeing my friends who I never get to see-wise. I will still be working essentially every day, since deadlines budge for no one, but I will also be seeing people, enjoying things, and eating cheese. Mmm, cheese.)

What does this mean for you?

Well, for one thing, nothing's getting mailed until I get back. I have tried my best to clear all pending mailing before I left; whatever hasn't been sent out is going to have to wait until such time as I am back where the things live. Fun for the whole family!

Because we are still verifying T-shirt payments and orders, we will not be shipping shirts until after I get back.

I will have internet access, but it's not going to be completely dependable from day to day; there may be a longer than usual delay in replying to messages. Also, messages may have random cat pictures attached, as I start to go into serious withdrawal.

It's going to be an adventure!

I will miss you all.

As of today, it has been six months since I quit my day job to become a full-time writer.

In those six months, I have traveled all over the country; I have seen and spent time with friends I hadn't really spent time with in years; I have finished writing multiple books; I have made word count more days than not; and I have slept. I have actually slept. It's hard to make people understand how important that is. I really had not been sleeping for several years. Slow sleep insomnia + things I had to do in the evening if they were ever going to happen + a 5am alarm all combined to = half my sick days were literally "I have pushed myself to the point where my body will not allow me to get out of bed." And now I am sleeping.

In the past six months, I have been seriously ill once, and that was a twelve-hour stomach bug that came on like a wrecking ball, and had me throwing up so hard and so consistently that I actually pulled muscles on both sides of my ribs. That may not sound like a good thing, but it was the sort of illness that fells whom it will, and doesn't care about your overall health. It wasn't brought on my exhaustion. Prior to quitting my job, I was literally coming down with a cold, flu, or other illness once a month. I am no longer losing my health to exhaustion.

I have to be a little more fiscally careful now, just because my income isn't as certain. I have to learn not to overcommit myself (I traveled a wee bit too much in the first part of the year, just out of the joy of freedom). I need to get better about finding anthologies, rather than waiting for them to come to me every single time, just to keep my finances moving in the right direction. But.

I am not sorry.

This was the smartest choice I ever made.

I can sleep, and that is worth everything that is more complicated than it used to be.

I spent much of the weekend looking in horror at the news, and at Twitter, and at everything else. A man murdered seven people and injured thirteen others before killing himself, explicitly because he couldn't get women to have sex with him. That's horrifying. That's upsetting and disgusting and wrong.

And then the people started saying "we'll never know why he did it," and I sort of lost my shit and had to go away for a few days.

He actually SAYS, IN SO MANY WORDS, that this is because he hates women. Because women will not give him the sex he so clearly deserves. Because "inferior men" are getting the women he should have. Because women have too much control (IE, the ability to say "no, I do not want to have sex with you"), and so the appropriate response is killing them to death.

But we'll never know why he did it.

A lot of people have said very good, sensible, logical things. Things that point out the power imbalance and the assumptions based on his apparent whiteness (he was half-Malaysian and half-Caucasian) and the fact that if someone shoots basically any other group of people on the planet, we're damn fast to accept that they did it because of hatred, but that when a man shoots a bunch of women, we'll look for any excuse but misogyny. I have not been able to say anything good, or sensible, or logical. Maybe I'll be able to in a week or two. But right now...

Right now, I look at the mounting number of incidents where "she wouldn't have the sex with me" has been used as an excuse for murder, and I'm just tired. That's all. I'm tired of the entitlement, and I'm tired of the assumptions, and I'm tired of the "not ALL men" response whenever someone says "misogyny kills."

I'm tired. No cookies today.

Tip jar results.

All things have been totaled (at long last), and the results of the latest tip jar are in, coming to a princely $1,187. I am still awed and amazed by the generosity of my readers. You've allowed me to prioritize finishing three InCryptid stories over the next three months:

"IM"
"Oh Pretty Bird"
"Bury Me In Satin"

These will be going up around the start of June, July, and August, respectively; "IM" focuses on Artie, while "Oh Pretty Bird" and "Bury Me In Satin" are both from the Johnny and Fran era. (That era is sadly coming to a close very soon: there are only three stories remaining to be written. I'm going to miss her. The first of those stories, "Snakes and Ladders," has also been prioritized.)

Upcoming appearances.

The book release party for Sparrow Hill Road will be taking place at Borderlands Books on Saturday, May 10th, starting at 5:00pm. There will be cupcakes! I'm actually planning to do a reading! Truly, it is a time of wonders. If you're unable to attend, remember that Borderlands takes orders both via the Internet and over the phone, and would be happy to hook you up with a signed and personalized book.

(If you're not attending and are planning to have me sign a book for you, please, please contact the store before the event date. I realized recently that some of y'all may not realize that I actually live an hour's drive from San Francisco, which means that—now that I don't have a day job—I can't just nip in to sign a few things before I head home. I don't want you to have to wait for your books because you called after I had already left the city!)

Cats.

They are. So mad.

Seriously, you have not seen anger like the anger of cats who are being left on the regular because their human needs to travel. I've managed to have at least a week at home every month so far this year, but they're pissed off, and I can't blame them. Poor babies. Also, it's summer, and if there's one thing Maine Coons hate, it's the coming of the summer. (Lilly and Lizzy don't mind as much. Ah, the joy of not being longhairs.)

More to come soon, and happy May!

Well, here I am updating again to say that I'm leaving. This is becoming something of a habit. (I know exactly why. I didn't travel much for like, four years, so this year has become a whirlwind of going everywhere and seeing everything and trying to do it all without losing my grip on things like deadlines and word counts and TV schedules. It'll settle down soon enough. But right now, it seems like I only update this blog when I'm about to hit the ground running.)

And what a run it's going to be! I'm Guest of Honor at Norwescon next weekend, and will be spending the next week in Seattle rehearsing, writing up, and getting ready. This is a working trip, not a pleasure trip, so if I don't reach out to you going "hey let's hang," please don't take it personally; I need to get my balance before I have to be awesome for a paying audience. But I promise lots of awesome on the other end, even if I'll be wracked with guilt over leaving my cats for this long.

(Alice and Thomas continue well, and exceedingly fluffy. Lilly is getting a bad case of the Olds, and is not doing as great, but she endures, transitioning into that stage of life known as "fueled by hate" among Siamese lovers everywhere.)

I have not been seriously ill since leaving my day job, even though I have seriously exhausted myself several times. I'm not saying that correlation is causation in this case, but I think I can make a good case for the two being connected. Hooray for being out of the plague pit!

More to come.

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 I've been in New Jersey/Boston/New York for the last two weeks. (No, those cities are not all smack-dab next to each other on the map; I flew into New York, was driven to New Jersey, was driven from there to Boston for a convention, returned to New Jersey, and have spent the time since commuting between New Jersey and New York for publisher meetings, dinners, lunches, more publisher meetings, and Pippin on Broadway.) According to the Virgin America website, my flight home is still scheduled to depart on-time, and I should be back in California by this afternoon.

I am really, really ready to be home.

I get twitchy and overly tired when I'm traveling for too long, and this is the longest trip I've taken in quite a while—longest in around ten years that hasn't involved a Disney Park in some way. I've been sleeping, but not enough; the sun comes up when I'm not expecting it, and smacks me back into the real world before I'm finished restoring myself to normal operating conditions. Sometimes I've been able to nap, but mostly not, since I've been running myself ragged dealing with the business side of publishing. Well, and seeing Pippin, which I managed to do twice.

This was in some ways a test run for my trip to Europe this fall, and I'm coming away from it very, very glad that I have people who are willing to let me be a bear in their guest rooms for a day or two. While it's going to be a longer time away from home, it should go better, because outside of conventions, I'm going to have less that I must do. Worldcon, Eurocon, Disneyland Paris, and Filk Continental are the only unmovable objects, and they're spaced out enough that I'll be able to move through them with relative ease. I'll just need to hibernate periodically.

I am tired. I miss my cats dreadfully. I need to restore my equilibrium, and that means going back into my hole.

I am going home.

Today was my first day as a full-time author.

Yesterday afternoon, I turned in my badge and left my day job for what will hopefully be the last time. I am finally in a position (thanks in part to the Affordable Care Act) to make a go of it. This means I'll have more time for work, more time to have a social life, and best of all, more time for glorious napping. I had a nap this afternoon. It was the best thing.

It also means that I'm going to be even more conservative, financially speaking. I regularly have to turn down conventions and speaking events that don't come with compensation for travel/lodging. I've been doing it up until now because it was a way to winnow things down to something I could handle with my available vacation time. Now...I can't afford it. I mean, right now, right this second, maybe I could, but in six months? In a year? I need to be careful, because I want to be able to do this, just this, the thing that I love, for as long as humanly possible.

Thank you all so much for supporting me as much as you have. You are why this can happen, and I am more grateful than I can express in words. I will do my very best to be worthy of your faith in me.

Because I know some of you will ask what you can do to help (and I am grateful for that, too), this is what you can do: buy my books. Buy my albums. When I say "here is a poster," or "here is a print," buy those, or point them out to people who will. Mostly, buy my books. That's what leads to royalty checks and more contracts, and wow are those going to be necessary going forward.

Again, thank you all, so much. I am so excited, and so relieved, and so looking forward to getting some actual sleep.

Comment amnesty is declared for this post! Because I want to spend that time napping.

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

Shipping.

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

Post-Hogswatch cleanup.

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

Prepping for Boskone!

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

My icon.

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

Cats.

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

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

Do you wanna build a snowman?

Or ride our bikes around the hall?

(Note: The following post discusses depression and suicide, quite frankly. If you want to skip it, I will understand. Also, I am calling a preemptive comment amnesty, because I don't know that I can get through whatever comments may be left. Thank you.)

***

I have a pretty good life.

That's not bragging, really. I mean, my life has its problems—it's stressful, I'm tired a lot, I'm a woman in the age of the Internet (which is unfortunately code for "I get some really disturbing hate sent my way for the crime of being outspoken and visible while existing as a non-male"), my foot hurts almost all the time, I worry about my friends—but there's no measuring stick that doesn't put me at "pretty good." I am financially secure enough to do things like take off for Disneyland at a moment's notice, to hug a woman standing as avatar for my favorite cartoon character. I have amazing friends who love me despite myself, and I struggle every day to be worthy of them. I have incredible cats. I sleep in an orange bedroom packed with dolls and books and Disney memorabilia.

I get to write books. I get to tell stories, for a living, and have people read and enjoy them. It's everything I ever wanted my life to be...

...and I spent more than half of 2013 wanting my life to stop.

I have been suicidal, off and on, since I was nine years old. I made multiple suicide attempts when I was a pre-teen and teenager; some came closer to success than others. I have my scars. My last active attempt was made when I was in my mid-twenties, and the friend who drove me to the train station has never forgiven me for making him complicit, in any way, in the attempt to take my life. I do not blame him for this, even as I know that I didn't mean to involve him; I just needed to get to the beach, and thought "hey, I can get a ride," and never stopped to consider what that might mean when he'd found out what I'd done, or worse, if he'd found out that I had succeeded. I couldn't see that far ahead. All I could see was the need to stop, to be over, to not need to do this anymore. Any of it.

A very dear friend of mine described suicidal urges and ideations as a narrowing, and she's exactly right, at least for me. It's not selfishness, not at its heart, because when things get that bad, it's virtually impossible to see continuing as an option. It's like climbing a very high mountain, and then running out of trail. You can't fly. It's not selfish to refuse to sprout wings and try. It would be selfish to stay where you are, to block the trail, to prevent others from climbing on without you.

It seems so much easier to just jump, and get out of everybody's way. It seems like the only logical choice. Selfishness doesn't really enter into it. I sort of wish it did. It would be easier to argue with the little voices, or at least it seems like it would be easier; we're all trained from childhood not to be selfish, and that makes selfishness easier to refute than narrowness. "I won't be selfish" is an easier statement than "I will continue to exist, even though there are no options, even though it will never get better, even though I am a burden to all those around me, even though I am unworthy of love, even though I do not deserve this skin, this sky, this space that I inhabit." And easy is...easy is easy. We want easy. When everything is hard, easy becomes incredibly tempting.

Writing this down is hard.

I didn't tell most people how depressed I was, because I didn't think I deserved my own depression. I have a pretty good life! I have all the things I listed, and more, and saying "I want to die" when I have a pretty good life felt like bragging; it felt like trying to claim a sorrow I had no right to. But depression doesn't give a fuck how good your life is. Depression is a function of fucked-up brain chemistry, and brain chemistry doesn't say "Oh, hey, you made the New York Times, that's cool, I better straighten out and fly right from now on." You can be depressed no matter what is happening around you, rags or riches, perfection or putridity. That does not make you wrong. Depression is a sickness. You can catch the flu at Disney World, and you can be depressed on your wedding day. No matter how good your life is, no matter how much people say they wish they had your problems, you are allowed to be unhappy. You are allowed to seek help. You are allowed to express your needs.

I did not actively attempt suicide in 2013, but that was only because I have had a lifetime of learning how to trick myself. I begged my agent to get me new book contracts. See? Can't die! I have deadlines! I cajoled my best friend into going to Disneyland with me. See? Can't die! I have to make faces with pixies! I accepted anthology invitations and convention invitations and let a lot of television build up on my DVR. Anything to create obligations that I would feel compelled to meet, but which weren't the kind that can overwhelm me. I made a lot of lists. I check-marked and itemized myself through the worst of it, and it worked, but it...it wasn't easy. I don't think it's ever going to be easy.

I am telling you this because I want you all to understand, at least on some level, that depression is not a thing you have to earn: it is not justified by tragedy, it is not created by grief. It can happen to anyone, and everyone has a right to seek help. Everyone has a right to be cared for, and to find a way to widen their options back into something that they can live with. Everyone. Even me; even you.

I would be very sad if I were not here to share 2014 with all of you. I hope—I really, truly do—that all of you will be here to share this beautiful year with me. Even if I don't know you, even if I've never met you or never will, I hope. Selfishness is easier to refute than narrowness, and we need to be here for each other, or those walls will crush the life from us.

I hope none of you have to deal with what I dealt with this past year. If you do, please, remember that you can seek help. You deserve help.

We all do.

So it's about six hours to midnight where I am, and I just woke up from a necessary and restorative nap; I think about half the last week has been spent in similar circumstances. I'm starting to take shorter naps, however, and I'm actually beginning to feel halfway rested, which is of deep importance to me.

2013. Well, that happened. In 2013, I made the New York Times List twice, and didn't make it once; I wrote more books than I really care to think about; I wrote more words than I can possibly count. I became the first person to ever receive five Hugo nominations in the same year, and learned how much hate mail that achievement generates (a lot), but didn't so much care when I got my five little silver rocket pins and my one big brass one. I won my second Hugo.

I nearly lost the ability to walk. I'm still getting it back a tiny bit at a time, and the whole process has been painful and upsetting in the extreme. For those of you who have never spent time with me in person, I love to walk. It's my primary exercise, and it's something that I usually do when I need to focus. Having it taken away from me has been horrible and upsetting. Here's hoping 2014 sees me finishing my recovery.

There were no major medical crises in either my family or my home. The cats are doing well, and apart from my foot and one bout of flu in January, this year has been one of my physically healthiest in a long time. I guess that's balanced by mental health; I spent much of 2013 incredibly depressed, and around six months actively wanting to die. Please don't respond to this post with "I'm so sorry" or "oh honey," because I know; there's a reason I didn't talk about it while it was going on. I'm doing better now, for the most part. So, you know. Yay recovery.

In 2013 I released four books: Midnight Blue-Light Special, Chimes at Midnight, Parasite, and Velveteen vs. The Multiverse. I released nineteen short stories, some through anthologies, others via my website. I got self-published fiction onto the Hugo ballot. I started writing poetry again. I didn't write enough fanfic.

I went to Disneyland. I went to Disney World. I hugged my cats. A lot.

So that was the year; it was productive but hard, and I'm ready to be done with it. Roll on 2014, if you would be so kind. I hope you all have the sort of night you dream of, and please, if you do anything, remember to be kind.

We're all we've got.

1. So I already wrote this entry once, and it was long and chatty and fun, and then I hit a button I didn't even realize existed and it all went away. I am thus suddenly grumpy, and my original tone may have changed a bit. Stupid buttons.

2. Amy Mebberson made a thing and you should all go admire it. I ordered mine so fast when it went up for sale that I actually got #1 of 50. That is love.

3. If you don't have a budget line item for Amy's art (which, let's face it, is a weird line item to have in a budget, and yet), take a look at Renee Nault's incredible watercolor mermaids. She has prints and calendars for sale, and has an incredibly diverse undersea world waiting for you to dive in. So pretty. So cool.

4. Starting Christmas Day, and continuing all the way through my birthday festivities, I will be doing a chain of twelve giveaways, for everything from ARCs and printed books to cover flats, posters, and special surprises. Each giveaway will have its own rules; watch this space for details.

5. Omnivoracious posted a super-fun thing about books at San Diego Comic-Con, including a picture of me in my Umbrella Corporation blue dress, standing in front of the Umbrella Corporation red cover for Parasite. I look very smug. You would, too, if that were your cover.

6. Alice and I did the Macarena this morning. I enjoyed it more than she did.

7. The year is almost over, but there are still some fun surprises to come: watch this space for details, and watch the sky for alien invasions. Darn those alien invasions.

8. Zombies are love.

9. I will be making my last pre-Christmas stop at Borderlands Books this afternoon. At this point, anything ordered won't reach you before the holidays, but you can still get signed and personalized books if you contact them before 2pm PST. After that, I don't guarantee another swing-through until sometime in January.

10. Finally for right now, Jill is still accepting donations to fund her surgery. As I said when she first started this campaign, we could buy her a future for Christmas, and that's amazing. If you've been looking for a tip jar to shove a couple of dollars into as a karmic investment for the year to come, please swing by and take a look at her plea.

I hope that you're all having the merriest holiday possible; I hope you're warm and safe and content, even if you're not in a place where you can be happy; I hope you're taking care of yourselves.

Let's get through these holidays together.

I am a bad, bad blonde blogger, and shall have no blogger blondie brownies, which breaks my heart, because blogger blondie brownies are the best brownies, better than butterscotch or banana brittle, and as I have now fucked around with alliteration for like, way longer than anyone really should, I will stop. Ahem. Anyway:

There's been an unplanned radio silence here, and for that, I apologize. The world sort of reared up and slapped me across the face with a wave of busy, and I've paddling frantically as I try to keep my head above water, my word counts marching in the right direction, and my cats from eating me. I'm trying to get things back to normal, but it's going to take a little while (and will probably happen just before I leave for Disney World on the 17th, thus making the entire enterprise pointless).

I did want to mention something, though, while we have the natural conversational opening of "I've been overwhelmed." And here it is, in bold text and everything, so that you can't miss it:

Unless you are my agent, my editor, a member of my proofing pool, or my significant other, your email/inquiry is not prioritized above anyone else's.

Please don't email me three times asking whether I got your email. If you sent it less than a month ago, the fact that you haven't heard back doesn't mean the message is missing; it means I have 300 emails to answer, and you're halfway down the heap. (If you did email more than a month ago, yeah, go ahead and email me. Once.) Please don't send me Tumblr asks or private messages going "hey why haven't you linked to..." or "you haven't replied to my comment on..." I'm getting to everything just as fast as I can, but triage is hard, and only certain things get an automatic float to the top.

If you're inquiring about a missing shirt, or something similar, use the merch address, which Deborah monitors for the sake of responding faster than I can. If you're asking about something time sensitive, feel free to say so in your email, but also understand that I may look at your question, go "that's not time sensitive to me," and resume emailing my editors/agent/machete squad about things that have firm, unbreakable deadlines.

I will continue to try to be as accessible as I can, but this is a super-busy time for me, and I'm exhausted and out of cope. Thank you for understanding.

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.

Many of you probably know that I've been having severe issues with my left foot right now, which make it difficult for me to walk normally. Sometimes I can't walk at all. It turns out that this is because I've developed an internal bone spur. So I'm going to the podiatrist, who's going to refer me to a surgeon, who's going to cut me open and make things better. "Better" is a word that lives on the other side of surgical recovery and more pain, but at least there's a clear road from here to there.

I keep joking that I'm a mermaid now, since I get to walk on knives everywhere I go. Damn, do I feel bad for Ariel.

It's not fun, being basically in good physical form and ready to resume my normal exercise regime (now that my back injury has finally recovered enough to allow me to do so), only to have my foot decide that I don't need to be independently mobile. It's been making me snarly and a little more short-tempered than usual, because constant pain does not a happy blonde make, and for this I apologize. Hopefully, surgery will resolve things neatly, I'll spend a few weeks sitting around hating everything while I recover enough to start physical therapy, and then I'll be better.

I am excited to be better.

Comment amnesty on this post: I really appreciate your support, silent or vocal, but I have a massive comment backlog, so I can't promise to answer everything.

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

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

Anyway, here you go:

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

Item: Tomorrow is my birthday!

Item #2: I am going to DISNEYLAND!

Item #3: So yeah, I am going to go offline for the next four days. I have no regrets. If you wonder why I have no regrets, see item #2.

Item #4: DISNEYLAND BIRTHDAY TIME!!!!!

...I am a happy girl.

We have survived the great beast 2012! Hooray and stuff! So here is my post-game commentary.

First, the bad, since there was actually less of it by weight, but what there was colored a lot of things. I did not move to Seattle in 2012. I'm trying really hard. Banks are difficult, and my day job is difficult, and it's all still a work in progress. This doesn't change the fact that by the end of the year, "so when are you moving?" became a question that was guaranteed to make me start a) yelling or b) crying. Sometimes it's really hard to live in a fishbowl, and when I don't have something I really, really want, and people keep asking about it...that's one of those times. So until I say "this is a thing that is happening, it has worked out with the bank and with my current housemate and with my job," please don't ask.

I developed a severe issue with my left foot in 2012. It's called "plantar fasciitis," and it basically means "screaming pain every time I put my foot down." This is a problem, especially since I walk both for exercise and for recreation, which has had to be cut way, way back, due to the whole "screaming pain" thing. This is negatively impacting my fitness, which I don't like. I'm doing what my doctor tells me and I don't need help, but it's bad, and it means that sometimes, I walk on a cane or not at all.

Now, the good. I went to Disneyland twice! I saw the largest intact Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton in the world! I went to Maine! Basically, through these things combined, it was a damn good year. I got Vixy into pin collecting, which gave me someone to collect pins with (always good). I saw amazing movies and watched a lot of TV, and I don't even know how many books I read. So many books. Truly we live in a magical time.

Oh, and I won a Hugo for never shutting up. I make a wish on it every night. (Yes, sometimes I wish on my Hugo to win a Hugo for Blackout. I never said I was reasonable.)

Publishing-wise, I couldn't tell you how much I wrote in 2012, because I seriously lost count, but I released five books: Discount Armageddon, Blackout, Ashes of Honor, Velveteen vs. The Junior Super Patriots, and When Will You Rise. I had my first reprint, "Lost", and my first reprint-in-a-book, "Crystal Halloway and the Forgotten Passage." It was a pretty slow year for me with short fiction, but there were some pieces I'm really proud of, like "San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats", and "In Sea-Salt Tears." I finished nine Velveteen stories, which is three more than the six I promised in 2011. It was a good writing year.

I'm excited about 2013, in all the ways. I'm going to spend my birthday in Disneyland. Wreck-It Ralph is coming out on DVD. And we're spinning our way around the sun again.

Whee!

I made history three times this year.

Wicked Girls was the first single-artist CD (as opposed to a compilation) ever to be nominated for the Hugo Award.

I was the first woman ever to be nominated four times in a single year, although several men had managed to accomplish that particular hat trick.

I was the first person ever to be nominated four times in a single year...and actually win something. Every other four-timer has proceeded to lose all four times, thus providing that splitting your voting block is a dangerous thing.

Thankfully, this third bit of "making history" was not pointed out to me until the absolute last minute, since otherwise, I think I would still be under my bed, hissing madly at anyone who tried to poke a stick under there and get my attention. (I know my friends. Many sticks would be involved.) We're talking full-on "Seanan goes feral," which differs from "Seanan goes wild" in that it features less naked, more bitey.

I am still a little bit stunned.

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.

Wicked Girls: the shirt.

The shirts have arrived from the printer, and they're perfect! Well. Most of the shirts have arrived from the printer: I'd say 95% of the shirts have arrived from the printer, and the last 5% are on back-order but should be with me very soon. And yes, I do mean "with me." Right now, the shirts are a huge stack of boxes in my living room, where the cats eye them with suspicion, because they dislike sealed boxes.

Why are the boxes sealed? The boxes are sealed because we're waiting for the mailing envelopes to arrive, and because we'd like to ship the darker colored shirts without a massive supply of bonus Maine Coon and Siamese hair this time. It's a wacky idea, I know, but work with me here. We've scheduled a packing party after Worldcon, to be held in a cat hair-free location, and will be trying to stuff literally every shirt into an envelope in a single evening. Mailing will commence immediately afterward.

I cannot take requests for early shipping right now, as that would require opening all the boxes and digging through all the shirts to find the right one. And then the cat hair precautions would be for naught. (Also because I'm in final prep for Worldcon, so I'm a little distracted, and only the Great Pumpkin knows what I would actually stuff into your envelope. Maybe it would be a T-shirt. Maybe it would be teeth. Who knows? Not me.)

But soon!

Wicked Girls: the CD.

The reprinted CDs have arrived from Oasis, and they're gorgeous. We fixed the typos from the first run (specifically the misspelling of "Carnival" on the back, and the spelling of Brian's last name throughout). The album is back in stock at CD Baby, at least for the moment; I shipped them 29 copies, and they're already down to 14, after having it in stock for a day. So if you've been waiting to get a copy of your very own, this would be a great time to order, since I have no idea when I'll be in a position to mail them a restock.

Basically, I am locked in a never-ending battle with the post office, and the post office is winning.

And that's the news.

It is August now. The Hugo voting is closed; the ballots have been cast, and what remains is fussing and fretting, putting on our finest things, and walking to the presentation room like Tributes to the Hunger Games (although we don't have to kill each other to win, which is probably* a good thing). Nothing we can do now changes anything.

I mostly haven't talked about my feelings about the Hugos, because it felt a little too much like campaigning to me, like even saying "I liked this" or "I didn't like this" would be casting too much weight behind an opinion. I'm not saying that my feelings are accurate; I've seen a lot of people dissect the ballot, and I don't think any less of them, and they didn't sway my votes. But it's hard to ignore the small, scared voice in your head that says "don't do that, it's not allowed," and I've been too tired to fight it.

I have strong feelings about almost every category. I have the Winners I Want, which may or may not bear any resemblance to the Winners Who Win. And no, I am not the Winner I Want in every single category. While I desperately want to win (please, Great Pumpkin, please), I actually want to be beaten in at least one category. I want to see people I love win. I want to see people I respect win. All the nominees are incredibly deserving of victory. Barring a statistically unlikely mass tie, not all the nominees are going to win.

And yes, I'm terrified. I'm the first woman ever to make the ballot four times in a single year, which is amazing, but if I become the first woman ever to lose four times in a single night, I'm not going to be in a very good mental place. More like a "hand me the port, lock me in the bathroom, and walk away before the crying starts" place. And it's not that I'm a bad loser, and it's not that I don't know every single winner will deserve it. It's that broken hearts are painful, and I've met me enough times to know that I'll be devastated, no matter how often I'm told not to be.

It is an honor to be nominated. I do, genuinely, want to win. I don't think there's anything wrong with my expressing that honest sentiment after voting has closed; it can't change anything, and no matter who does win, I know that they'll deserve it.

This is huge. It is amazing. It is an honor to be nominated, it is mind-blowing to look at the ballot and think, "these are some of the giants of science fiction and fantasy, and there I am, me, and my friends, some of my best friends, and we're with them, and to a little girl like I was, looking at this ballot in twenty years, we'll be them." When I was a little girl looking at pictures of Isaac Asimov's Hugo Awards, I asked Santa to bring me one (maybe I should have asked the Birthday Skeleton). Now I have the chance to get one the legitimate, non-supernatural-being-initiated way. And it's huge, and it's terrifying, and I have a very pretty dress, and two very pretty dates for the ceremony, and...

And it's August. It's almost here.

Oh Great Pumpkin who waits for Harvest, hallowed be thy patch...

(*Only probably. The Valente/Hines/Cornell/Bear/McGuire alliance would take out half of the science fiction community before we were forced to turn on each other. My dress has big skirts. You can hide a surprising number of knives under big skirts.)

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts?

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

I have been home, dead of sick, for two days. We're talking "deep, rasping chest cough, I sound like a Batman villain, spent eleven hours on the couch yesterday, watched all of The Number 23 because changing the channel seemed too much like work" levels of sick. (PS: Maybe the number-obsessed OCD girl shouldn't watch movies about being driven to increasing levels of paranoia by numbers when she's already sick. Luckily for me, the movie made no damn sense, and just triggered nice little daydreams about prime factors and pi. What? I don't judge what helps you feel better.) So here is some stuff from my link file that I have been unable to find context for.

First off, no matter how bad a cover your book gets, it will never win the bad cover lottery. That prize has already been claimed by this not-safe-for-work edition of The Princess Bride. What is that I don't even. Flesh-snakes are attacking her lady bits with the intent to burrow their way into the promised land. Presumably the promised land has a cover that makes sense. Also, I do not remember Buttercup using a falcon as a cunning hat. Maybe somebody was hitting the cold meds a little too hard when they approved this one? I don't know.

The next time I go to the UK, I am totally visiting Hoxton Street Monster Supplies, which promises me "bespoke and everyday items for the living, dead, and undead," and is the only shop I've ever seen that was polite enough to request that angry mobs douse their torches before entering. Hell, forget visiting; I want to live there.

This is Alton Brown's Fanifesto. It makes me happy, even as I am sad that it needed to exist.

Disney Princesses have their issues, and I am the last person to pretend that they don't, but they have their good sides, too. This is a lovely collection of moments to illustrate that. (And while I'm pointing you at Princesses, why not swing by Amy Mebberson's Tumblr? Her weekly "Pocket Princesses" cartoons are a real treat.)

Finally, for now, cuckoos are in a biological arms race to continue their egg parasitism ways. So maybe there's hope for humanity. If the cuckoos don't figure out a better way...

I'm going back to bed.

Pre-ordering books.

I've seen some people going "Oh, no, I pre-ordered! I'm sorry!" and variants on this theme. I want to state, for the record, that pre-orders are awesome. Pre-orders are the rainbow sprinkles on the delicious sundae of a new book: not always necessary, but always an improvement. Pre-orders tell bookstores that there is a demand for something, and can increase initial on-shelf orders. They also tell publishers how many copies of a physical book are likely to be needed. Pre-orders rule.

The issue here is not pre-orders: it's that some retailers started releasing books early. Normally, your pre-orders do count against week one sales, because normally, that's when the pre-orders are charged and delivered. In this case, due to no fault of my publisher or anyone who ordered a copy ahead of release, those pre-orders will be counted two weeks ahead of week one. My sales for week -2 are going to be awesome!

Calculating bestseller lists.

I want to say this plainly: all sales count. Period. If you buy a book, your sale is counted. That said, not all sales count for purposes of making bestseller lists, because those lists are snapshots of certain measures of time. In the case of the NYT list, it's calculated on a weekly basis, and a new book's best shot (not only, but best) of making the list is week one, when all the pre-orders are delivered and all the bookstores have the book on their "new releases" shelf.

Not making this list doesn't mean your book is a failure. I'm pretty sure Feed is my best, steadiest selling book, but it didn't make the NYT. It's simply continued to sell, week after week, and that demonstrates good long-term health for both book and author. But that's long-term. In the short-term, making the list is a good way for publishers to know that they have something worth holding onto. That's why authors hope to make it; because they want that position of "see? People like me" to support them when they try to sell the sequel.

Early sales are still counted against your overall "my book sold this many copies." They just don't count against snapshots of release week.

My publisher is awesome.

My publisher rules. They did not release my book early; some online retailers did that. They are not dropping me if I don't make any bestseller lists; they've already bought the second InCryptid book, and the next two Toby books. I worry about my sales partially because I want my publisher to be happy with me, and partially because I want to be able to sell them the next three books in both my series, but also because I love them and want them to benefit from everything they've done for me.

To recap: DAW rules, DAW did nothing wrong, DAW is standing with me, DAW is very annoyed about people calling me names.

You are awesome.

All the support and kind words have been just amazing. Thank you so, so much. I really appreciate it.

I feel a little better because you're here.

One month from today (give or take a few days, given shipping times and shelving patterns), Discount Armageddon will be officially released into the wild. People will be able to buy it, not just pre-order it. Reviews will hopefully become more common, without becoming dramatically meaner. My teetering pile of ARCs will be replaced by a teetering pile of author copies. The beat, as they say, will go on.

This is the first new series I've launched under my own name since 2009, when Rosemary and Rue came out. Feed was released in 2010, and I was a nervous wreck about it, but at the end of the day, Mira Grant was another person; if she failed, I would cry a lot, because Feed was a book I really, really loved, but it wouldn't crush me. But this...

I've had some people email me to sadly ask whether I'm tired of Toby. I'm not, and the sixth book comes out this fall (Ashes of Honor). She's just emotionally exhausting, and it's hard for new readers to get into the series without feeling daunted. Whereas InCryptid is something I've really wanted to write for a long time, with characters and situations that I really love, and it's a series and world I've put together with more experience under my belt, allowing me to avoid some of the flaws in Toby's world. Yes, flaws: Toby's world, for all that I adore it, is innately Eurocentric, and can be confusing sometimes, even though the only type of supernatural creatures to exist are the fae. There's a lot of history, and I sort of assumed everyone understood feudalism. It's my world, I made it, and I love it, but there's something amazing about starting from scratch.

A month before Rosemary and Rue came out, I was vomiting with terror. I'm calmer this time, although I'm still anxious as all hell. Will people like my baby? Will it do okay? Will the other new releases beat it up and call it names? Will sales be strong enough that I'm allowed to continue past the second book? It would make a tidy duology, but you've met me: two is never enough. I want to go much, much further in this world, and whether I get to do that will depend partially on book one. I am a bundle of anxiety and neurosis.

But it's almost here. No matter what else happens, no matter what comes next, Discount Armageddon is almost here.

That's pretty much amazing.

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.

"Can I promise you that I'm going to get better? No. This is what you get, you know. This incomplete person, with toothbrushes, and with rubber gloves, and with so much love for you. But if that's not what you want, then you need to be honest with me, and with yourself. And the sooner the better." —Emma Pillsbury, Glee.

"When I was a kid, I always imagined I'd be normal by now." —Hannelore, Questionable Content.

Before I begin, I want to make it clear that this is not the first time I have talked about my OCD, and the way it impacts my life. I don't talk about it in depth all that often, because it's a daily thing for me. I'm not "normal" five days out of the week, and OCD on Mondays and Thursdays. I'm not cyclical. I am programmed in a way that doesn't quite fit the currently defined human median, and that's how I function all the time.

I started displaying signs of OCD when I was nine, although I didn't get formally diagnosed until I was nineteen. Because I'm not germaphobic (if anything, I'm virophillic) or a "cleaner," it was easy to write my insistence on following patterns and maintaining routines off as just one more aspect of me being a weird kid. And I was a weird kid, with or without the OCD. It's impossible for me to know who I would have been with a differently wired brain, but I like to think that I would have been a version of the self I am now. Just maybe one with a little less stuff, and a little less esoteric knowledge about bad B-grade horror movies.

My diagnosis was almost accidental. I was depressed; I went to see a doctor about my depression; one thing led to another; we arrived at a place that we both agreed matched up with the contents of my brain. (OCD is sometimes connected to depression. Hell, OCD sometimes causes depression, either because you can't keep up with your obsessions, or because your compulsions make you sad. I've had both these experiences. Neither is particularly fun.) I promptly told absolutely no one, because the OCD jokes were already common within my social circle, and I didn't want to deal. But I did start putting some basic coping strategies in place, and things got better. I didn't fly into a towering rage over people being late if we didn't set a start time. I learned to eat food without mashing it into an indistinguishable slurry. The beat went on.

As I've gotten older, my symptoms have matured with the rest of me, as have my coping strategies. I've finally reached the point where I can be less than two hours early for my flight, providing I have a printed boarding pass and priority boarding. I can travel with people who are more laid back than I am (although, to be fair, that's everyone). I can even go for dinner without having a pre-memorized menu (I don't get credit for this one; it turns out you can, with time, memorize a wide enough range of food combinations to be safe within a number of specific cuisines). And I mostly don't take it out on other people when things go wrong.

One in fifty Americans lives with OCD. I won't say "suffers from," because not all of us are suffering; I am not suffering. I am no more or less normal than anyone else. It's just that I start from a different position on the field. Some people with OCD do suffer, because it can be a crippling condition. It's the luck of the draw, the same as anything else.

The dominant idea of OCD is still Adrian Monk or Hannelore, or Emma from Glee. I've been in tears over her twice this season, because it breaks my heart a little when I see her struggling to control something she never asked for, never did anything to earn, and has to deal with all the same. Most people with OCD aren't these stereotypes. They're your friend who always has hand sanitizer, or your cousin who never leaves the house until seven minutes after the hour. They're the guy you went to college with who has a collection of lawn gnomes in his bathroom, and buys a new one every six months. They're your favorite football player. They're that composer you like.

They're me.

I made a comment on Twitter earlier today that I was an "odd duck," because I wanted to dance to a Ludo song at my wedding (no, one isn't planned, I just like to plan ahead). Celticora replied, "You're not an odd duck, you're a normal platypus." I think I'm going to roll with that. So the next time someone wants to be early, or can't leave the house without checking that the toaster is unplugged, or does something else you can't understand but that doesn't actually hurt you, remember, it's a big ecosystem. We have room for ducks and platypi.

Everybody loves a semi-aquatic egg-laying mammal of action, right?

ME: *asleep*
ALICE: *asleep*
LILLY: *asleep*
THOMAS: "Bluuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuurgh hack hack hack blurgh bleah puke puke puke."
ALICE AND LILLY: "MONKEY MAKE HIM STOP."
ME: "Huh wha' is it time for school yet?"
CLOCK: *1:45 AM*
ME: "...oh I am going to make slippers."

So that happened. Poor Thomas decided to celebrate my birthday by throwing up all over the hallway shortly after midnight, resulting in my first birthday activity being "mop up all the cat puke." Also, ew. He seems fine, just unhappy, and got snuggles before I went back to bed and dreamt* about being eaten by a giant gar.**

ME: *asleep*
ALICE: *asleep*
LILLY: *asleep*
THOMAS: *sulking*
ALARM: "Good morning good morning good morning GOOD MOOOOOOORNING!"
CATS: "MONKEY MAKE IT STOP."
ME: "I hate everything."
FACEBOOK: "HAPPY BIRTHDAY FROM THE POPULATION OF HALLOWEENTOWN! LIKE, REALLY, THE WHOLE POPULATION!!!!!!"
ME: "...okay, maybe not everything."

Today is my thirty-fourth birthday! Which is pretty awesome, since I, like most nihilistic teenagers, never really expected to live past the age of twenty. I definitely didn't expect to be writing books and snuggling cats and going to Disney World and having amazing friends and basically getting a pretty good score at the game of Life. Even if my little car lacks other pegs (which I never really wanted anyway). Mom is checking up on Thomas throughout the day, but he really does seem to have just eaten a bug that didn't agree with him.

Tonight, there will be writing, and maybe cupcakes, if I'm feeling ambitious and like walking down to the bakery before I go home. And this weekend, there will be blessedly nothing. I will rest, and it will be glorious.

Happy birthday to me.

(*Dear spellcheck: screw you, that is the correct past tense of the word "dream.")
(**It's a kind of fish. With bonus teeth.)

So as I get ready to leave, I begin addressing the administrative funtimes that are my inbox. Which leads us to today's exciting question:

"Why hasn't my _____________ been mailed?"

This question comes in three flavors: books, shirts, and ARCs. If you are currently expecting a book from me, it has been mailed. If you don't have it, it's either in transit, or the post office has eaten it. I sadly don't control the post office, and I can't afford to pay for confirmation on every package I send, so unless you sent me money for postage that included tracking, I don't have a way of knowing where it wound up. I'm sorry.

If you are currently expecting a shirt from me, we just received the last box from the printer. It's a small shirt shop, and they were as overwhelmed as I was by the size of the response. We're still packaging and mailing, and will finally be able to start packing and mailing out those shirts that previously didn't exist. Thank you very much for your patience. I can look up individual people on the list, but I ask that you email Deborah at the merchandise account, not me directly; Deborah has the files, and time spent digging through the list of shipped shirts for your name is time I'm not spending putting shirts in envelopes.

If you are currently expecting an ARC from me...here's where things get fun. See, my email? Is apparently broken. As in, "no longer accepting mail from my website contact form." So the addresses of the winners of our last contest never reached me. If you're reading this, please try sending your address again, via LJ messenger this time; my webmaster, Chris, is trying to isolate and repair the problem, but I have no idea how long that's going to take. For the moment, assume that if you've emailed me, I didn't get it.

Because administrative chaos right before a week in Florida is so totally what I needed this year. Happy holidays!

1. I'm currently running an ARC giveaway for Discount Armageddon, and will be choosing a winner via random number generator tomorrow morning. US addresses only for this particular giveaway. I'm leaving the state very shortly, and I don't have any customs forms, so I have to limit the entries if I want to be sure of mailing out the book.

2. Speaking of mailing things...I sent a massive batch of shirts this weekend, and will be preparing another batch to go out at the end of this week. The "I do not have any customs forms, and neither does my local post office" issue means I'm only sending US orders right now, but hopefully they'll have more customs forms soon. The shirt shop finally sent me the last of the shirts, so if your order was skipped before due to me not having your actual shirt, I should now be able to package it. (Yes, this is taking a long time. I can only send what I can hand-deliver, and that sort of complicates things.)

3. Why am I leaving the state? Because I am going to DISNEY WORLD!!!! More specifically, I'm going with my mother, my youngest sister, and vixyish, who has been drafted into the role of "person who keeps Seanan from killing her family." We're meeting up with hsifyppah and sweetmusic_27 in Florida, along with Amy's friend Patty, and then we're going to spend NINE DAYS enjoying the glories of Orlando. I'm the only person in my group of four that's ever been before, and I can't wait.

4. This does mean, however, that I won't be online for over a week. No email, no LJ, nothing but Twitter from my phone. So please don't email me and then get upset if I don't answer. (I mean really, don't do that anyway, I beg of you. I am unable to promise a swift reply for anything sent in my email. I'm even retooling my website in a vain attempt to reduce the amount of email coming my way. Have mercy.)

5. Which brings us to release dates. All books and stories with confirmed release dates that I can say "yes, it comes out on that day" about are listed on my bibliography page. Please check there before you ask me when something is coming out. It's unfair, I know, but I get asked that question so often that it makes me cranky, and I hate being cranky at people who don't deserve it.

6. I am currently trying to either write or revise ALL THE THINGS, and will be doing another inchworm post shortly, because that has turned out to be a distressingly good way of staying on top of things. Thanks, Bear.

7. So The Agent returned her editorial notes on Ashes of Honor, and as always, has proven to be incredibly good at identifying the major structural flaws that all the rest of us mysteriously missed. I'm currently fourteen chapters in on the editorial rewrite, after which the book can go off to The Editor, and I can forget about it for a little while. And by "forget about it," I really mean "start The Chimes at Midnight." I think there's something wrong with the way my brain works.

8. I am now on season four of Criminal Minds. I'm sorry I started watching so late, because damn. I'm also glad I started watching so late, because it means I've had lots to enjoy. Also, Penelope Garcia for the win.

9. Jean Grey is still dead.

10. Happy holidays! Try not to freak out and bludgeon anyone to death with a fruitcake, okay? Because that would be a horrible way to go.

So last night, my body decided it was time to hit the shiny red STOP button on my life, by bringing on a bell-clanging migraine of the sort that I only have once or twice a year. I went to bed at six o'clock, figuring I'd sleep until eight or nine, and have trouble going to bed, but feel much better. Instead, I slept until seven the next morning, and woke up groggy, dehydrated, and feeling faintly like I'd been hit by a truck.

Needless to say, I did not go into the office today.

Instead, I have done ALL THE WORK here at home, and written ALL THE WORDS, in-between unplanned naps and episodes of Criminal Minds. I'm on season three now, which is very comforting and reassuring. By season three, most shows have found their feet, settled in for the long haul, and stopped shifting their perspectives without warning. It's a nice place to be. And serial killers make me feel better.

I'm hammering away on Midnight Blue-Light Special, hoping to buy myself Sunday as a free day for processing edits on Ashes of Honor, since every little bit counts. I'm also working on the page proofs for Discount Armageddon, and writing another John/Fran story set decades before the start of the series. Literally decades; they're the parents of the POV character's grandmother. It's one of my favorite universes, because it's both very open and accessible, and very close and snug. I love that sort of narrative contradiction.

The cats have loved this last day. Thirteen hours in bed, followed by hours and hours without leaving the house? Feline bliss. They'd be happier if I would feed them more than twice, but right now, they're taking what they can get, and what they're getting is my total attention. I'm a little vexed about today being a no-mail holiday, since I wanted to both send and receive mail. Since I didn't make it outside, I should probably let the vexation go.

And that's my Friday. Hope you're all gearing up to an amazing weekend!

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

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

Anyway, here you go:

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

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

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

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

Ashes of Honor.

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

Social life.

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

My fall convention schedule.

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

And after that, I nap.

Too much TV.

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

Toys!

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

Cats.

Insane.

"Wicked Girls" T-shirts.

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

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

I need a nap.

So there's been a huge influx of people over the course of the past few days—hello, people!—and while I expect that the majority will leave again when it becomes clear that discussion of sweeping social issues is less common around here than discussion of that cute thing my cats did, some of the new folks will probably stick around. Welcome! A few things you ought to know...

1. My name is Seanan; I'm an urban fantasy author. My name is also Mira Grant; I'm a science fiction author. Both of my personas write other things, but those are mostly what we're known for. As Seanan, I won the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. As Mira, my first book, Feed, was nominated for a Hugo Award in 2011. I put out three books a year. I don't sleep.

2. I have cats. I'm not currently blogging about them much, because there was some unpleasant mail that I'm still calming down from, but they are a huge part of my life, and my word count posts include a note about where the cats are. All my cats came from reputable breeders. I believe in supporting both animal rescue and healthy, responsible breeding.

3. I watch a lot of television. Like, a lot of television. However much you're thinking, it's probably not enough. During the fall, my DVR is a sad, overworked little monkey that deserves lots and lots of treats. Given a choice between sleeping and watching television, the TV wins. Thankfully, writing is like TV for my brain, so I manage to meet my deadlines.

4. I collect toys. Specifically, I collect classic 1980s My Little Ponies, Monster High, interesting plush, the occasional totally awesome vinyl figure, and dolls from Wilde Imagination (Evangeline Ghastly and Ellowyne Wilde). As I type this, a Beautiful Nightmare Evangeline and a Blithe Spirit Ellowyne are sitting on my desk. It is very difficult to hang out in my room if you have issues with creepy dolls watching everything that you do.

5. I try to answer every comment posted on one of my entries, although not necessarily every comment posted on a thread. This can take a while. Please have patience with me.

I have a free friending policy, and a permanent unfriending amnesty. You don't need to tell me, either way. :) Again, welcome, and I'm glad you're here.

Authors Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith have written a very brave, very straightforward article about being asked to remove homosexual characters from dystopian YA. Check it out. It's a fascinating read, all the more because it's so topical.

I have never been asked to turn a gay character straight; I'm very thankful for that. I have also, as yet, not been working all that extensively in YA (although I hope that will change in the future). So who knows what's going to happen? I have faith in The Agent, however, and I truly believe that she will fight for me, and for the integrity of my work. Both my houses (both adult houses) have been fabulous about my having gay, lesbian, and bisexual characters in my books; I do not yet have any explicitly transgender characters in published work, but I have absolute faith that when those characters appear, both DAW and Orbit will treat them with the same respect that they show to all my other characters.

That being said, I'm noticing one disturbing trend in certain replies/rebuttals* to this entry. Specifically, I've seen several people saying "There are absolutely gay characters in YA. What about ________?" and naming specific examples. Tom and Carl in the Diane Duane books. The protagonists of Annie On My Mind. Pretty much anything by Francesca Lia Block. And, well...

To me, this is the same as saying "Of course there are female leads in the movies! Didn't you see Bridesmaids?" or "Of course there are female protagonists in cartoons! Don't you watch My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic?"

Yes, those stories exist. But they exist in the context of "chick flick" (how I hate you, rhyming label), or "girl's cartoon." If you omit "chick flicks" and action movies involving Mila Jovavich or Angelina Jolie, both of whom are basically playing video game heroines most of the time, it's really hard to find a female lead. We get romances and we get to fight evil in our skivvies. We don't get to have stories that are essentially gender-neutral. If you take out the cartoons where pink is the primary color of the universe, it's really hard to find a cartoon that has gender balance, much less a female in a leadership role.

When I talk about wanting diversity in my YA, I'm not asking for more specifically "queer YA." I love it, I want to see it keep getting published, I think it's important, and I think it's not the point of this particular sword. What I want is paranormal romance where the lead is in love with the head cheerleader, not the head jock. What I want is heist books and con men where it's Mike and Dan, not Mike and Dawn. I want gay best friends and gay parents and sisters who were born brothers but got that fixed. I want books that are sold as being normal, everyday, perfectly ordinary books, that just happen to have gay people in them, not the next! Big! QUEER ADVENTUUUUUUUUURE! I have plenty of queer adventures. What I want is gay men doing laundry, lesbians chasing werewolves, and transgender superheroes fighting to save Metro City. What I want is books where the story matters more than the sexual orientation of the characters it contains.

Saying "queer YA exists" distracts from the issue at hand: there is very little in the way of YA with queer characters, as opposed to queer YA. And that's something we should be aware of, and something we should be working to fix. My sexual orientation did not somehow change the stories that I was interested in, or the adventures I was able to have as a human being. It was just one factor, amongst a whole lot of other factors. We need explicitly queer YA the way we need sports books and horse books and The Babysitter's Club and every other niche story: to tell us that this is okay, that this is an option. But characters in apocalypse YA ride horses, play sports, and babysit for children. So why can't they date whoever they want, without being changed into something they're not?

It matters.

(*I don't really understand how you can present a rebuttal to something that happened. The surrounding circumstances can be argued, but if a dog bites me, you can't present an argument for why the dog didn't bite me. I'm bleeding, I was bitten. This does not stop people from trying.)

In the interests of not giving myself something else to cry about the week before I have a book release, I am officially declaring comment amnesty on yesterday's post about the situation with the cats. Thank you all so much for your kind words and advice. Your support means worlds. But if I try to answer every comment, my head will explode, and nobody wants that.

Thanks for understanding.

I haven't been blogging about my cats recently.

Some of you may have breathed a sigh of relief when you realized that you had entered a relatively feline-free zone. "Finally," you said. "She's going to talk about something that doesn't meow." Others may have been concerned. (I've heard from the concerned contingent, not from the relieved, but I have no trouble with the idea that both sides exist. Honestly, I don't demand that anyone be interested in everything I have to say, and that includes my cats, machete collection, horror movies, the X-Men, and candy corn.) Even more of you may well have been confused, given how focal cats have traditionally been around here. But I haven't been blogging about my cats.

John Scalzi has just made a lengthy post about the shit female bloggers get that he doesn't get. Go and read it. I'll be honest: after more than a decade on the internet, I find his experiences to be pretty spot-on. I make a controversial comment, I get death threats, comments about my weight, accusations of bitchiness, comments about my weight, offers to "fuck the stupid" out of me, comments about my weight, insults, comments about my weight, and, best of all, people swearing up, down, and sideways that I deserve whatever I get. It's been a few years since I've had a really bad troll problem, but when I had one, it was...

It was bad. It was "Kate monitored my journal and deleted comments before I could see them" bad, with a side order of feeling sick every time I considered getting online. I didn't sleep, I didn't eat, and I was scared all the time. It's invasive, and it's scary. Cracks about my weight aside, I'm not that big, and if someone wanted to fuck me up, they could. Easily. (Is this a motivator for my large and oft-discussed machete collection? Possible! Anybody comes to my house with the intent of doing me a mischief in the woods, they will not be thrilled by the results.)

And I haven't been blogging about my cats recently.

I'll be honest: I understand people being dicks for the sake of being dicks. We're all a little mean when we've had a bad day. My mother used to snap at me, even though she loved me. Sometimes I pick fights with my friends, or snarl at my co-workers. Human nature sometimes trends toward asshole, and no matter how hard we work to control it, it's going to happen. What I don't understand is why being a dick towards a woman on the internet so often turns into a) threats of violence, b) sexual insults, c) threats of sexual violence, or d) comments about perceived attractiveness/weight. Or violence toward the things that woman loves.

I haven't been blogging about my cats recently, because someone has been sending me email, from dummy accounts, threatening to kill my cats. In graphic detail. They know what my cats look like, thanks to the amount of blogging I have done in the past, and they've been able to get really, really specific in what they're going to do. Why? Because I got my cats from a breeder, and not from a shelter, and that means I need to suffer in order to understand the suffering of the cats waiting for adoption. "Bitch," "cunt," and "whore" feature heavily in these emails, which is always a nice seasoning for my rage and terror stew. It's all very gender-specific.

And they're threatening to kill my cats.

So no, I'm not going to talk about them right now; not until this email stops, not until the trolls find something else to chew on. And yes, I realize that making this post may reawaken some of my old trolls (and oh, Great Pumpkin, I hate it so much that I even have to take that into consideration), so I'm going to be watching comments carefully. Anything insulting will be deleted. Anything malicious will result in an immediate banning. I mean that. I am not going to let that shit stand.

We need to stop acting this way toward one another. We need to remember that there are humans on the other side of all those keyboards. We need to be decent human beings, because otherwise, everything is going to fall apart.

And none of this changes the fact that if the fucker who's been telling me what he's going to do to my babies comes anywhere near them, I will probably be going to prison for assault.

Some days I hate being a girl.

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.

My house was broken into yesterday.

I had managed to leave my house keys on the floor next to my bed when I left for work, so I called my mother and arranged for her to pick me up from the train station. The Great Pumpkin was looking out for me; if she hadn't given me a ride, I would have come home alone, less than twenty minutes after I did.

When we reached the house, we saw a razor scooter parked next to the trash cans. "Huh," I said. "I wonder what that's doing there?" But we dismissed it as having been left by one of the neighborhood kids, and kept going.

There was a large Aaron Brothers bag, and a backpack, in the front yard. "That's weird," I said. But we decided it probably belonged to my little sister, who will sometimes put things in odd places while she does other stuff, and we kept going.

Inside, the cats were in a state of high dudgeon—even moreso than normal for a weekday afternoon—and appeared to have expressed their unhappiness by knocking a bunch of stuff over. Mom scolded them amiably while I started for the fridge to get a soda, and saw that Alex's bedroom door was open. His room is one of the only places in the house the cats aren't allowed. I thought "wow, lots of mischief," and went to close it...

...only to find that his bedside table had been cleared onto the bed. And the door to the laundry room was open. And the door connecting the laundry room to the back was open. And the DVD player was gone.

Cue freaking right the fuck out.

Mom searched the house while I got the stuff out of the front yard. The bags proved to contain everything that was missing: the DVD player, Alex's computer (mine was untouched), a bunch of small electronics, a few DVDs. (Ironically, our thief only took Firefly-related material. So we're looking for an asshole Browncoat. Nice!) The Aaron Brothers bag was mine, which explains why my pictures were scattered all over the floor.

After a heart-stopping moment of not being able to find Lilly, we got ourselves calmed mostly down, and Mom went to the hardware store to get new locks while I called the police. An officer came out and took my statement; we walked the perimeter, and found that the hide-a-key (which I didn't know existed until I called Alex) was missing. So that's probably how they got inside.

We think we came home and surprised the thief in the process of going back in for another load. That's why we found all their stuff (and the scooter). Had I come home alone, they would probably have still been there. And I would have walked in on them, without a car to warn that I was coming.

Alex got home and confirmed that all his stuff was there. Mom changed the locks. Victor and Lara came and took me for dinner. The cats got fussed over. And I took a machete to bed.

So...

1. Nothing is missing.
2. In fact, net gain: I have the thief's scooter.
3. We think it was a teenage boy, based on the scooter, the things grabbed, and the fact that none of my girly things were touched.
4. Alex is working from home today, so the house is not empty.
5. The cats are fine.
6. I will be sleeping with a machete for the foreseeable future.

It's an ignite the biosphere kind of day.