So.

Apparently, something is wrong with the contact form, in that somewhere along the line (between it and my PA and me), some email is getting eaten. We don't know how, we don't know why, and most importantly, we don't know how much. We only know this is happening at all because I was able to confirm two instances of "I tried to contact you and it didn't go through." (One was resolved by resending with a different return email address. The other, we're not sure.)

Chris is working on a way to make sure this doesn't happen anymore. For right now, giveaways are going to have to be handled in a two-step authentication process, for which I am sorry: specifically, rather than saying "email me," I'm going to be saying "comment here and then email me immediately, so I can tell you if your email is not received." Inconvenient? Yes. Annoying? Yes. The only way I can continue to do giveaways until this problem is resolved? Sadly, yes.

I am deeply sorry for any inconvenience this has caused, especially if you were someone who didn't get a prize because your email was eaten. (Please do not contact me saying "this happened to me a year ago, give me a book." I will believe you. I just don't have the books, or the postage budget, to do anything about it.)

Whee.

...is currently in France (la la!), and on pretty crappy wireless. All email bounces through her, thanks to The Great Profanity Storm of 2012, which means that some things may have gotten lost. Specifically, the emails from two of our ARC winners have not been received.

Jill, we have yours; if you are one of our other two winners, please re-send your mailing address via the website contact form ASAP.

Cranky blonde is cranky with the world, not with any of you (or with Kate).

There's a trend I've been noticing lately: everything is suddenly everywhere. I think this may have something to do with the emails I receive daily that are literally checklists of every social media site in existence, complete with a handy "be sure to like this here! Be sure to tweet about this here! Be sure to make a witty Tumblr post complete with reaction .gif here! Be sure to..." and I don't know what comes after that, because I have already deleted the email and gone off to interact with something less exhausting. I have enough trouble remembering to promote myself; I can't take on the responsibility of promoting everything I come into contact with.

It feels like the signal to noise ratio is getting skewed; everything is a sea of signal boosts and endorsements and link-backs and that's lovely, if they're things that you support and believe in. I try to post and tweet and yes, Facebook and the rest about things that I care about. But I don't care about everything in the universe. That would be exhausting.

I wonder if we're just all drowning, and thus all afraid of being overlooked. Whatever it is, I admit I'm getting a little tired of being told how to use my social media. "People will be more likely to notice this if you tweet it!" Well...yes. But then they're less likely to notice my awesome Pokemon.

Everything's a trade-off.

I love reviews the way that I love snakes. I am glad that the world is full of them; I enjoy the company of a great many of them; I have been a snake keeper and I studied snakes in school; I do not particularly feel like snuggling up to every snake on the planet, thanks. Many of them have sharp fangs, deadly venom, and little fondness for hugs. While a bitey review won't kill me, I don't feel like hugging them, either. But—and this is important—I am genuinely glad that they exist. The only way to have something universally well-reviewed is to make that thing out of calorie-free vegan zero-cruelty Wonka Fudge that magically changes to taste like whatever it is you love best in all the world, and even then, I bet one person would pan it on the basis of "this has no personal integrity."

Negative and critical reviews are essential. They make people think about what they're consuming. They provide necessary information that a glowing review might skip over in favor of going "yay yay yay" a lot. They matter. Now, that doesn't mean I'm going to link them, because this is my space, and it doesn't mean I'm going to wander into the terrifying depths of the Amazon rabbit hole, where "this book contained the letter 'c'" is considered a legit reason to pan something. I have a vague sense of self-preservation, and while I may be glad those reviews are out there, I'm not going to go seeking them out.

But here is the thing. Many people @-check me on Twitter. "Just finished the new @seananmcguire," or "Wow candy corn @seananmcguire must be thrilled." And this is great, this lets me talk to people and see who's talking about what. I enjoy the closeness of conversation engendered by use of the @ system. Except...

Except some people seem to forget that the people you @-check can actually see what you're saying about them, because you're saying it to them. I've had to stop clicking review links on Twitter, because there are two conventions colliding when someone @-checks me on a negative review: the Twitter social contract, which says that "Thank you!" and other interaction is appropriate, and the writer/reviewer social contract, which says that I will not engage with a negative review in any space. I don't really want to thank people for negative reviews. It seems disingenuous. I also don't want to get flagged as an "attack author" for saying "Well, I'm sorry you felt that way" whenever someone links me to their one-star take down of my latest work. But at the same time, I feel like I was invited to the conversation; after all, including my Twitter handle guarantees that you'll show up in my feed.

I actually spend a lot of time feeling faintly awkward and unsure, because people will @ me the weirdest things. Someone decided to tell me via Twitter that they felt like one of my books had been phoned-in. Um. I'm sorry you feel that way? But I have no place in this conversation. Everyone's feelings about media are valid, period. Everyone has the right to like or dislike things, even problematic things, and not need to defend themselves. But there's a big difference between a negative review, or a conversation to which I am not invited, and walking up to me and announcing "I hate your work." I am not allowed to respond in any substantive way. It's not my place. I don't get to dictate how you feel about a thing. So it winds up feeling attack-y, in a way that a simple bad review does not.

I think it's important to remember that when you @-check a person, you are inviting them to the conversation, and you may consequentially be inviting them to respond. They have been tagged; they are a part of the discussion now. And it's a little unfair to invite them in if you know they're not allowed to join. It hurts.

I am powerless before the terrible intimacy of @.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Jean Gray is still dead.

Once again, people have started asking "Why can't people outside the US buy the e-book edition of X?" (In this case, X = any given work that is unavailable in a specific region. Most often Blackout, since it's new, and "Countdown," since it currently lacks a physical edition, but almost everything has fallen into this category at one point or another.)

The answer is pretty simple.

Basically, when I sign a contract with a publisher, they acquire certain territorial rights. This is distinct from my copyrights, which are always mine and never sold. DAW owns the World rights for Toby and InCryptid. Orbit owns the World English rights for Newsflesh. DAW and Orbit may then sublicense these rights to other publishers in other regions (or territories), which is how you get things like Winterfluch and Feed: Viruszone (German editions of Rosemary and Rue and Feed, respectively).

The pieces I have sold to the Orbit Short Fiction Program ("Apocalypse Scenario #683" and "Countdown") were sold under a contract which, at present, covers only US territorial rights, which means that my publisher can't make those properties available outside the United States right now. They aren't allowed. And buying the rights for every possible market, in every possible region, is not always financially feasible with every work they publish.

It is also not always financially feasible for an author to sell all the rights to their work in every territory to the US publisher. Keeping World rights may mean a lower advance, but when I do retain those rights, I can ultimately earn more for them by selling them directly to foreign publishers. I want you to have and read my books in your preferred format, but I also want to pay my bills, and foreign rights sales enable me to do that reliably.

Orbit is working on making the short fiction pieces available outside the US; if you check the Short Fiction landing page, they note the problem exists, and that they're looking for a solution. Under my most recent contract with them, they now have the right to sell or license English language editions outside the US, which means that you'll hopefully be able to read it soon.

It's mildly annoying that it works this way, just like it sucks when I can't get the British or Australian TV shows I want on the right region format immediately. At the same time, this is how I keep the lights on, and how my publishers keep being able to do what they do.

ETA: This post has been pretty dramatically revised, following some clarification from smarter people than me. So if some of the comments seem to make no sense compared to the content of the entry, that's why. Sorry to confuse!

All right: here's the thing. Discount Armageddon is officially released March 6th. That's the date we've been talking about for months, that's the date you should be able to obtain the book, that's the date when sales begin counting against my first week numbers. Any books which escape into the wild before then count against my overall sales, but do not count for that all-important first week. Also, because I am number-based OCD, any books which escape into the wild before then make me feel sick, cry hysterically, and basically become non-functional with stress. It's THE BEST THING.

As of midnight Monday/the very beginning of Tuesday, Amazon has been shipping copies of Discount Armageddon. Consequentially, Barnes & Noble is doing the same thing. I haven't been saying anything because DAW is trying frantically to fix it, and I didn't want to drive sales to the sites which have chosen to release my book early. (I don't blame B&N for reacting when they saw that the book was on sale; they're a business, after all. But it's not helping my stress level any.) Please, please, do not buy my book early. I know it's hard. I know that the urge to have the shiny thing now is strong within us. I've ordered dolls from Japan and Australia, and DVD sets from Canada and the UK, for just this reason. But those things were legitimately released in the regions where I was ordering them, and Discount Armageddon has not been legitimately released anywhere at all. Please wait until March 6th. Don't punish independent bookstores, and local brick and mortar stores, for some computer's hard-to-fix mistake. Please. I am literally begging you here.

It doesn't help that so much of a book's success is measured by their first week. I've basically thrown up every time I thought about my week one numbers (including just now), because these early sales could mean the difference between a series and an accidental duology. It's unlikely—DAW is very loyal, and they stand by me—but it could happen, and I am very much worst-case-scenario girl when I'm this flipped out. So please. Do not buy early. Wait until March 6th.

And then there are the ebooks.

Both Amazon and B&N have put the physical edition of Discount Armageddon on sale, but are still holding the electronic edition for the actual release date. People who receive their physical books early are reaping the benefits of a fortuitous, author-breaking error. People who have to wait for their electronic books are not being denied anything; they're doing what was supposed to happen in the first place. This has not stopped the exciting emails from rolling in. They mostly stopped after the first day, but on that first day, I was called...

( A lot of bad things are behind this cut. If you don't want to see, just go with 'I was called a lot of bad things.'Collapse )

See, apparently, the ebooks are being withheld because I, personally, am trying to force everyone to buy my preferred format (physical). So sexual threats and relentless abuse are totally acceptable, because it just shows me the error of my ways.

I have nothing to do with the books being available early. I wish they weren't.

I have no control over whether the electronic editions are available early. I'm glad they're not, but it's not because I'm a greedy bitch; it's because I don't want any editions available early.

I am literally sick with stress, and this is not in any way helping. Please, don't buy my books before their actual release date. Please, don't place an order with a site which is offering my books before their actual release date. Please, don't call me horrible names because you can't have what you want the second that you want it.

Please.

(Because it must be said...comment amnesty. I'm already crying hard enough.)

A good chunk of the internet is blacked out today to protest SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect IP). If you have somehow managed to miss this, you must not visit any news or geek-culture blogs, read very many web comics, use Google or the Firefox homepage, or access Wikipedia. (Also, if you have somehow managed to miss this because you don't use the internet for any of the things I've cited above, I am a little bit afraid of you. What do you use the internet for? How did you even find this page? Are you a robot?)

How has the blackout impacted me? This is my morning routine:

1. Get up, get ready for work.
2. Internet! FOREVER! Okay, for about fifteen minutes. First up, web comics.
3. Second, toy collecting sites.
4. Thirdly, io9 and Television Without Pity.
5. Wikipedia, to both check facts about things I'm writing (do parrots eat meat?) and to confirm which shows I follow will have new episodes tonight (for some reason I trust Wikipedia more than I trust the TV Guide site).

This is my morning routine after SOPA:

1. Get up, get ready for work. Because everything else is blocked, removed, or under attack.

This is a broad-strokes "protection of copyright" that actually goes so far above and beyond the call of duty that it's like getting a pack of trained attack basilisks to keep those damn kids off your lawn. Basilisk crap is going to wind up getting everywhere, but who cares? No more kids on the lawn!

Now, I am a creator of things, and I appreciate and enjoy making money off of them. It enables me to do silly little things like keeping the power on and feeding the cats. I appreciate and enjoy it even more when people don't steal from me. But you know what doesn't steal from me? Book reviews. But SOPA could make it a crime to post book covers or quote inside text, something my favorite book reviewers often do. Hell, SOPA could make it a crime for me to maintain my own website, since I use art that is technically under copyright to either my publishers or the original cover artists, and if someone wanted to be a real dick, they could report me for posting pieces of my own books.

You know what else doesn't steal from me? Fanfic. The legal arguments about fanfic and fan art are huge and complicated and a matter for another day, but I can honestly say that I have received email from people saying "I encountered this piece of fic about your work and so I read the originals." I haven't received email saying "I encountered this piece of fic about your work and it was so bad that now I am stealing all your shit forever." Whatever impact fan works may have on my sales, and whatever the legality behind transformative fan work, it isn't stealing from me. It isn't internet piracy. But under SOPA, you could totally rat out fanfic archives and most of DeviantArt for violating copyrights, and watch the pretty, pretty fires as they burned.

Piracy pisses me off. I don't feel that I have wasted my time when I got upset about piracy and copyright. But there is such a huge difference between "I will now protect you from piracy" and what these bills will do that isn't even funny. Don't believe me? I mean, why should you? I am, after all, not a lawyer or anything like that. But I do have access to the internet, and to the smart people it currently contains, the ones I am allowed to communicate with freely and without fear of being slapped for violating a law that seems a bit too broadly written.

John Murphy would like to talk to you about SOPA. Better yet, he does it very intelligently and coherently, with good, clean information.

Still not convinced? The folks at reddit have actually dissected the text of SOPA, and point out some terrifying potential abuses. If you want to get your legal language on, this is the place to go.

And the ever-fabulous and profane Chuck Wendig has also pointed out some of the major issues with these anti-piracy measures. Like me, he's approaching it from a writer's perspective. He just says "fuck" more.

You know what? Fuck SOPA. Fuck PIPA. Fuck the idiots who think that they can control the internet. And fuck them twice for forcing today's internet blackout, because I still don't know whether parrots eat meat.

Fuckers.

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!

I would like to begin by noting that this is not a post about the ethics, morals, or legalities of creating free torrent files of material which does not belong to you. I've talked about this in the past, repeatedly and at length, and while I'll doubtless talk about it again in the future, that's not today's target.

Instead, I want to talk about illegal resales.

Yesterday afternoon, some bold soul wandering the internet jungles encountered a site that looked too good to be true: a private seller offering huge numbers of ebooks, some by extremely popular authors, for two dollars each, or ten for ten. That's, like, amazing! That's incredible! And best of all, that's totally against the law! This individual told a few authors, who told a few more, who told a few more, and then the wrath of the internet came down upon that seller's head, since people don't take kindly to being stolen from. The sales page was taken down. The seller changed the name on her twitter. All done, right?

Not quite.

First, there's the matter of the seller herself. She's not going to be named, because I don't play that kind of game, but I think it's important to note that she justified her actions by saying that she was trying to make money to pay for her kidney transplant medications. This? Is a sad story. It may even be a true story. It's also the kind of thing that's sort of calculated to make people back off and not want to be the bad guy by yelling at the woman who's just trying to afford her drugs, so she doesn't die. To this I say...

I am so very, very sorry that people are ill. I hate that we live in a country without medical care for everyone. It's a huge, scary, horrible issue. But I can't sit back and let people profit off my work because they're sick. There are a lot of sick people, and sometimes, I'm one of them. If I said "oh, it's okay because you're sick," I'd wind up in a world of trouble. And Alice would be dead, since only being paid for my work enabled me to pay for her extremely expensive, extremely unexpected vet bill last year.

Second, I can almost understand people who put things up for free. Yes, they're stealing, and no, I don't condone it, but they're not trying to profit off someone else's property. They're not taking cookies out of the back of a bakery and selling them for half-price at a food truck down the street, they're giving out cookies for free. One of the big "you're over-simplifying, you're not seeing the big picture" arguments in the whole book piracy discussion is "not every download is a sale." Well, if someone is selling my books, independent of my publisher, every download is a sale, and it's a sale I'm not getting paid for.

People like getting things for less money. It's the natural way of mankind. It's why we clip coupons, shop at Ross, and wear last year's sweaters. But there's legitimate discounting, and there's stealing, and sadly, it can be hard to tell them apart.

Finally, and most troubling to me, this represents a snapshot of the biggest problem I see coming down the pike, as ebooks become a bigger and bigger percentage of the books sold: there is no ebook secondary market.

I love used bookstores. I exist because of used bookstores. In the last month, I have been to three Half-Price Books, two independent used bookstores, and a library book sale. When I was a kid, eighty percent of my books came from these places. Without the secondary market, I wouldn't have been able to read the way I did, and I would have grown up to be someone very different. I am worried about the smart, poor kids of today, and I can easily see more and more sites like this cropping up as people try to "resell" things that can't actually be resold.

I don't know that there's a solution. I'm worried, and I'm scared for what comes next. But this pirate site, at least, came down.

Please, remember that there's no secondary ebook market, and that if a price seems too good to be true, unless it's a promotion offered directly by a publisher...

...it probably isn't legit.

ETA: Please stop trying to make this a discussion about piracy. As noted above, that is not this post. We are treading old ground, and I do not have the energy or time to moderate this conversation right now.

So people have been asking a lot lately "Why can't people outside the US buy the e-book edition of X?" (In this case, X = any given work that is unavailable in a specific region. Most often "Countdown," since it lacks a physical edition, but almost everything has fallen into this category at one point or another.)

The answer, sadly, is simple, and not something that's easy to fix. Basically, when I sign a contract with a publisher, they acquire certain territorial rights. DAW owns the US distribution rights for Toby and InCryptid. Orbit owns the US and UK distribution rights for Newsflesh. Other publishers own my distribution rights in other regions. The pieces I have sold to the Orbit Short Fiction Program ("Apocalypse Scenario #683" and "Countdown") were sold under a contract which, at present, covers only US territorial rights. Meaning that my publisher can't make those properties available outside the United States. They aren't allowed. And buying the rights for every possible market, in every possible region, would make the work fiscally unsustainable for them.

Part of this is tied to the intrinsic value of a property. Say, for example, that we want to sell the InCryptid books to a UK publisher, for a UK edition. This would make the physical books cheaper for UK customers, since they wouldn't need to pay import costs. This would mean I got paid (foreign rights sales are a good chunk of my income in a given year, since it's a way to keep a book that's already been sold paying my electric bill). But if we tell a UK publisher "oh, and by the way, we sold the ebook rights to that series to someone else," that publisher isn't going to buy the series. There's too much tied up in ebooks right now for that to be fiscally wise of a publisher.

Orbit is working on making the short fiction pieces available outside the US; if you check the Short Fiction landing page, they note the problem exists, and that they're looking for a solution. But the solution is never going to be "sell global ebook rights to the US publisher," because if authors did that, the foreign rights market would collapse. Books would remain import-expensive, non-English readers would lose a lot of diversity, and my cats would get very hungry.

It sucks that it works this way, just like it sucks when I can't get the British or Australian TV shows I want on the right region format immediately. It may change someday. But for right now, this is why things are the way they are.

So it turns out that even being deathly ill doesn't stop the world from continuing to produce awesome things, and that's what we're talking about right now. Specifically, we're talking about the part where Orbit has created an absolutely stunning book trailer for the Newsflesh series—and if you watch to the very end, you might catch a sneak peek at the cover for Blackout! Watch the video, spread links, tell your friends. Let's go VIRAL.

Seriously, this is my first book trailer, and if I weren't so damn sick, I'd be jumping around and screaming. Please, please, check it out, spread it around, and see if we can't convince my publisher that I should always get these. Because they're awesome.

Once you've seen the trailer, why not gussy up your computer with a little bit of home-brewed awesome in the form of icons and wallpapers from the Mira Grant website, created by the ever-fabulous Miss Tara? The site itself is about to get some pretty massive updates (they were planned for this week, and then I slept for two days), but the icons and wallpapers are fresh and sweet and waiting for you right now.

Not quite the same, but semi-related, you can read my thoughts on California's recent unseasonable rains and how they relate to writing speculative fiction at Larissa's Bookish Life, where a guest blog I wrote for her has been posted. It's not as visually striking as the first two items on our list, but hey, I managed to make it vaguely applicable, right?

Oh, and hey, the Blog Critics include Feed in an article on dystopias, alongside 1984 and The Hunger Games. I directed a stage production of 1984 in high school. Seeing my book in a graphic with that book is like...whoa. I win the universe.

That's all for now. I'm going back to bed.

Okay, so. A few things...

1. I am still assembling the T-shirt spreadsheet. I had intended to finish last night, but then my home internet decided to emulate the mighty banana slug and travel at a speed of approximately three miles per hour, making navigating LJ borderline impossible. So if you haven't heard back from me, you do not yet need to worry. I will post one more time when the spreadsheet is done, saying "if you haven't heard back from me, worry." But if you followed the instructions (name, size, color, email address on the original post) or contacted me and asked politely for an exception, you should be fine.

2. I just found out that apparently, my drummer on Wicked Girls was never paid. I thought he'd been paid out of the money I gave my producer, but no, that all went to mixing. Given the math of albums, this is totally believable, but marginally, you know, inconvenient. So if you don't yet have a copy of Wicked Girls, or wanted to get one for a friend, now would be an awesome time to do so, as I now have an unexpected recording-related bill to pay.

3. I have a convention this weekend, and word counts to make, and I'm trying to post a piece of Newsflesh-related short fiction every day during the countdown to Deadline. So in the interests of maintaining my own sanity, I'm declaring amnesty from my normal "answer all comments" blog policy where those posts are concerned. I'll try to answer direct questions and the like, but I won't answer every expression of "yay, more story." I'll read and appreciate them all, I just need to use my time in other ways right this second. :)

4. My phone is dead. Not just a little dead; dead-dead, the great death from which there is no returning. So I'm a little grumpy, and only accessible via electronic channels right now. Some of which don't work from home, where the internet is toast. Did I mention that this was the best week ever?

5. There is no number five. I just didn't want to end the list on an even number.

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

Ahem. Anyway...

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

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

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

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

What's new with you?

Hello, world! It's the Thursday before Wondercon, and I'm trying to take care of all the little rags and tags of reality that build up over the course of a week like cat hair on velvet pants. So anyway...

1. The fight is still raging in the BSC Review tournament! This round closes Sunday morning, at which point, eight books will be reduced to four, and those four will duke it out for the right to do to the bracket semi-finals. Cat and I both still have horses in this race, so please, help keep Toby swinging!

2. Speaking of Cat, her new book, Deathless, came out this week. Hooray for book release! There's a lot of neat free stuff to have and enjoy and be amazed by; my darling talkstowolves has made a big post collecting it all into one place. I even drew a Pretty Little Dead Ghoul for the occasion. Feel the love!

3. My new phone is lovely, and allows me to do exciting things like "take pictures of my cats" and "access Twitter from the train." It also allows me to answer email when I'm not at home, which is going to be a huge, huge relief as time goes on. It's already taken some of the weight off, since I've been able to respond to things while in transit.

4. Thomas and Alice have started working against me. Thomas jumped onto the back of my knees at four o'clock this morning, jarring me INSTANTLY AWAKE, at which point Alice began pushing their ceramic food dishes back and forth in the feeding tray. Scrape. Scrape. Scraaaaaape. So yes, I got up, and I fed the cats. I am so doomed.

5. The full-length trailer for the new season of Doctor Who has been released, and is so intensely awesome as to cause me to sit, weak-kneed and gaping at my monitor, for several minutes before hitting "play" again. I remain overjoyed and giggly over the fact that this show, my show, is back.

6. Also, there's a new My Little Pony cartoon that doesn't suck. I clearly control the universe. You can place your requests with Kate, who will only allow me to fulfill the ones that don't involve diseases or amphibians.

7. I'm getting ready to do a massive post office run, so I am once again taking orders for "Wicked Girls" posters. According to my files, if it's been paid for, it's been sent out; please email me if you don't have yours. Comment either here or on the original post if you'd like to request a poster, and we'll coordinate.

8. I will be mostly offline this weekend, as I will be attending Wondercon. I'll have my awesome new phone with me, but let's face it, when given a choice between answering email and staring raptly at James Gunn, James Gunn wins without a contest. I'll definitely Tweet my location at various points throughout the weekend, and if you find me, you could win a prize. Or not. I may be out of prizes.

9. Zombies are still love.

10. I get to see Amy this weekend (Mebberson, not McNally)! And Kaja! And Phil! And there will be cupcakes, and hugging, and artwork, and Mom will probably wear her chicken hat, and I'm so excited!!!!!

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

1. If you want to reach me, please, email. Not Facebook messenger; not LJ messenger; email. If you don't have my email address, the "contact" form on my website is extremely easy to find, I promise. I get those messages.

2. That being said, I am not the world's fastest email correspondent. I do my best, I really do, but I have a) email from my day job, b) my personal mail, c) my business mail, d) Mira Grant's mail, and e) all my other mail to deal with. Expect at least a seventy-two hour delay on anything that's not urgent.

3. Unless you're my agent, my publisher, or my boss, I decide what's urgent when it's in my inbox.

I'm as slow as I am because, in addition to all the things above, I'm trying to write three books, keep up with the comments on this blog, make new entries on this blog, update my website, and two or three dozen other things at any given time. The only way I could answer every email I receive in a swift and satisfying way is if I stopped doing anything else. My publishers would not be okay with this decision. Honestly, neither would I, as I think my head would explode.

So please, if I am not swift in answering your email, be patient. I understand wanting a reply now now now—I do it too; I'm doing it right now, waiting for answers on some really cool website graphic possibilities—but I just can't. Not if you want me to stay on top of everything else.

Thanks for understanding.

So far this morning, I have deleted seven spam comments, and blocked the commenters from posting in my journal again. I have also deleted five spam emails submitted through my website contact form (which proves, I think, that we're training spambots to pass Turing Tests, since you have to prove humanity before my website lets you email me).

I read a web comic called Skin Horse, and pretty much daily, the comment section is kudzu'd by spammers, until one of the admins comes along and deletes the offers of cheap drugs, hand bags, imported wives, and free money from a bank in a country that doesn't exist. So far as I know, none of the readers of Skin Horse really want any of these things.

My message boards are in a continual state of "behind" when it comes to approving users, because we have to work so hard to not approve spammers.

And through it all...I don't know anyone who has ever purchased something from a spammer. Most people are so anti-spam that they reject perfectly legitimate purchases, because they've decided that they're "spammy." (This did not happen to me, thankfully, but a friend of mine was told, on their own journal, "I will never buy your books, because you're SO SPAMMY about them." Said friend pretty much confined talk of books to that journal. The journal is gone now. Because that's how much we fear being slammed for spam.) All spam seems to do is waste our time and make us paranoid about clicking things. It's like the TSA of shit you encounter on the Internet.

I do not want .jpgs and spam. I do not want them, Sam I Am.

So the discussion on my latest book piracy post is fascinating, and I fully intend to answer comments. However, right now, I'm not feeling terribly awesome, so I'm going to take some cold medication and go lay down. I just wanted to address a few high-level points first. Forgive the brevity, I really feel like crap.

Point the First: "Not everyone who illegally downloads your book would have bought it, so you shouldn't act like they would have."

True! That being said, I know enough people who have illegally downloaded books and then bought them, or have told me to my face (or via email) that they were planning to buy the book, only then got it for free, that I feel some consideration of the number of illegal copies is warranted. Just going off what I do know, I tend to assume about one person in ten represents a "lost sale." This accounts for new readers only, not people downloading copies of books they already own.

Point the Second: Downloading copies of books you already own is a morally gray area.

True. I completely understand and sympathize with people who download virtual copies of books they already own. Unfortunately, a) I don't own the e-book rights to my books right now, and thus can't say "sure, have a PDF with proof of purchase," and b) the methods for getting those downloads are non-legal. There's not a private literary speakeasy where you have to send in a photo of yourself with your legal physical copy before you get the download link. And so while I can understand the moral ambiguity of it all, I can't endorse the practice.

Point the Third: It's not piracy, it's copyright infringement.

Okay, true. For precision of language, I should call it copyright infringement. But the people who sometimes post intentionally inflammatory things on message boards aren't actually trolls, they're just being mean. In some cases, the prevailing language of the land is going to win out over precision. I apologize for any confusion.

Point the Fourth: "Does this mean you don't like me because I initially read your book in a sub-legal format?"

Did you buy the book? I mean, really, that's where my concern is here: In whether I can feed the cats. I first discovered the X-Men because my friend Lucy had an older brother who wasn't careful with his comics, and I didn't pay for those, either. As I said above, I can't condone illegal downloading, but once you've paid for the material, I lose all personal animosity.

Point the Fifth: Books and music aren't the same.

Most the research on illegal downloads has been in the music arena, and the numbers aren't the same. According to iTunes, the single song I have listened to the most often is the cover of "Livin' La Vida Loca" by Spork, which I have listened to 342 times. The single book I have read the most often is IT, by Stephen King, which I have read, if guessing generously, eighty times in the last twenty years. Many people don't re-read, or do so only sparingly. So saying that illegal downloads increase sales when you're only looking at music is like saying that breeding mice increases the elephant population.

Point the Sixth: Cory Doctorow does it.

Cory Doctorow is also recognized by my spellchecker, which doesn't recognize my name. He chose to distribute over the Internet, and it worked out awesomely for him. He's also doing Internet-savvy fiction, with a keen edge of interest for the online crowd. I write urban fantasies about women with silly names. We don't have the same target audience; it's mice and elephants again.

I'll come back and participate in the discussion more one on one later. Now? DayQuil and sleep.

I am about to preach to the choir, because I have no idea what else to do, and frankly, I am at a loss for other options.

I am a professional author. I have worked a very long time to reach a place in my life where I could make that statement and not feel like a fake. I have written books; publishers have judged them commercially viable and worthy of publication; my books can thus be purchased from bookstores and online retailers everywhere. Please note the word "purchased." My books, which cost me time and sanity, and cost my publisher time and money, can be purchased from bookstores and online retailers everywhere.

Or, if you'd prefer, they can be illegally downloaded from the Internet. Mind you, this will eventually lead to my being unable to justify the time it takes me to write them, since an author who cannot make a living through writing must make a living through other means. My cats don't understand "Mommy can't feed you because people don't believe she should be compensated for her work." They also don't understand "People say they like the things I write, but they'd rather steal them than make sure I can keep writing."

To be honest, I don't understand it either.

"See! Piracy is a serious problem." —Penny Arcade.

When I first started publishing, I had no real clue how big the book piracy problem was becoming (and it's continued to grow since then; the number of available torrents increases every day). I was honestly stunned when I got the first Google alert notifying me of an illegal download of Rosemary and Rue. Now, it's a rare day—and for "rare" read "non-existent," now that I have four books in print—that doesn't come with at least one torrent notification. Normally, it's more like four or five, and sometimes more, when some new site discovers my work and gets excited about the possibility of stealing it. Yes, stealing it.

Look: when you calculate the average author's royalties on a mass-market paperback, it comes to approximately fifty cents per copy. Let's assume I got paid $5,000 for Rosemary and Rue. I didn't just pull that figure out of my ass—that's the standard first advance for a genre novel, although very few people will get that exact number. Still, it's nice and round. Now, part of the standard publishing model says that I won't get any additional money for the book until it has managed to earn back the advance, which is done solely from the percentage of the cover price that "belongs" to me. So an author with a $5,000 advance must sell ten thousand copies of their book before they "earn out" and start making additional money. Authors who regularly fail to "earn out" will find themselves with decreasing advances, until the day that the number hits zero, and the party is over.

"Internet piracy isn't that big a deal," people say. "It can't hurt your sales that badly." Oh, really? Well, if I get one notification of an illegal torrent per day...let's assume that each torrent is downloaded three times at most. Okay? One torrent per day is 365 torrents per year, or 1,095 illegal downloads per book per year. This is a conservative estimate of downloads; most torrents will be downloaded more like ten times each. Gosh, I feel popular now! Or maybe violated, it's hard to say.

Returning to our $5,000 advance, I must sell—actually sell, from actual stores—10,000 books before my publisher realizes a profit and says "Yeah, okay, let's keep buying your stuff." Let's assume, this time optimistically, that all 1,095 people who illegally downloaded my book were originally planning to buy it new, before they found this awesome new way to save money and get the book magically delivered to their computer. So unless my book was guaranteed to appeal to 11,095 people, I may have just dipped below the magical 10,000 person mark. Goodie for me.

"Dear person online begging someone to upload an illegal copy of my book because you LOVE me SO MUCH: you don't love me. You love stealing." —Ally Carter, author of Heist Society.

I made the following statement in a relatively recent post:

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

Several people promptly told me that I was wrong, and that authors who really want to continue their series can do so whether they have a publisher or not. My addiction to professional editing services and distribution is clearly a personal failing, and I should embrace this brave new world of working forty hours a week to pay for cat food, and then going home and working forty hours a week to Stick It To The Man by continuing my canceled series. Sadly, this isn't going to work. When I'm writing books for money, I go through a rigorous internal editing and proofreading process before anyone sees my work. When not writing books for money, I write for my own pleasure, and if there are a few typos or logical failings, whatever. That doesn't pay my bills.

I love my books. I love my art. If I were only in it for the money, I would be doing something else for a living, like selling my kidneys. But at the end of the day, if a series can't pay, I can't afford the hundreds of hours required to write the average book. It's just not feasible. Note the number of unpublished "first in series" books I have sitting around. Until they sell, I can't afford to write the sequels. No matter how much I want to.

"People will spend fifteen bucks on an ironic shirt." —Penny Arcade.

A paperback book costs ten dollars, retail, and less if bought at a discount or with a coupon. This is about the same as a ticket to the movies. Even if you read fast, it will probably take you a minimum of three hours to finish said paperback, and then it's yours to keep. The movie is over faster, and also not yours at the end of the evening. (This is not to say that people don't pirate movies, and that said piracy isn't a huge concern. They do, and it is. But that isn't my department, as yet. Believe me, I'll start researching film piracy the day that Feed is optioned for the big screen.) People are constantly willing to pay for things that are more transitory than books, yet seem to blank out when asked why stealing books is still theft.

"I'll buy it later." Really? "I just want to see if I like it." Okay, how about you download the free chapters from the author's website, and then go to a bookstore? "I want to see if the author has improved since the last one." See above. "I disagree with the author's moral or ethical stance, so I'm voting with my dollars." Okay. You're also voting through theft. Why not get the book from a library or support your local used bookstore instead? It would be a lot less sketchy.

I know plenty of people who would never dream of walking into my house and stealing a book off my shelf, but have talked themselves around to the point where downloading books illegally is just not the same thing, not the same thing at all. It's the same thing. Don't believe me? Ask Paul Cornell (taken from Twitter):

"Just saw download site with 2356 illegal downloads of Knight and Squire. You have no idea how angry that makes me. Bloody thieves."
"Thanks everyone who's said they're buying it. No thanks to: 'well, if it was legally downloadable...' Like they're forced to steal it."
"Just heard: average number of illegal downloads = four times legal sales. That's why your favorite title got canceled. No margin left."

The margin is what makes it profitable for publishers to keep publishing. The margin keeps their lights on, and keeps the creators receiving royalty checks, and now we're back to feeding my cats, which is a topic I think about a great deal. The cats don't give me a choice.

I leave you with this grim thought. Yesterday, I was sitting around, minding my own business, when a friend of mine (name redacted as it was a private conversation) messaged me with:

"Somebody went to the trouble to photocopy all of [upcoming, not yet released book] and put it up online."

This sort of thing tightens control over ARCs, which reduces their distribution to book bloggers, which makes it harder for you to find well-informed early reviews. It potentially hurts my friend's sales, which may result, long-term, in her being dropped from her publisher, which means no more books for her fans. So who does Internet piracy hurt?

It hurts you.

People of the Internet, please, please, please, when you use my website contact form to get in touch with me, please include an address so I can respond to you? Sending me messages with blank "from" lines just means...

a) I can't answer, even if you ask direct questions, and
b) I get really frustrated, because I at least try to answer all my mail.

So please, please provide me with an email address so I can answer you. It makes things a lot more stressy when you don't.

Thanks.

So here's the thing: I don't want to be lectured about my reliance on thumb drive technology. I've gone over the pros and cons with a dozen people, and for the most part, my methodology is very safe. I perform frequent backups of the whole drive, as well as doing local file backups and mailing files to off-site readers. I avoid contact with magnets and with other things that seem likely to do me a mischief in the woods. I am a careful person. Internet storage systems don't work for me, for a lot of reasons, and as long as I have a day job, I need to be able to transport my work with me, without being tied to a specific system or reliant on a stable Internet connection.

With all that said, this has been my weekend:

Friday night, I got home, watched an episode of The West Wing, and did my basic household chores. Then I sat down to get some work done. This began with the insertion of my thumb drive into the USB port. "The format of Drive G is not recognized. Format Drive G?"

Uh, no. I removed the drive, blew on it, and tried it in a different port. Same result. I rebooted. Same result. I pulled out my netbook, booted it up, and tried again. Same result. I called Rey in tightly controlled hysterics. He came over, and—after spending about an hour and a half fighting—took my thumb drive away. He's supposed to come back tonight to finish file recovery. I've done basically no work this weekend, but I've only cried myself to sleep once, so that's something, right? Right?!

Oh, Great Pumpkin, I need a drink.

In happier news, there are still pendants created from A Local Habitation available from Chimera Fancies. Not only are these amazing pieces of unique, wearable art, but there are three extra-special pendants currently up for small-scale auction, here:

1. Born to Neverland.
2. Save Faerie.
3. Tybalt's Magic.

These are just incredible. Plus I got to write BPAL-style bumper text for them, which was, like, super-fun, and I will probably be unable to resist doing in the future. I am such a geek. Anyway, pretty shinies to admire and desire and obtain, and you should totally take a look. I love Mia's work so.

More contests next week, more review roundups, and hopefully, more sanity, once I have my files back. I have not had a good weekend.

Today was my signing event at the Pleasant Hill Borders. I woke bright and early (too bright, and too early; after waking up at 6:20 AM, I went back to bed for another hour and a half), walked to the grocery store for a fresh fruit breakfast, and came back to the house to shower and watch The West Wing while I prepared myself for the day ahead. Wonder of wonders, Mom wasn't just on time, she was early, and we got on the road with time to spare.

After stopping at a yard sale en route, we reached the Borders, parked, hit the Farmer's Market for several pounds of cherries, and went into the bookstore, where I had a small table dedicated to my use, thoughtfully outfitted with some Sharpies and a few bottles of water. People showed up. I signed things. We chatted. It was very nice, although the sheer size of the stack of books made me feel rather like I was letting down the team, and should have been sneaking ninja-like around the store, sliding paperbacks into purses and making people pay to avoid shoplifting fines.

(One fascinating facet of being a "visiting author" in a bookstore: no one wants to meet your eye, for fear that they'll be forced by guilt to buy your book. Much like a Venus flytrap, I had to adopt a strategy of "ignore them until they're too close to escape." Also, once the bookstore employees stop looking you in the face, it's time to leave.)

We eventually took a break for lunch and errands, running to the Best Buy for a new camera* and then to the Texas BBQ for tasty, tasty lunch. I had BBQ chicken, and we split a blackberry cobbler, to which I can only say HOLY CRAP NOM. After that, it was back to the bookstore for a pleasant hour of reading all their comic books while not actually signing anything. Oh, well.

And then the fun started.

See, when we left the bookstore, the car wouldn't start. Several people ignored Mom's pleas for a jump, leading her to call a friend to come jump us. The battery was essentially a zombie at this point, obeying our commands only so long as we didn't feed it salt...so it was off to Pep Boys to buy a battery. Um, yay? I was so tired I was yawning the whole time, and read several old Women's World magazines, which taught me that a) desserts are good, but b) I shouldn't eat them ever, or I'll be fat and no one will love me, and c) men like sex, presumably after a good dessert that I'm not allowed to eat. Again, um, yay?

Having purchased a new battery, Mom drove me to the comic book store, and I salved my wounded soul with graphic novels. Which I will now read. So if you're wondering where I am? I'm in the back of my house, reading the new X-Babies.

Snikt.

(*Yes, this means kitty pictures soon. You're welcome.)

Hey, gang—

My webmaster's email address appears to have been compromised, and is sending out the classic "oh no I have been mugged and I'm trapped in a foreign country, send money and flying monkeys and the A-Team" email to everyone in his address book. This is not a real message. He doesn't need help, or flying monkeys, although he might welcome the A-Team; he's still here in California, and I'll make sure he knows about the situation as soon as he wakes up.

For right now, don't panic, and don't click anything he sends you.

Well, it's finally started: Rosemary and Rue is now showing up, with some regularity, on the various pirate sites. (No, I won't link to them, and no, those torrents don't stay up for very long; as soon as I find out about them, I report them to my publisher, who has them taken down.) I find this somewhat upsetting. Not because I hate the Internet. Not because I think that books should only be available to the wealthy. But because, at the end of the day, pirated books are really, really bad for my career.

Multiple studies have been done on the people who pirate music, and they've found that, on average, people who pirate buy more music than people who don't. That makes sense, if you stop and think about it, because music has a very high replay value. I discovered one of my favorite bands, We're About 9, when my friend Merav gave me a mix tape—the oldest form of music piracy—with one of their songs on it: I've since purchased several albums, including the one with that original song. I don't tend to listen to the full albums very often, but every time the individual tracks come up in my iTunes shuffle, I remember that I want to buy more music by these authors. It's music piracy as a form of private radio, and most people—not all, but most—understand that if you want to keep hearing things you like on the radio, you need to support the artists.

Just about everyone I know has at least a few pirated songs. I recently acquired a pirated copy of Freddy's Greatest Hits, a parody album featuring none other than Freddy Kreuger himself. It's been out of print for twenty years. I do not feel any shame about listening to this rare treasure from the horror graveyard...although I'll definitely buy the actual album, if I ever find it.

Book piracy is different, because the way people interact with the media is so different. According to my iPod, I've listened to the Glee cover of "Don't Stop Believing" over two hundred times. Two hundred times. Of course I paid for it. That song is part of the soundtrack of my life now. Looking at my bookshelves, the single book I've probably read and re-read the most times is Stephen King's IT, where I lost track at eighty. I'm a dedicated re-reader. I re-read IT at least once a year, and frequently more often than that. And I'm only up to eighty. Many people don't re-read the way I do, and very few people re-read immediately. So if I download a torrent of the new Ikeamancer novel, I'm pretty unlikely to run right out and buy myself a copy...and if I want to re-read the book six months later, I may just dig the file out of my hard drive, because it's there. Never underestimate the power of instant gratification.

Past experience tells me that this is the point where someone says "Does that mean you hate libraries/people who loan their books to friends/used book stores?", and the answer to all these things is the same: No. In all of these cases, someone has bought the book. In the case of libraries, the number of copies purchased by a given branch is determined by the number of people who request the book, or check it out once it's in the system. Yes, ten or twenty people may get to read a single copy, but with a pirated book, that number is a lot higher, and that initial sale may not have happened. If I loan a book to a friend, the book comes with a high recommendation ("Here, read this"), and even if my friend doesn't buy their own copy, we're looking at one sale for two people, not one sale (or one OCR of a library copy) for some unlimited number. Even used bookstores are limited by the size of the print run, since they can't get more copies than were initially sold, and are thus a vital part of building the readership for ongoing series. They're part of the natural ecosystem.

People complain about how slow some publishers are to adapt the e-book format, but honestly, the concerns over piracy are a really, really big deal, just because of the impact it can have on a book's overall sales—especially for a beginning author. No, I'm not saying that best-selling authors somehow "deserve" to be pirated, but piracy is likely to be a much smaller overall part of the book's footprint. Dan Brown is not going to be told not to write another sequel to The DaVinci Code over piracy. The author of the Ikeamancer books...might.

Publishing is changing. E-books are, and will continue to be, a big part of that. But unless people remember that book piracy isn't exactly the same as music piracy (and hence culturally viewed as "try before you buy," but almost always leading to that eventual purchase), they'll also continue to be a problem.

The Internet and Girls Gone Wild have more in common than you may think. They both encourage nudity. They both involve a lot of audio-visual equipment (and a lot of folks who once belonged to their high school A/V Clubs, myself included). They both look like fun, fun, fun until your daddy takes the T-Bird away, especially when you're half-drunk and it's spring break and nobody's telling you what to do you're not the boss of me. And, of course, both of them are a lot more public than you try to convince yourself when you wake up the next morning. You could walk into your living room one morning to discover that your kid sister has discovered your DVD hiding space, and be greeted with "Is that you/your girlfriend/Mom?" before you've even had a cup of coffee. But while DVDs get accidentally thrown in the microwave and no one's really rushing out to watch Girls Gone Wild: 1994, there's one big thing we all sometimes forget about the Internet.

The Internet is forever. You can't shove it in the microwave. Even if you take down a post, website, or poorly-considered picture, the odds are good that someone, somewhere, may have it in their cache...and may decide to re-post it, just because they can. "Because I can" is a totally valid reason for doing almost anything on the Internet. This is where the wild things are. The wild things have cookies. The wild things also have your really horrible fifth grade school photo, and they'd love an excuse to put it up.

The Internet is not as private as you think it is. I recently read a thread wherein an agent (not mine) said that she had decided not to work with someone because she saw a blog post they'd made, complaining about agency response times and being fairly unpleasant about it. Without saying anything about whether the response times were out of line—largely because I really don't know—I will say that I understand where the agent was coming from: I wouldn't want to enter into a professional relationship with someone whose response to irritation was to identify me by name while complaining loudly. It wouldn't be fun for either one of us. The agent went on to say that she had been notified of this post by a Google spider (magical Google spiders do that sort of thing), and that she later discovered that the blog post was, in fact, locked. Several people promptly started castigating her for being "unprofessional." Some even implied that she had broken into this person's account, or otherwise violated her privacy. Which, well...not so much.

If there was a privacy violation in this instance, it was on the part of the blogging site where the original entry was made—the blogging site that did not lock itself against Google spiders. (Now, I'm not very technical; it could be that the site can't be locked against spiders. If that's the case, I still say the blogging site was at fault, because they probably didn't include "locking a post will not prevent it being mined by search engines" in their privacy setting descriptions.) If there was a judgment error, it was on the part of the person who said "I'm going to use my blog to slam on someone I'm hoping to work with by name, rather than either being really, really vague, or by calling my best friend and ranting until I feel calm." Clicking on an email in your inbox? Not a privacy violation. Reading what it says? Also not a privacy violation. And sadly, the "unsee" button has yet to be invented for the human brain.

The Internet is never private. In the sixteen-plus years that I've been online, I've had embarrassing pictures crop up; I've sent emails and instant messages to the wrong people; I've messed up the privacy settings on blog posts; I've said things I regretted later, and had no way of taking back, ever. I've seen people I care about get burned really badly, either because their missteps were bigger than mine, or because they dodged a little more slowly. It's going to happen to all of us, forever, because that's what the Internet is. So I give you...

Seanan's Reminders for Surviving the Internet.

1. Remember that the thing you least want to have repeated is going to wind up being the one that that gets posted everywhere. The snarky off-handed comment or the bitchy update to your Facebook? The one you think only eight people will see? See, as soon as you think "at least only ____ will see this," it's time to re-think. It's okay to let it all out. Just consider whether you want to do it on a public forum, or via email or instant message to someone you trust.

2. It's not as private as you think it is. Blog posts, Twitter feeds, Facebook accounts, they're all a lot less secure than we like to think they are. People lose jobs because of pictures they put up on their Facebook. Authors lose readers because of things they say on their blogs. I am absolutely not saying "censor yourself into mashed potatoes." We are all people; we all have a right to the ball, and honestly, if you think I'm a freak because I love Disney and horror movies and chainsaws and frilly pink dresses and pumpkins and Halloween, you're probably right. We wouldn't have been good for each other anyway. But I've given serious thought to how much I wanted to share about all these things, and while I am absolutely honest, there are some things that just don't need to be shouted from the mountaintops.

3. Bridges burn easy, and they make a lovely light. We're all human here. If I stomp all over someone else's party, people will remember that. The person who was having the party is probably never going to want to invite me over again...and half their guests may well feel the same. When the person throwing that party is a professional in your chosen field, this is maybe not the best idea ever.

4. Tone doesn't always come through. I make a joke, you take offense and think I hate you forever. You make a snarky comment, I think it's hysterical and never leave you alone again. If people seem to be reacting to you in a way that is the opposite of what you expected, it may be time to step back and a) apologize for the confusion, followed by b) clarifying the situation. A vague disclaimer remains nobody's friend.

5. The Internet is forever. Keep it in mind.

I have landed safely in New York. scifantasy was kind enough to collect me from the airport, and explained many interesting things about fair use during the trip. I am in Jersey City, and we are about to leave for the Apple Store, which is why this post is neither lengthy nor terribly informative.

Back later, please do not burn down the Internet. (Quoth scifantasy, "And if you let Missus O'Grady's cow kick over that lantern again...")

Point the first: I have drawn the winner for the first A Local Habitation giveaway! I literally do this by feeding the number of comments into a random number generator, and then counting (this is very laborious, but worth it). So our first winner is...

asthecrowfly!

Please email me—DO NOT use the LJ messenger function—with your mailing address. I will be mailing the ARC out after I get home from New York (so next week).

Point the second: I am about to shut down my computer, get into the car, go to the airport, and fly to New York City. I'll be online in the evenings, and may even be online from the plane, since I'm going to need distractions while in the air. I have a lot of writing planned for the actual transit portion of the trip, and a lot of business meetings planned while in New York. I'm going to be Seanan and Mira this time. Fun for the whole family. Plus, The Agent is taking me to Serendipity 3. Mmmmmm, frozen hot chocolate.

Point the third: Coyote has decided that I depend too much on modern technology, and my iPod has died. Hard. Like, I spent half an hour on the phone with Apple technical support, and finally got told "I think it's your hardware." No shit, Sherlock. Anyway, I'm going to go to an Apple Store in Manhattan, where hopefully they'll say something like "gee, this is still under warranty, have a new one." If not, I'm going to sell one of Brooke's kidneys (again) or something, because my mental health really hinges on having portable music, and I no longer have my faithful old Sony Discman (it died quite some time ago). My housemate has loaned me his iPod for the duration of my trip, largely, I think, because he was afraid I might eat him if he didn't.

And that's the news from California. There will be more contests and ARC giveaways in the months to come, including the first contest proposed by The Agent, and I'll let you know when I reach New York alive.