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.

This time tomorrow, I will not only be at Disney World, I will have been there for three hours. So you'll please excuse me if my current connection to linear reality is, um, not so solid. Nope. Not really. Here are things you'll need to know!

To anyone who wants anything from Seanan between now and May 13th:

I am very, very, very much in need of a break, and that is why I am boarding a big metal sky-bird and soaring off to the House of Mouse, where no one who isn't actually in my party will be able to find me with any reliability. I will have Wifi, and I will have my phone, but I will not be tethered to them as I am in the real world, and I won't be home, which is where things like "the mailing supplies" live. At this time, all giveaway prizes and contracts have been mailed, and there are still about twenty shirts pending (not counting the ones omitted from the original delivery). Two shirts have been returned to me due to address issues. This will all be dealt with when I get back.

Mail sent through my contact forms will go through Kate and Vixy, as always, with a catch: Vixy is going to Disney World with me. So if you're using the www.miragrant.com contact form, please expect delays all around.

To anyone who thinks it might be fun to rob my house:

They say not to tell the internet when you're traveling, because it tempts thieves. I get that. I also get that the nature of my life makes it hard to hide when I do something like "I'm going to drop offline for thirteen days and fill my Twitter feed with pictures of Disney World." So...

Please don't rob me, nebulous internet baddies. I have a housemate, a large dog, and a house-sitter. More, I really don't have anything valuable in the traditional sense; my only real electronics will be in transit with me, and most of my dolls are haunted. Save yourself. Stay away.

To anyone who thinks it's weird for an adult to be this excited about Disney:

I think it's weird how excited adults get about professional sports, but you don't see me coming into their space and harshing their squee. I even let Shawn tell me how the Red Sox are doing every season, despite my total lack of fucks to give. So please don't tell me my passions are strange or immature. I don't care.

Disney time! See you all on the rested, refreshed, wind-blown, sunburnt flip-side!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Zombies are love.

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

What's shiny and new with all of you?

There are people in the world with tattoos inspired by my words. This will never fail to amaze me.

But this is the first time someone has tattooed me and Vixy on their body.

Look at this beautiful ink. What an amazing honor.

I am amazed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that's another story.

It's no secret that I love Disney Parks more than is strictly normal. While my friends start saying "maybe we could vacation somewhere, you know, else," I am still going "HAUNTED MANSION WOO HAUNTED MANSION LET'S GO." So when I had the opportunity to go to Paris, it was pretty inevitable that I would actually be going to Disneyland Paris (still often referred to as "EuroDisney" by people who haven't gone alone with the name change).

Problem the first: the cost of the Disneyland hotels was so high that it seriously made more sense to go in on a very nice, very expensive apartment on Rue Rambuteau, which is like saying "it cost so much to get a manicure that I decided to buy a new car." These things should not even be in the same discussion. But they were, and so we decided to stay with our friends and have some wonderful non-Disney experiences to go with the wonderful Disney experiences that we were already guaranteed.

Problem the second: we didn't actually know how many days we wanted to spend at Disneyland Paris. I mean, there's the quick and easy "all of them," but that didn't really address the fact that we had no idea how my foot was going to have held up during Loncon (surprisingly well, as it turns out), or how much walking we'd have to do to get to the Parks (annoyingly large amounts), or even how much there'd be to do inside the Parks, which are more spread out and still slightly sparser in some ways than their California equivalents. In the end, we decided to buy our tickets when we got there, since that would give us more flexibility.

Monday, we went down and wandered around Disney Village, and I started my multi-day campaign to collect all the pins I'd never had the opportunity for before.

Tuesday dawned bright and (relatively) early, considering that we were all sort of sleeping with no concept of time or how long things would take. Vixy, Amy, and I departed for the train station, and were basically the annoying giggly tourists all the way there, since "We're going to DISNEYLAND!" was continually appropriate.

Upon arriving, we joined the first mighty queue we found: the bag check. This took a dauntingly long time, and was followed by an even mightier queue, where we bought tickets. All three of us got Park-hopper tickets, two-day for me and Vix, one-day for Amy. I was already almost out of steps by the time we got through the gates and entered Disneyland Paris, so Vixy and Amy parked me on a bench while they went and got me a wheelchair.

This is where I say "we fell prey to thinking that because it was a Disney Park, it would be like all the other Disney Parks, and nothing could possibly go wrong." I had looked at the website previously, trying to figure out what we needed to do in order to have me in a chair without a problem, and had not realized that we would be banned from the main queues of even rides where I could physically go through the queue in a wheelchair. Instead, we would have to use the back entrances for everything, and would need to have an Access Pass. Why would this be a problem? Because at Disneyland Paris, unlike at Disneyland California, you need a doctor's note to get an Access Pass. Even if you clearly cannot walk. So...

Amy and Vixy returned with a wheelchair, and we proceeded into the Park. Being long-time Disney Park people, we immediately beelined for the Phantom Manor (the local equivalent of the Haunted Mansion), using the Frontierland signs as our landmarks. I admit, I teared up when I saw the Manor for the first time.

The queue area involved stairs. Amy followed the wheelchair signs to the back entrance, where we learned about the Access Cards for the first time. Oh, we said, and made our way back to City Hall...which is where we discovered that we were supposed to have a doctor's note. Which was a problem, since a) we didn't have one, b) my doctor was in California, c) we were in Paris, and d) my doctor was not going to get up at local 3am to fax over a note saying "her foot is messed up, she cannot walk." Vixy, as our main French speaker, tried to explain that we hadn't known before we got there and was there anything we could do. Amy looked distressed. I tried not to cry, while wishing I could sink into the floor. I hate this, I hate it, I hate having to do research on lifts and where I need a doctor's note and not knowing, day to day, whether I'm going to be able to walk. And sitting there not knowing what was being said, just that it was being said about me, made me want to die.

I can say "it was all my fault, I didn't dig deep enough into the website," and that is true. I can also say "spending a day confined to a wheelchair for the privilage of using the back entrances, not seeing the queue areas, not getting on the ride any faster, and being sneered at for taking up space, is not fun; it is not something I do for shits and giggles," and that is also true.

Eventually, Vixy was able to get across that my injury was temporary, rather than being a permanent disability which was why we didn't have a placard or anything. The very nice man in City Hall basically went "Americans" and gave us an Access Card that was good for me and one other person to use the back entrance (again, not priority access: we had to wait for the length of the line before we could get on the rides, which was totally fine by us).

We returned to the Phantom Manor, where Vixy went through the line while Amy and I waited in the back. Multiple people checked my Access Card to see if it was legit, which...we were not getting priority access. We were not "cutting" or getting a special magical show. We were, instead, fighting across cobblestones in a manual wheelchair, having people run into us, and basically being treated like we didn't deserve Disney because I had the audacity to be in an assistance vehicle. I was miserable. I was sitting in the Phantom Manor, feeling like a cheat and a fraud and a liar, because everyone was treating me like one. The Cast Members I usually count on to be on my side were acting like we were trying to pull something over on them.

I have never felt more like a burden to my friends and loved ones.

But the line moved, and we got on the Phantom Manor, and Vincent Price laughed for me, and I gradually reclaimed my Disney spirit. It was not easy. It hurt, and that was new and strange and awful. But I did it. Amy and Vixy and I proceeded to a BBQ place, where we ate lunch, and then enjoyed the Park.

Alice's Curious Labyrinth! Space Mountain Mission 2! The Nautilus! The Tower of Terror (across the way in Disney Studios)! The new Ratatouille ride, which used the trackless 3-D ride format from Mystic Manor, and was splendid! And so so so so so so so so so so so so so many pins. Oh, the pins. AN INFINITY OF PINS. I traded constantly, and got glorious pins from cast members, and it was wonderful.

Space Mountain Mission 2 was jerky and weird, but it was a coaster Amy had never been on, and we loved it so. We hit the Ratatouille ride just before closing, and the Cast Member on the door kindly let us ride together, even though I still had to use the wheelchair entrance. Dinner was at a little cafe on Main Street, and included the best ham and cheese sandwich I have ever had. We returned home tired but okay.

The next day it was just me and Vixy. We had already decided that our main objective would be a) pins and b) trying to eat lunch at Cinderella's Enchanted Table, so Vixy could meet the mice (Suzie and Perla). I decided not to get a wheelchair. It just wasn't worth it, and I knew I could turn back at any time; we didn't need to close out the Park.

It was my first day on foot in a Disney Park in more than two years.

To say that I was nervous would be an understatement; so would to say that I was overjoyed. I could climb stairs (slowly). I could step up curbs (also slowly). I could do anything I fucking wanted and it was magical and I only cried a little from the pain. I really am getting better. (Note that this would not have been possible had I not been in a wheelchair for the whole previous day.)

Vixy and I started by going to see the dragon that sleeps beneath the castle. It was a glorious piece of animatronics, and leaving put us right near Cinderella's Enchanted Table, where lo and behold, they had just started service, and we were able to get a table. She was ecstatic. I was amused. We spent two and a half hours eating a very slow lunch, ending with flaming ice cream balls, and she got her picture with the mice. She then declared that it was ANYTHING YOU WANT O'CLOCK, since I hadn't stabbed her with a fork during the very slow dining experience. Yay!

I elected for Pirates. Their queue led through a smuggler's tunnel into Tortuga, and it was a glorious piece of ride design (the ride itself was pretty awesome, too). From there, we went to Indiana Jones (totally different from the California ride; this is a single-track roller coaster with a full inversion), Phantom Manor, and then out, marking a day with very few rides, but with a lot of pins. So many pins.

On the whole, Disneyland Paris was gorgeous, and I wish I had been able to take more time to really drink it all in. But I couldn't have done any more time than I did on foot, and being there in a wheelchair was so unpleasant and dehumanizing that I don't think I could have loved the Park if I had spent any more of my time in an assistance vehicle.

Glad I went; may go back someday; will not go back until I am absolutely sure I can spend the whole trip on foot.

Next up, Ireland, and Eurocon!

When I realized that I was going to be staying in Europe between Loncon and Eurocon (I mean, I'm staying much longer than that, as witness the fact that I am writing this entry from a kitchen table in Ireland, but that realization came later), I immediately turned to Vixy and went, "Let's go to DISNEYLAND!"

Yessssssssss.

Brooke, who is a genius of travel planning, used Air B&B to find us a glorious Parisian apartment with four bedrooms, disturbing murder art on the walls, a full kitchen, a hot tub, sauna, and steam room, and wifi, all on the ground floor, which meant I had zero obligate stairs. It was perfect. Vixy and I checked in first, on Sunday, to be followed by the rest of our party (Brooke, Amy, and the Crowells) on Monday.

Sunday was the Eurostar, followed by checking in, a wander around our temporary neighborhood, and dinner at an outdoor cafe, where I had a ham and mushroom pizza that had been very generously outfitted with ham. We showered in The Serious Shower, which I think I will dream about for the rest of my life, and planned our adventures to come. I misidentified the train station we'd need to get to Disneyland Paris. This will be important later.

Monday, we decided to take the train to Disneyland Paris and wander around the Disney Village (their equivalent of Downtown Disney) for a few hours, just to get the lay of the land. We were not going to go into Disneyland that day, and indeed, we didn't. Instead, we walked roughly a mile in the wrong direction in our attempts to find the right train station, and when we arrived, we visited all the shops. I traded pins with a bunch of cast members, who viewed my single-minded approach with amusement and bewilderment. Vixy bought things. I did not. A good time was had by all.

When we got home, our housemates were there, and we gloried in the hot tub and not being at a convention. We spend so much of our time traveling to and from cons that sometimes it's nice to just be together, without a program grid dictating what we do and when we do it. Amy was delighted that we had refrained from going into Disneyland Paris without her, meaning that her first time on the Phantom Manor would also be my first time on the Phantom Manor.

Eventually, we slept.

In preparing for this entry, I had time to give a lot of thought to the essential question of whether I wanted to do one big Paris post, or one Paris post and one Disneyland Paris post. The latter won. So here are the Paris pieces:

Tuesday, Amy, Vixy, and I went back to Disneyland Paris, following what I thought was the correct route. It was sort of very wrong, and while we got there just fine, we had a bit of a "tired people navigating places" tiff on the return journey, ending when Amy brilliantly hailed a cab.

Wednesday, Amy went off to see Paris, while Vixy and I finally went to the train station the right way, which was much, much shorter. We also returned home earlier, content and perfectly tired. Vixy and Amy went out with Brooke and the Crowells to have Fancy French Dinner; I stayed home with Simon, the Crowells' teenage son, and had Leftovers and The Internet. Everyone was happy.

Thursday, Vixy, Brooke, and the Crowells went out to a museum, while Amy and I went to the airport. The ladies at the Aer Lingus counter were pleasant, but recommended we call a wheelchair, given the size of the airport. We called a wheelchair. We waited.

And waited.

And waited.

After half an hour, we walked to our gate, since otherwise, we might have missed our flight. We were off and running for Ireland, and our French adventure was finally complete.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

England!

I'm Guest of Honor at NORWESCON, in beautiful Seattle, Washington! It's time for fun with crows, evergreens, and rain! If you're planning to be in the area, here's where you can find me throughout the weekend:

Thursday.

5:00pm, Guest of Honor Banquet. I am not on the menu! But I believe banquet tickets are still available, and you can put food in your face. Yum!

7:00pm, Opening Ceremonies. We are gonna open the shit out of this convention.

Friday.

1:00pm, Reading. I have copies of Sparrow Hill Road, and I'm not afraid to open them...

3:00pm, Feminism in Fandom. Let's play Bingo!

5:00pm, Lifetime Members' Banquet. Food. Again.

8:30pm, Vixy & Tony concert. Come see the ever-amazing Vixy & Tony in concert with Betsy Tinney and Sunnie Larsen, as well as musical aid from yours truly.

10:00pm (roughly), my concert. I'll be honest here: it's basically the same set-up. There's not going to be a hard line between us so much as "first set list is finished, we pause to pee, second set list begins." I highly recommend attending both. I'll have CDs, T-shirts, and posters for sale.

Saturday.

1:00pm, autograph session. I'll sign shit!

5:00pm, Q&A. Come with your Qs, I'll show you my As.

Sunday.

4:00pm, Closing Ceremonies. Find out who next year's guests will be! Watch this year's guests try not to pass out on the table! Good times.

Hope to see you there!

Filk Continental happens in Germany. It happens in a castle. It is one of the only filk cons I have never attended, because it is very far away, and up until recently, I have had very limited vacation time.

It's still far away. But this year, I'm going...and I'm going as their Special Guest! Yes! After a year off, Filk Continental is gloriously returning, with Vixy & Tony as their Guests of Honor, and me as their Special Guest. A German appearance! A fantastic party! A glorious time!

October 3rd through 5th: the website and details are here: http://www.filkcontinental.de/fc/home/index.php.

I'm so excited!

Earlier this week, The Guardian published a list of what they viewed as the twenty best young novelists in genre fiction. It's a pretty good list, and I'm awed and delighted to appear on it.

But as I looked at this list, what really struck me was how many of these people I call friends, and how many I call friendly acquaintances ('cause they're not quite close enough for me to call them up and swear at them about the X-Men, but I would totally let them crash in my guest room if necessary). And that was, honestly, even more awesome and delightful than being on the list in the first place.

Lauren Beukes and I were on the Campbell ballot together, and she has been a joy and a delight every time we've been able to spend time together. Saladin Ahmed shares a publisher with me (DAW), and DAW is a family: he's like the cousin I never knew I had until he was stealing my hash browns and lecturing me about my taste in music. NK Jemsin just might be one of my favorite people to share a panel with—she's thoughtful and passionate and engaging, and her thoughts and passions are so brilliantly put together that I can just sit and listen to her forever.

Chuck Wendig is a man I would call brother (and also a man I would call a flaming cockweasel, because that's how we communicate; we're like a spinoff of John Dies at the End, scored for bearded penmonkey and shrieking murder princess).

And then there is Catherynne Valente, about whom I have already said everything, including the eternal "I miss you and I wish you were here."

There are names on the list that I've heard only in passing, names whose works I have read and names whose works I haven't reached for yet. And I know that these people are friends of my friends; that there's this huge web of community that connects us, because we came through the same forests to get here, even if we didn't come via the same paths. It's a wood that shifts every few years, although parts of it remain the same.

I didn't know any of these people before I started publishing (although Cat and I have so many people in common that it would have happened eventually; she has been an inevitability in my life since the day I met Vixy, and that is wonderful), but we have walked the same ways and seen the same sights and we are connected now, and that is incredible. There are so many other names that aren't on this list (Jim Hines, Elizabeth Bear, Peter Clines, Amber Benson, to name a few) who are part of my unique web of connections, and they all have their own webs, forever and ever, to the end of the horizon.

Community forms one meeting and one miracle at a time.

I am so glad to be part of this one.

The world is wonderful.

Guys guys guys! The Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling* Show is tomorrow! For the eighth time, my band of merry wanderers will descend upon San Francisco, bringing music, chaos, and the excitement of a book release party with us! This time, we're actually not going to be at my beloved Borderlands Books, although they will be selling books at the event: thanks to an opening in the Variety Preview Room Theatre, we're going to be trashing someone else's house for a change! The party begins this coming Saturday at 6:00 PM, at...

The Variety Preview Room Theatre
Hobart Bldg., 1st Floor (use the entrance next to Citibank on Market St.)
582 Market Street @ 2nd and Montgomery
San Francisco, CA 94104

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE.

Delicious cupcakes! Free popcorn, for that circus feeling! A cash bar, including a signature cocktail designed just for us, The Snakehandler! Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff rocking the house, now with special bonus Paul Kwinn and imported bonus Vixy! And this time, I'm not the only author who's going to be taking her turn in the ring. That's right: I have AWESOME BONUS GUESTS. Sarah Kuhn, awesome author of the geek rom-com One Con Glory, will be joining the fray, as will Amber Benson, whose latest Calliope Reaper-Jones adventure, The Golden Age of Death, dropped just two weeks ago.

Three authors. A lot of music. Plenty of sugar. Accessible booze. NOW HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY?

I thought so.

Seating at the Preview Room is limited, so please show up early. We are a kid-friendly circus, although there will probably be swearing (I'm planning to show up, I swear a lot). The doors will open at 6:00 PM to allow for getting drinks and books, meeting people, and generally relaxing into the night; the Circus takes the stage at 7:00 PM. Here is the full schedule for the evening (subject to change):

6:00 PM: Welcome to our party! The doors will open for milling, schmoozing, hitting the bar, and finding seats. AND CUPCAKES!
7:00 PM: Would you like some music?
7:30 PM: Perhaps you would like to win things.
7:40 PM: Now there will be a reading! WHO WILL IT BE? NO ONE KNOWS! (Amber, Sarah, or Seanan.)
8:00 PM: More music?
8:30 PM: More prizes?
8:40 PM: Another mystery reading!
9:00 PM: Last music of the night.
9:30 PM: Q&A and book discussion.
9:50 PM: Thanks and final raffle before we move to the lobby for signing.

One note from the management:

"Don’t Drive—Seriously. Parking sucks in this area. Take BART or MUNI downtown, as we are directly adjacent to the Montgomery Street BART/MUNI station! Street parking ($3.50 per hour/coins or meter card, no charge cards) is metered 7 days a week til 6PM. If you have to drive, we suggest parking at the Folsom St. Garage at 3rd & Folsom (cheapest), across from Moscone Center."

See you Saturday!

(*No snakes will be present at the event, which is a shame, because I like snakes. I will content myself with humans. FOR NOW.)

I believe we've discussed this before, but: in the filk community, there is a man by the name of Bob Kanefsky. He is also a verb. To "be Kanef'd" is to have one of your songs gripped in the white-hot maw of his evil genius, chewed up, and spat out as something entirely different. If he and Weird Al Yankovic got into gonzo parody battle (probably in an abandoned warehouse somewhere, with lots of exposed beams and weirdly good lighting), Kanef would win with subtlety and horrifyingly accurate internal rhyme.

To be Kanef'd is a rite of passage in the filk community. It is the announcement that yes, you have made it as a songwriter; yes, you have created something good enough to be worth tinkering with.

The first time I was Kanef'd, I like to've died. Literally—I couldn't breathe. And as with most creative people, he's only improved since then. At the Circus on Saturday night, he launched a new parody at me, using Vixy and Tony as his delivery mechanism.

"I get paid to write a fairy tale:
Tinkerbell’s detective daughter,
Fourteen years of unread mail,
Like a fish out of the water..."

Oh, yeah. He went there.

"Deadline: About the Author" is set to the tune of "My Story Is Not Done," and contains spoilers for/references to the Newsflesh trilogy, the Toby Daye books, and Discount Armageddon. And it is hysterical.

Bob Kanefsky, I salute you.

I shall have my revenge.

It is with great pleasure that I remind you all that the latest iteration of the Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling Show will be assembling this Saturday at San Francisco's own Borderlands Books. We'll be getting underway at 6pm, and rocking the roof until closing time comes and they kick us all out! Why are we partying?

To celebrate the release of Ashes of Honor, naturally.

There will be cupcakes! There will be music and a raffle and reading and some Q&A, and it will be a hootenanny of a good time, with a whole lotta hoot AND a whole lotta nanny! Bring your kids! Bring your siblings! Bring your slime monsters! We totally hope to see you there.

Oh, and: Richard Kadrey, who is so awesome that they had to invent new swear words to describe him, will be at the bookstore before the Circus comes to town! His event starts at three. Come early, and make a day of it!

Remember that Borderlands does take telephone and email orders, and would be happy to send you books signed by any of the lovely authors who will be haunting the store that day. Get a book already touched by pure awesome. Or, you know. Ink. The party starts Saturday at 6pm!

Cheese! And! Cake!

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

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

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

ENCORE:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't think it's any secret around here that I've been running at warp speed basically since a month before WorldCon, last year. This has resulted in a general decrease in available content here at my journal, because slowing down enough to type an entry hasn't always been an option. So here are some things I've meant to blog about, and haven't:

1. I went to Disney World for a week, with Vixy and Amy and Brooke and Patty. My mother and sister were there, too, but we sort of had parallel-but-rarely intersecting vacations. This was ideal, as my idea of "fun at Disney" involves pin trading and shows and ice cream and frogs, while theirs involves luaus and smoking and ludicrous plush and more smoking. Our only real point of overlap is roller coasters, and we already had a full car.

2. Also I went to Disneyland for a weekend, with Vixy, my mom, and my sister. See above for the basics.

3. I watched a lot of television, in an extremely non-critical manner. I don't believe that you should shut off your brain completely while consuming entertainment, but sometimes I really just want to be all "you know what? I like what I like," and not be all analytical and thoughtful about it. This stops when somebody blows up a blonde girl.

4. I went to New York for a week and a half, where I saw the Counting Crows (with my agent), Ludo (with a large group of friends, my former editor, and my agent; I have a very full-service agent), and The Devil's Carnival (with several friends, including Tu, who I didn't even realize was on the East Coast until I found her in line).

5. Also there is a permanent haunted house called Times Scare in New York, open 365-days a year. If I lived there, I would wind up asking about a Frequent Dier's card or something, because I would be in there at least once a week, being chased by a man with a chainsaw and giggling unnervingly.

6. I wrote some book club articles for SFX Magazine. The second, which is about The Midwich Cuckoos, is out now. I need to think more about the responses some of the readers have had to the book (not to my article), because they're fascinating to me. But basically? I got paid for my Wyndham and telepaths obsession. Life is good.

7. I went to Maine! I stayed with Cat and Dmitri! I want to move to Maine! I won't, because I'm moving to Washington, but seriously, in another timeline, I have already bought a house on Peaks Island, and I am not sorry. I sort of envy that version of me.

8. An old friend from high school literally showed up on my doorstep. Randomly.

9. I ate six pounds of cherries and I'm not sorry about that either.

10. I am currently behind on word count in several areas, which is why comments are going unanswered for what feels like, to me, an unreasonably long time. But I'm catching up. Slowly. I think.

And those are some of the things I've been too frazzled to blog about.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. Jean Gray is still dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Jean Grey is still dead.

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

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

Click the thumbnail to see the details!

Wicked Girls being nominated for a Hugo Award made me stop and think about just how many wonderful, wicked girls I know. This comic is just a few of them. (Seriously. Every girl I drew, I realized two more I had forgotten.)

Top row, left to right: Seanan, Vixy, Erin, Kate, Amy, Patty.
Second row, left to right: Rachel, Kaja, Brooke, Betsy (with Arial).
Third row, left to right: Devany, Teddy, Kirsten, Morgan, Emily, Torrey.
Fourth row, left to right: Jude (with Frost), Tara, Bear (with GRD), Catherynne.
Bottom row, left to right: Beckett, Teddy, Tara, Vixy, Seanan, Amy, Dr. Mary, Kate.

I am sorry I couldn't fit more people into a single sheet of paper. You are all, forever and always, amazing.

I'm trying not to be the all-Hugos, all-the-time channel right now (believe me, it's hard), but there is something I really wanted to talk about, and that's my nomination in the Best Related Works category. Wicked Girls, the CD I released in January 2011, has been nominated for the brass ring. This is the first time a single-artist filk CD has been nominated for the Hugo Awards...except for where it's not a single-artist CD. My name may be the only thing on the cover, but it's not the only name that was involved with the project. And that's what makes this so amazing. Because Wicked Girls is the thing I did with some of the people I love best in all this world, and I think that it shows. I really do.

This is the album where half the songs were written specifically so Vixy could sing them with me, or specifically for Amy's fiddle breaks. This is the album where my "I love you more than fairy tales" songs for my friends all got recorded, "Wicked Girls" and "Mother of the Crows" and "The True Story Here" and so many others. It was an amazing experience, recording this. And I credit that entirely to the people who recorded it with me.

Vixy, who sings with me on almost every track. Amy, whose screaming electric fiddle is the first primary instrumentation on the album. Kristoph, who tolerantly listened to me trying to explain what I wanted, and then gave me a hundred times more. Mary, and Betsy, and Sooj, who took the time to come to the studio and make things amazing. They put the heartbeat into the songs. Paul, who I loved first and best as a guitarist. Tony, who makes magic with strings. Margaret, who harps like it's going to be banned tomorrow. And others, and others, and others, forever.

Tara designed the cover; Beckett designed the liner notes. Mia made the pendants that inspired almost half the songs. Deborah listened, and loved, and helped in a thousand ways, as did Kate, and Cat, and all the members of my scattered family.

After more than thirty years, the filk community has representation on the Hugo ballot, and it's for an album that contains members of Southern filk, Midwest filk, Pacific Northwest filk, and California filk. And that is amazing. I am amazed.

I think I'm going to be amazed for a while.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Psst. Guess where I'm going to be this weekend. If you guessed Consonance, Northern California's very own filk convention, you're right! Here is the website:

http://www.consonance.org/

I am their Ghostmistress! Or maybe their Toastmistress. Hmm. I'm not quite sure, but I guess I'll find out when I get there, since they'll either hand me a proton pack or a microphone (vote ghosts, ghosts are awesome). Regardless, I have a concert Friday night at 9:00 PM! I'm going to be performing with some of my favorite people: Vixy and Tony, Amy McNally, Dr. Mary Crowell, Jeff Bohnhoff, Brenda Sutton...it's going to be amazing. And you will not believe this set list. I barely believe it. It's like whoa.

It's a weekend packed with awesome. Brooke has a concert! And Amy! And the Three Weird Sisters, all four of them (it's a thing)! And I have a signing Saturday morning! You should totally try to be there. It's going to be amazing.

Yay, Consonance!

I missed the SF SqueeCast's Awkward Episode—although you don't have to; you can listen to it, and all the awkwardness, here—and that made me Very Sad. This was the episode for saying awesome things about each other, which is something that, well. It's socially awkward, and hard to do. We feel weird sometimes, being overly positive about our friends. It's like "I love you, I have to be critical of you, because no one will believe me if I say you did something awesome."

Screw that.

Catherynne Valente is proof that the universe intends for all us fairy tale girls to find one another, given enough time, enough space, and enough raw need. Our paths wound through the same wood for a very long time; the last ten years of my life are peppered with mutual friends offering to introduce us to each other, and it just not working out. And I'm glad, I'm so glad, because we needed to reach the same stage in our stories before we could recognize each other. I'm the Lily Fair to her Snow White; she's the Ozma to my Dorothy; she's the sister I didn't know I was looking for, for so very long. And she's amazing. She really is! It's not just because I love her: I am actually very critical of her, because I love her. Her Russian political fairy tale, Deathless, is out in paperback today, and I give copies of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making to every little girl I know.

Jim C. Hines was one of the first people to welcome me to DAW when I signed with them for the October Daye books. He was friendly, he was knowledgeable, and he made a scary process a little less unknowable and terrifying. For that alone, I would love him always. So of course he has to be funny, and smart, and an awesome blogger, and a great writer who re-imagined some of my favorite fairy tale characters into ass-kicking heroines who don't need saving, by anyone other than themselves. He's like the Lego of fantasy authors, constantly being reconfigured into something new. The awesome, gender-neutral Lego of my childhood, not the sexist, pink-and-purple Lego Friends of today. He's a gentleman, a scholar, and one of the best men I know. I'm proud that he's my friend. You should read all his books.

Elizabeth Bear always struck me as vaguely terrifying. She was smart, she was loud, she wrote lots of books, she won a Campbell Award, she had a Giant Ridiculous Dog...terrifying. And then I met her, and realized she was terrifying because in another lifetime, she was my best friend all the way through school, and echoes of the time she shoved me off a roof in that reality kept overwhelming my sense of this one. It sounds weird, but it's true: we met, and I instantly knew that I'd known her forever, and wanted to keep knowing her forever, because not knowing her made my life less awesome. Her upcoming book, Range of Ghosts, is one of those things I shouldn't have loved, and did, because it was just that well written, and that infused with the raw awesomeness of the woman who had written it.

Paul Cornell still thinks I'm capable of being shy when put in front of a microphone, and wrote some of the best Doctor Who novels ever conceived. Also some of the best episodes.

John Scalzi sometimes shows up in my dreams, usually taking poor, confused me by the hand and leading me to where I'm supposed to be (often, it's a plane).

Tanya Huff changed my life forever with her books, and then changed it again with her friendship. I am beyond blessed to know her.

Amy McNally is planning to fiddle the Devil for my soul when he comes to collect on the crossroads bargain that I clearly made when no one was looking.

And then there is Vixy.

If Cat is my sister in story, Vixy is my sister in soul: she's the wicked girl I was looking for all my life, without ever knowing what I was trying to find. Some of the happiest moments in my life have included her, and they were all the more amazing because of it. I am eternally grateful to the filk community, for throwing us into the same space, and to OVFF, for giving me an excuse to say "hey, you want to sing with me?" Vixy makes me a better writer, a better performer, and a better person, because I feel the need to live up to her example. She makes me a better friend. For that, I am so grateful that there aren't any more words.

I can't list everyone in the world, or my fingers would fall of. So I say to those who read this: Happy Valentine's Day to each and every one of you, and if you don't celebrate Valentine's Day, happy Horny Werewolf Day. May you be happy, may you be loved, may you be warm and safe and dry. May you have stars to steer by, wish on, and follow, and may you find your sisters and brothers and lovers and children in these woods, waiting for you, where you always knew they'd be.

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.

Saturday night was my belated natal day celebration, wherein several* of us gathered at The Mint in San Francisco to get our karaoke on. Now, if you're going to get your karaoke on, The Mint is the place to do it. They have an incredibly large, diverse catalog of songs, and their resident KJ**, Frank, is a snarky miracle. Plus they have pear cider on tap. It's a perfect storm of karaoke awesome.

Because it was my birthday, Vixy actually flew out from Seattle on Friday night, and we were able to spend a good chunk of Saturday ambling around San Francisco. I showed her Toby's new neighborhood, and we ate lunch at the Phoenix. All was well. Our reservation was for six; we reached The Mint about ten minutes early, and secured our tables. Several people were already there, karaoke-ing away. Some of them were even sober.

The rest of our party trickled in by dibs and dabs; you never knew who was going to show up next. Naamen, for example, spent an hour at the wrong bar before he checked his email and realized he was in the wrong place. Oops.

Successful karaoke requires an odd mix of "taking it totally seriously" and "not taking it seriously at all." You either need to choose songs that sound good in your range, or songs that are utterly ridiculous, like our lengthy run of Disney standards (Kate's "I Just Can't Wait to Be King" was awesome). You need to have a sense of humor, but not clown it up so much that it hurts to watch you. Because we are a group of lunatics, we're very, very good at successful karaoke. Not all of us can sing, but we can all laugh at ourselves while still being PROFOUNDLY SERIOUS about the source of our laughter.

We sang rock. We sang country. We sang "Bohemian Rhapsody" en masse. Morgan claimed not to know Melissa Etheridge, so Kate did "Come to My Window"; Morgan allowed that she knew Melissa Etheridge after all. Morgan sang "The Final Countdown," and we were all kazoos. Vixy sang "Barracuda," and I watched all the drunk sorority girls hate her forever (it was adorable). Victor and Lara did "Istanbul," which was hysterical and amazing. Sunil sang "Dragula," JUST FOR ME. In short, we had a seven-hour karaoke party of karaoke party awesomeocity.

At one point, having already exhausted the songs that other people wanted me to sing ("When You're Good to Mama" for Kate, "Raise Your Glass" for Vixy), I decided to do "Independence Day," by Martina MacBride. Only I don't really know her version. I know Talis's version, which has less spousal abuse, and a lot more alien invasions. So I figured what the heck, if the scansion worked, I'd run with it.

The scansion worked. I ran with it. Turns out I know the whole thing! The drunk people looked confused, since they could tell I wasn't singing what was on the screen. The sober people cracked up. One nice man even came up to me after to tell me that I was his favorite performance of the night.

Kate and Morgan saw us out with a duet of "Don't Stop Believing" that got literally the entire bar singing, and then we all limped, exhausted, home.

And that was my karaoke party. We're going to do it again soon. Frank promised me he'd get the new Taylor Swift***, and I need to get my karaoke on.

(*The Mint is not a massive establishment, so "several" was defined by how much space we could successfully reserve. Another party had already reserved most of the seating area for their loud drunk bridal shower. In the balance of things, I wish we'd reserved first, but we live with what we get.)

(**Karaoke DJ. Basically, he's the guy who decides whether you get the song you asked for, or the obscure Swedish cover that's been pitch-shifted up an octave and shifted to a faster tempo. Be nice to your KJ. Tip your KJ.)

(***"I think her ever-present frown is a little troubling. She thinks I'm psycho 'cause I like to rhyme her name with things.")

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.

Hey, kids. Wanna see something awesome? Well, this coming Sunday, I will be performing as part of the Geek Fest Concert and Vendor Fair, hosted by the Seattle Browncoats.

Music! From such luminaries as Vixy and Tony, Betsy Tinney, Sunnie Larson, the Doubleclicks, and Eben Brooks (and more! MUCH MORE!). Oh, and me. I'll be performing with my usual Seattle backing band, and it's going to be AWESOME.

Vendors! Are you looking for that perfect gift for your geeky sweetie? Well, this is your chance to buy directly from the creator, cutting out silly little things like "shipping" and "waiting for the mail." Again, it's going to be AWESOME.

Admission is a mere $10 ticket, granting you full access to the concert and the vendors. Food and drinks will be available for sale. The whole shindig is going to be indoors, so we're not going to get rained on, and your admission will go to a great cause. Support geeky pursuits, the Seattle Browncoats, and the randomness of me flying to Seattle for a one-day event, and show up for the Geek Fest!

Hope to see you there!

The first weekend in October was my fifth Toby-related book event at San Francisco's Borderlands Books, home of naked cats, tolerant employees, and, every six months or so, the Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling Show. We've appeared in other locations, but Borderlands is the one we keep going back to; Borderlands is the home base for this particular flavor of insanity. Why? Because we like them.

Normally, I try to be a little prompter with my write-ups of the parties and their aftermath, but let's face it here: I have been a little busy. Anyway, we started super-early on Saturday, since we all had to rehearse if we wanted to not suck. Rehearsal took place in Kate's basement, and featured the day's entire planned slate of musicians. Many things happened. Many of them were lovely. And then we all piled into a variety of cars and drove to San Francisco, hence to Make Things Go. The bookstore is used to us by this point, and no one batted an eye as we invaded the office, turned it into a green room, and began trashing the place like the good little circus that we are.

Jeff set up the sound system, which is both little and awesome, while Jude got the house in order, Mia set up with the pendants in her corner, and Shawn took over maintenance of the raffle table. I got cupcakes and candy set up (the important things), and we got that party started.

As always, the festivities were divided between music, Q&A, baked goods, and drawing prizes in our raffle. The questions were new and different, the raffle prizes were an awesome mix of standard and surprising (including some special additions by the bookstore, which made things even more spectacular), the cupcakes (from Cups and Cakes Bakery) were delicious, and the music was rocking. The set lists:

SET ONE:

1. "Let's Get the Monkeys to Do It." Paul Kwinn, lead vocals, guitar; Jeff Bohnhoff, guitar; Maya Bohnhoff, Michelle "Vixy" Dockrey, backing vocals; Betsy Tinney, cello; Beckett Gladney, harmonica.
2. "Caledonia." Paul, lead vocals, guitar; Maya, backing vocals.
3. "When I Go." Paul, lead vocals, guitar; Beckett, harmonica.
4. "The Dark Man." Paul, lead vocals, guitar; Jeff, guitar; Maya, backing vocals; Seanan McGuire, backing vocals; Betsy, cello.
5. "Where the Magic is Real." Paul, lead vocals, guitar; Maya, Vixy, backing vocals; Jeff, guitar.
6. "My Story is Not Done." Seanan, lead vocals; Paul, guitar; Betsy, cello; Beckett, harmonica; everyone in the store, backing vocals.

SET TWO:

1. "I Am the Walmart." Maya, lead vocals; Vixy, backing vocals; Jeff, guitar; Betsy, cello.
2. "Dairy Queen." Maya, lead vocals; Vixy, backing vocals; Jeff, guitar.
3. "Dance in the Darkness." Maya, lead vocals; Vixy, backing vocals; Jeff, guitar.
4. "Wil's Song." Maya, lead vocals; Vixy, backing vocals; Jeff, guitar.
5. "Turn the Page." Maya, lead vocals; Vixy, backing vocals; Jeff, guitar; Paul, guitar; Beckett, harmonica.
6. "Get Off Of My Lawn." Maya, lead vocals; Vixy, backing vocals; Jeff, guitar; Betsy, cello.

SET THREE:

1. "Still Catch the Tide." Seanan, lead vocals; Vixy, backing vocals; Tony Fabris, guitar; Betsy, cello.
2. "Eight-Legged Blues." Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Beckett, harmonica; Paul, percussion.
3. "We Can Be Anything." Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Betsy, cello.
4. "Six String Love." Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar.
5. "Build That Wall/Setting Sail, Coming Home (medley)." Vixy, vocals; Maya, backing vocals; Tony, guitar; Betsy, cello.
6. "The Ocean." Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar.
7. "Got To Fly." Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar.
8. "Wicked Girls." Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Betsy, cello.

"The Dark Man" and "Where the Magic is Real" are on the first Puzzlebox album, Assembly Required.
"Caledonia" is on Dougie MacLean's album Craigie Dhu.
"When I Go" is on Dave Carter and Tracy Grammar's album, When I Go.
"Six String Love" is on Vixy and Tony's first album, Thirteen.
"Dance in the Darkness" and "Turn the Page" are on Jeff and Maya's second album, Manhattan Sleeps.
"I Am the Walmart" and "Wil's Song" are on Jeff and Maya's fifth album, Grated Hits.
"Build That Wall/Setting Sail, Coming Home (medley)" are on the Bastion Original Soundtrack.
"The Ocean" is on Dar Williams's album, Mortal City.
"Got to Fly" is on Marian Call's second album, Got to Fly.
"Still Catch the Tide" is on Seanan's second album, Stars Fall Home, and on Talis Kimberley's recent live album, By Request at Duckon.
"My Story is Not Done" and "Wicked Girls" are on Seanan's fourth album, Wicked Girls.

A good time was had by all, and the cupcakes lasted almost fifteen minutes this time, because we finally ordered enough. We're already making plans and getting our ducks in row for the next time that the Circus comes to town. And if you're curious, or want to see some pictures, you can check out Beckett's fantastic (and more timely) writeup of the event.

Thanks to everyone who attended, and to everyone who didn't...see you next time!

This past weekend, I was in Ohio for OVFF (the Ohio Valley Filk Festival). I go as often as I can, usually every year, and I always have a wonderful time. This year, I was honored to be represented twice on the 2011 Pegasus Ballot, once for "Best Bad-Ass Song," for "Evil Laugh," and once for Best Song, for "Wicked Girls." My beloved Amy McNally, meanwhile, was on the ballot in the "Best Performer" category. It was an exciting year.

It was also a brutally hard ballot. Voting for the Pegasus Awards is never easy, but it's usually a little easier on my heart than this. There was absolutely nothing bad on that ballot, and nothing that I could even really say "well, that's perceptibly weaker than the things around it" about. It was all amazing. The only thing I was sure of was that I couldn't predict the results; the only result I was really praying to the Great Pumpkin for was in the Best Performer category, where I desperately wanted Amy to win.

Best Romantic Song was the first announced, and went to "As I Am" by Heather Dale. We all clapped and cheered, and laughed at her pole-axed acceptance. Best Bad-Ass Song was the second announced, and went to...me. And my dinosaurs. I sort of staggered to the front, blinked a lot, said dinosaurs were cool, and went away. My table clapped and cheered. Best Writer/Composer, S.J. Tucker.

And then...Best Performer, Amy McNally. My table, which had, again, clapped politely when I won, EXPLODED. Literally. Screaming, shouting, applause. Amy wasn't able to attend this year, so Brooke, Vixy, and I went up, announced that we were Amy's Angels, and accepted the SHIT out of that award.

I am so proud of her.

Best Classic Filk Song went to "The Phoenix" by Julia Ecklar. More clapping and cheering. And then Best Song...

Best Song went to "Wicked Girls." Oh, my heart.

I have coveted that award. I won't pretend that I haven't. I've wanted it, very badly, from the day I understood what it was. It is the ultimate "you are an awesome songwriter and you have written an awesome song" of filk, and I wanted it. I did not cry, but only, really, because I was still in shock and full of delight over Amy's win. We are wicked. We are fair. We can all of us save ourselves.

The winners for 2011:

Best Filk Song: "Wicked Girls" by Seanan McGuire
Best Classic Filk Song: "The Phoenix" by Julia Ecklar
Best Performer: Amy McNally
Best Writer/Composer: S. J. Tucker
Best Badass Song: "Evil Laugh" by Seanan McGuire
Best Romantic Song: "As I Am" by Heather Dale

Some interesting facts:

This is the first time the entire Pegasus slate has been won by women. No co-writers were harmed in the granting of these awards. Go team Wicked Girls!

Amy McNally's win marks the first time someone who is primarily an instrumentalist has been awarded Best Performer. So well-deserved.

Julia Ecklar won the John W. Campbell Award in 1991. I won it in 2010. This is the first time, ever, that both Best Filk Song and Best Classic Filk Song have been won by professional authors.

It was a very good year. Thank you to everyone who voted, and thank you to everyone who believed that we could fly.

Oh, and Amy? Congratulations, sweetheart.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you tomorrow's...

PARTY SCHEDULE!

4:00 PM: Setup, sound check, and final details. You can show up, but we may ignore you if you do. Sorry about that.
5:00 PM: Welcome to our party. We're done ignoring you now.
5:15 PM: Would you like some music?
5:55 PM: Perhaps you would like to win things.
6:00 PM: Now there will be cupcakes and autographing.
6:30 PM: More music?
7:10 PM: More prizes?
7:15 PM: Toby Daye Q&A and book discussion.
7:45 PM: Last music of the night.
8:25 PM: Let's raffle some more stuff off.
8:30 PM: Assuming people are not too busy buying books and eating cupcakes, I will read something. No, really.
9:00 PM: Last raffle drawing of the night and we close the evening.

This iteration of the Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling Show will be in the bookstore proper; the cafe will be open throughout the evening, and they've promised to have plenty of bread and delicious pastry this time. Raffle tickets will be available through the two standard methods: show up, or buy something from the bookstore.

All performing musicians will have CDs for sale, because we're predictable like that. Mia will be there with pendants for sale, and they are gorgeous. There will be cupcakes and candy provided as part of the party, and a whole cafe full of delicious things to purchase and enjoy.

It's gonna be a good night. Hope to see you there.

Hey, gang, this is your friendly reminder that the fifth iteration of the Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling Show will be appearing this Saturday, October 1st, at San Francisco's own Borderlands Books. Festivities will commence at five, and will include delicious baked goods, live music, our inevitable raffle, and a Toby Daye Q&A.

This iteration of the Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling Show includes, in alphabetical order, Jeff "Heavy Metal Squid" Bohnhoff, on guitar and sound; Maya "Sonic Boom" Bohnhoff, on guitar and vocals; Michelle "Ceiling Cookies" Dockrey, on vocals; Tony "Code Monkey Likes You" Fabris, on guitar and vocals; Beckett "Don't Lick That" Gladney, on harmonica; Paul "The Cute One" Kwinn, on guitar and vocals; Betsy "Living Improbability" Tinney, on cello and vocals; and me, doing my usual mix of vocals and random stage patter.

Kate and Ryan will be running support, because they are awesome, and my mother will be running around like a chicken with her head cut off. Jude and Naamen will be keeping the bookstore from burning down (respect the bookstore). Mia will be on hand for pendant sales, and Victor and Lara will be on hand for AWESOME (and inevitably getting drafted).

It's going to be an awesome time, with signings and questions and cupcakes, and you should come. If you can't attend, remember that you can contact the bookstore to place orders for delivery, and get your books signed by attending our Circus in your heart.

See you Saturday!

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.

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.

So, as you may have noticed, I am currently stretched...well, pretty thin. I am thus bringing on some help here in the salt mines, to make sure things keep running smoothly. Yaaaay!

The lovely Deborah (talkstowolves) has been handling the "Wicked Girls" T-shirt orders, which are almost ready to go to the printer, and will now be stepping in to help with basic website administration work. She'll be updating the news and appearances, fixing typos, and making adjustments to pages as needed. This will free me up to actually get some of the major things done in a more timely manner.

Also! While I will continue trying to answer all comments on this journal in a vaguely timely fashion, it...isn't always so possible. To help prevent confusion, I thought I'd give you the names of the folks who are Fully Authorized (tm) to answer direct questions on my behalf.

porpentine does my website code, and can answer any and all questions about how it works.
talkstowolves and vixyish do a lot of administrative duties for me, and can answer practically all questions about what the hell I think I'm doing.
aiglet has the best grasp of my schedule of anyone who isn't me, and can usually answer questions about where I am and when I'll be back.

In short, if you ask a question, and one of these four people answers it, you can take their answer as coming from me. (I realize there will always be less general questions, like "where did you get that icon?" and "hey, didn't I see you last Tuesday at the Gwar concert?" But there's been some confusion lately, stemming from people asking questions and then getting them answered eight ways, by eight different folks. I'm just trying to make it all a little less bewildering. As if that's possible.)

Thank my brave volunteer staffers, and do not throw things at them. They bite.

Dear Great Pumpkin;

It has been some time since I last wrote to you, but you have never been far from my thoughts. I just thought you might like me to do my own planting for a change. Since our last correspondence, I have not started any political movements or debunked any major scientific theories for my own amusement. I have loved my friends and looked upon my enemies with tolerant disdain, as opposed to reaching for the machete. I have shared my cookies. I have not brought about the end of all mankind, nor lured the unwary into the cornfield. I have continued to make all my deadlines, even the ones I most wanted to avoid. I have not talked about parasites at the dinner table. Much. So obviously, I have been quite well-behaved, especially considering my nature.

Today, Great Pumpkin, I am asking for the following gifts:

* A smooth and successful release for Deadline, with books shipping when they're meant to ship, stores putting them out when they're supposed to put them out, and reviews that are accurate, insightful, and capable of steering people who will enjoy my book to read it, while warning those who will not enjoy my book gently away. Please, Great Pumpkin, show mercy on your loving Pumpkin Princess of the West, and let it all be wonderful. I'm not asking you to make it easy, Great Pumpkin, but I'm asking you to make it good.

* Please let me finish the current draft of Blackout on time and without anything exploding when it's not supposed to, drawing this trilogy to a satisfying conclusion. I've never finished a series before, Great Pumpkin, and I admit, I'm nervous. I want to do this world, and these characters, justice; I want to make the people who've been with me since Feed was a crazy idea called Newsflesh proud. I know it can be done, and that I have the skills necessary for the task. All I ask is that you help me do it.

* And when that is done, o Prince of Patches, I ask that you help me to find my way back into the depths of Ashes of Honor without that changing-genres stumble; let Toby and her world open their arms and welcome me home, that I might transcribe the story that is already making my fingertips ache. There is so much that I want to do in this book, and only so many pages for me to do it in. Please help me find my way, and help me tell this story. It needs telling.

* I thank you once again for my cats, Great Pumpkin, who are everything I could ever ask for in feline companions. Alice is huge, puffy, and utterly without dignity. Lilly is sleek, smug, and satisfied with herself. Thomas is playful, expanding rapidly, and too smart for his own good. I have never been happier with the cats who share my life than I am with this trio, who delight me in all ways. Please, Great Pumpkin, keep them healthy, keep them happy, and keep them exactly as they are.

* I haven't said anything up to now about what I really want this year, Great Pumpkin, but...you know I've been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. You know, because you know everything. You know that if I win, I'll be given a rocket ship in Reno, with my Amy and my Vixy in attendance. Neither of them could be there in Australia, and it would mean the world to all of us if they could be there to see this happen. Please shine your holy candle upon the Hugo, Great Pumpkin, and, if you see fit, I will thank you in any speeches I have to give (you know I'm good for it, I did it last time).

I remain your faithful Halloween girl,
Seanan.

PS: While you're at it, can you please turn your graces on Harvest? I sort of really want to tell this story. It centers on Halloween, you're going to love it.

This past Saturday was my fourth Toby-related book event at San Francisco's Borderlands Books, home of naked cats, tolerant employees, and, every six months or so, the Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling Show. We've appeared in other locations, but Borderlands is the one we keep going back to; Borderlands is the home base for this particular flavor of insanity. Why? Because we like them.

This particular party was slated to start at six and run until nine, giving us three hours in which to sell books, answer questions, make music, and feed people vast quantities of sugar. We arrived at the bookstore en masse around four-thirty, while the prior event was tearing down, and toted ALL THE THINGS inside. Seriously, when we go into carnie mode, we're a scary mob of ALL THE THINGS. It looks like we're planning to actually move in. Wisely, people scattered; just as wisely, Kate (who met us at the bookstore) hauled me away to put food in me, since I'm about as much help during setup and tear-down as a Gila monster with a machine gun.

People began showing up around five-thirty, while we were in the midst of final touches, final placements, and soundcheck. Jeff ran our small but spunky sound system, while Kate worked the raffle table and ensured (along with Mom) that everyone got a ticket of their very own. Six o'clock hit, heralded by the arrival of my cupcakes, and we got that party started.

As always, the festivities were divided between music, Q&A, baked goods, and drawing prizes in our raffle. The questions were new and different, the raffle prizes were an awesome mix of standard and surprising (including some special additions by the bookstore, which made things even more spectacular), the cupcakes (from Cups and Cakes Bakery) were delicious, and the music was rocking. The set lists:

SET ONE:
1. "Thirteen." Michelle "Vixy" Dockrey, lead vocals, tambourine; Maya Bohnhoff, Seanan McGuire, backing vocals; Tony Fabris, guitar; Betsy Tinney, cello.
2. "Dear Gina." Seanan, lead vocals; Vixy, backing vocals; Tony, guitar; Betsy, creepy creepy cello.
3. "High Desert." Maya, lead vocals; Jeff Bohnhoff, guitar; Kristine Bohnhoff, backing vocals; Vixy, backing vocals; Betsy, cello.
4. "Pocket Man." Maya, vocals; Vixy, backing vocals; Jeff, guitar; Betsy, cello.
5. "We Can Be Anything." Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Betsy, cello.

SET TWO:
1. "Radio Free Luna." Maya, lead vocals; Vixy, backing vocals; Jeff, guitar; Tony, guitar; Betsy, cello.
2. "Manhattan Sleeps." Maya, Kristine, vocals; Vixy, backing vocals; Jeff, guitar; Betsy, cello.
3. "Tam Lin." Vixy, Maya, Seanan, vocals; Jeff, guitar; Tony, guitar; Betsy, cello; Vixy, djembe; Maya, shaker.
4. "Walmart." Maya, lead vocals; Vixy, backing vocals; Jeff, guitar; Betsy, cello; Vixy, tambourine.
5. "Oak and Ash and Rowan and Thorn." Vixy, lead vocals; Maya, backing vocals; Vixy, djembe.

SET THREE:
1. "Alligator in the House." Vixy, lead vocals; Maya, backing vocals; Tony, guitar; Betsy, kick-ass cello.
2. "Tanglewood Tree." Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Betsy, cello.
3. "Apprentice." Vixy, lead vocals; Maya, backing vocals; Jeff, Tony, guitar; Betsy, cello.
4. "Got to Fly." Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar.
5. "Wicked Girls." Seanan, Vixy, vocals; Tony, guitar; Betsy, cello.

"Thirteen" and "Apprentice" are on Vixy and Tony's first album, Thirteen.
"Dear Gina" is on Seanan's third album, Red Roses and Dead Things.
"High Desert" and "Radio Free Luna" are on Jeff and Maya's fourth album, Möbius Street.
"Pocket Man" is on Jeff and Maya's third album, Aliens Ate My Homework.
"Manhattan Sleeps" is on Jeff and Maya's second album, Manhattan Sleeps.
"Tam Lin" and "Alligator in the House" are on Tricky Pixie's first album, Mythcreants.
"Tanglewood Tree" and "Wicked Girls" are on Seanan's fourth album, Wicked Girls.
"Got to Fly" is on Marian Call's second album, Got to Fly.

A good time was had by all. We raised the roof; I signed more books in a single sitting than I ever have before, even at Comicon; the cupcakes lasted eight minutes, tops; nothing got broken. We're already making plans and getting our ducks in row for the next time that the Circus comes to town.

Thanks to everyone who attended, and to everyone who didn't...see you next time!

People of Earth, consider this your final warning: The Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling Show will be descending on Borderlands Books tomorrow, from six to nine in the evening. There will be cupcakes from Cups and Cakes Bakery, including the famous (or infamous) Mad Tea Party cupcakes originally conceived for the Emilie Autumn concert. (Chai cake, ginger buttercream, and strawberry jam.) We will endeavor not to eat them all before you get there, but it's gonna be hard.

There will be no actual snakes.

This iteration of the Circus includes Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff, who have never joined us for this particular madness, and are going to go a long way toward rocking the proverbial house. We'll have a raffle, a Q&A period, book signings, and all the random cheering you can stomach. There may even be some random dancing. Do you hear me? RANDOM DANCING!!!!

Come help us celebrate the release of Late Eclipses, and my first appearance on the New York Times bestseller list. If you can't attend, remember that you can order signed and inscribed copies of any of my books from Borderlands, and they'll be happy to hook you up.

Hope to see you there!

What: Late Eclipses release party.
Where: San Francisco's own Borderlands Books, home of the naked kitties.
When: Saturday, March 19th, from six to nine PM (probably followed by decamping down the street for dinner, because That's How We Roll).
Why: Because we like you!

The Traveling Circus is descending upon Borderlands in a new incarnation, to dazzle, delight, and entertain you as we celebrate the release of Late Eclipses. This particular circus spectacular will feature Vixy "Kitsune Girl" Dockrey, Tony "Tony" Fabris, Betsy "The Cellonator" Tinney, Jeff "Heavy Metal Squid" Bohnhoff, and Maya "The Crusher" Bohnhoff. Oh, also, me. This is the first time the Bohnhoffs have joined us for a Traveling Circus, and I'm very excited about the whole thing.

There will be a raffle, readings, Q&A sessions, music, and cupcakes. Borderlands Cafe will be open right next door, to satisfy your nourishment needs (because let's face it, man does not live by cupcakes alone). We always have a great time at these things, and part of what makes them so awesome is the way people show up and help us party. So please, show up! Help us party!

It's going to be a fun night.

Late Eclipses [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] is nearly upon us, and you know what that means. TRAVELING CIRCUS TIME!

The Traveling Circus (this time consisting of myself, Betsy Tinney, Vixy & Tony, and Jeff and Maya Bohnhoff) will be descending on San Francisco's own Borderlands Books on March 19th, where we will do our best to blow the roof off with our characteristic mix of music, madness, and random, unexpected cheering. There will be a raffle, and the cafe will be open to fill your bellies with delicious food. This is Jeff and Maya's first day at the Circus, so please show up and help us show them how we roll.

I'll post a reminder when we get closer to the event, and of course, all events are listed on my website appearances page.

Also potentially of interest, for those of you who can't make it to the party: remember that Borderlands Books will take orders for signed and inscribed books, and will happily ship them all over the world. I'll be swinging through the store on Tuesday, where I'll happily sign any books that are waiting in my queue. So if you want a personalized book, drop the store a line, and trade some cash for the knowledge that my pen has been put to paper in your name.

It's really a book!

Last Thursday, I left work and went straight* to the San Francisco Airport, where I hopped on a big red and silver plane and flew to Seattle. Thanks to Virgin America's generous frequent flier plan, I was actually flying First Class, which meant a much bigger seat, no under-seat storage, and all the free booze I wanted to drink. I did not want any free booze. That was okay, though, since the men in front of me were pretty well-dedicated to drinking enough to justify their upgrades. I think they succeeded. I weep for their livers.

Vixy, Torrey, and Tony were waiting for me on the ground in Seattle. We collected my bags and went on a brief, fruitless search for a Wendy's before returning to the house, where Sooj, K, Fishy, and Lauren were waiting. Oh, the hugging we had! Also the presents. Everyone ooh-ed and ahh-ed appropriately over their shiny new copies of Wicked Girls. My presents had a distinctly dinosaur-y theme this year, which is something I will always approve of. Always.

Eventually, people went to bed. I slept like the dead. And slept, and slept, and slept, and was still the first person up in the morning. This is because there is Something Wrong With Me.

Friday, we went to Old Navy (the cats unpacked my suitcase, and I didn't notice, STOP LOOKING AT ME LIKE THAT), Borders, and the grocery store, since I was going to be spending Saturday cooking. And then we played Rock Band 3 until we all wanted to die. It was awesome. This being New Year's Eve, there were many parties being thrown, and many enthusiastic plans being made. Vixy had a headache, and I don't like crowds of strangers, so our enthusiastic plans consisted of staying home, watching 2012, and making rosemary shortbread. I rank this among my top ten New Year's Eves. Shortbread! And global disaster! And Vixy!

Okay, so admittedly, the science of 2012 isn't so much "bad" as "Warren Ellis on acid trying to explain Latin grammar, somehow getting used to fuel a sanity-destroying laser aimed straight at your cerebral cortex" levels of "insane," but hey, there's a GIRAFFE HELICOPTER. No movie with a GIRAFFE HELICOPTER can be all bad, right? Right?

Anyway, life is good, and if you spend the year as you spent the start of it, 2011 is going to make me pretty darn happy. Happy new year!

(*Well, "straight" except for the stops at the post office, Borderlands Books, and Fritz's for mussels and fries. Sadly, "I left work and went crooked" doesn't have quite the right meaning. And this is truly a pity.)

Let me tell you about Rose Marshall—
Might be the last thing you’ll ever see.
They say some stories will never die,
Well, she died back in fifty-three,
Kept her prom night date with the cemetery.

—"Pretty Little Dead Girl."

"Have you ever heard the story of the woman at the diner?"

—Rose Marshall, "Good Girls Go to Heaven."

Sparrow Hill Road is finished now. Twelve stories, twelve stops along a single stretch of highway. We didn't blow a tire or take any unexpected detours along the way, and that's good. And now here we are, and it's time to get out and stretch our legs, at least for a little while. The first part of the story's done.

I knew when I agreed to do Sparrow Hill that it was going to be a one-year commitment. Not only was I not sure how much of the story I'd be able to get through in a year—there was a very real chance that I'd finish the setting completely, leaving nothing untold—but I knew that 2011 would be extremely busy, which would make agreeing to a two-year tenure suicidal for me, and dangerous for Jennifer. A year looked just about perfect. That didn't stop it from being nerve-wracking at times. A few of the stories were turned in just as the ragged edge of my deadline was approaching, and the schedule I was on didn't really give me time to say "you know what? This story needs to be benched, let's do something else." But I never missed a deadline, and I never turned in a story I thought was bad. I can look back on the year with a sort of smug pride. I did that. I turned in one complete narrative a month, every month, for a year. And now I'm finished.

If you know me through filk, you may have met Rose as far back as 2004, when I wrote the song "Pretty Little Dead Girl," although most people didn't "meet" her until I was the OVFF Toastmistress in 2005, and did the song, along with my Rosettes, in a bright pink prom dress on the convention's main stage. I went on to write a bunch of songs about Rose, showing different sides of her story. I always knew I wanted to write the "what really happened" version, eventually, but it seemed too complex for lyrics.

Then Jennifer asked if I wanted to be one of the 2010 Universe Authors, and everything started falling together.

Sparrow Hill Road was challenging, exciting, and complicated in a way that neither novels nor short stories tend to be complicated. It was, essentially, my Green Mile: a serial novel told in strange installments. And like The Green Mile, I'm planning to revise it, turn it into a coherent whole, and see about finding a publisher. But that's going to need to wait a little while.

My big, big thanks go to Jennifer, for being the best editor I could have had on this crazy project; Amber, for taking amazing pictures; Torrey, for being Rose Marshall (and doing a bang-up job of it); Vixy, Amy, Brooke, Kate, Rebecca, and others, for editorial, copy-edits, and letting me talk things through with them; and Phil, always Phil, without whom none of this would have happened.

It was a good ride. It's over now, and there were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys I sent away, but it was a good ride.

Thank you for taking it with me.

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

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

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

The bridge for "Wicked Girls" was...

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

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

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

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

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

See you next con!

The Pegasus Awards for Excellence in Filking are given out each year at the Ohio Valley Filk Festival. This the biggest award in the filk world; when trying to explain them to non-filkers (or even new filkers), it's often said that the Pegasus Awards are "the Hugos of filk." This is not inaccurate. It's a major award in the filk world, with a ballot nominated and voted on by the community.

Every year, there are four "standard" categories—Best Song, Best Classic (for songs more than ten years old), Best Performer, and Best Writer/Composer—and two "floating" categories, which change from ballot to ballot. Floating categories can range from general, like "Best Parody" or "Best Love Song," to extremely specific...like this year's floating categories, "Best Magic Song" and "Best Mad Science Song."

I was at the Skin Horse volume two release party when Amy and Vixy both sent me text messages to inform me that "What A Woman's For," my song about the virtues of being Dr. Frankie's little helper when the world just has to be destroyed, had won the Pegasus Award for Mad Science. Yes. I got an award for Mad Science, at least in song form.

TREMBLE, PUNY MORTALS! TREMBLE, FOR SOON I AND MY GENETICALLY-ALTERED ARMY OF FLESH-RENDING PEGASI WILL COME FOR YOU IN THE NIGHT! THOSE FOOLS LAUGHED AT ME AT THE ACADEMY, BUT THEY'LL PAY! THEY'LL PAY! OH, HOW THEY'LL PAY!

...ahem. And also, thank you to everyone who voted, and squee! Pegasus! Congratulations to all the 2010 ballot winners, especially my frequent musical partner in crime, Paul Kwinn, who won the Pegasus for Best Magic Song. Life is good.

I'm so happy.

I like mai tais. I find them pleasant, entertaining, and charmingly garnished with obscene amounts of fruit. I also like the process of making cocktails. It's like a fabulous combination of chemistry, alchemy, and, y'know, booze. Plus, it's fun. I like things that are fun. So I decided, what the hell, why not learn how to make mai tais?

This is how my brain works. Be glad you don't have to live with me.

First up, I had to find a recipe for mai tais. I like them with pineapple. Thankfully, Wikipedia is always willing to save the day, and provided me with a page that contained more recipes for the mai tai than one woman will ever need. I settled on recipe #5, the pineapple variation, as my "Mai Tai Scripture," the one true recipe against which all other recipes would be measured. At least until I got bored.

According to the recipe, I needed light rum, dark rum, grenadine, orange, pineapple, and lime juices, and triple sec. (The recipe didn't say that I needed a pineapple, maraschino cherries, a lime, or little paper umbrellas. I figured that part out on my own.) So step two was clearly a trip to BevMo. Yay BevMo!

Now, to work at BevMo, one needs a) a decent understanding of alcohol, and b) a sense of humor. Both these things were possessed by the clerk who came over to assist me in my quest. She found me in the rum section, squinting bemusedly at the assortment of bottles. "What are you trying to make?" she asked.

"Mai tais."

"The mai tai mix is over here."

"From scratch."

Beat. "Are you from the university?"

When in doubt, claim college hazing. "Yes."

"Well, then, you'll want this, and this—"

She was awesome, and quickly helped me assemble everything I'd need to make a truly epic mai tai. She also reminded me to buy the little paper umbrellas, without which, the mai tai could bring only shame upon my household. ALCOHOLIC SHAME. So, y'know, thank you, helpful BevMo clerk! You were truly awesome.

After a stop at Safeway to acquire fruit (and fruit juices), I went home, and discovered that putting all my liquor on the counter meant that I couldn't put my laptop there. My laptop, you know, with the recipe. So I did the next best thing, and called Vixy at home, making her read me the recipe. I started off by telling her the wrong recipe, leading to hilarity when she started asking me to put things I didn't have into the cocktail shaker. Oops. We recovered quickly, and I managed to combine all the correct ingredients. Only...I needed ice, and my ice was frozen solid. Cue me smacking the ice with everything I could find in an effort to chip off enough to fill my shaker. More hilarity.

Somehow, I escaped the ice without injury, and was finally able to properly mix my drink. I put it into a glass. I added lots of fruit. And I called it good.

Mai tai! (And My Little Pony, specifically, Wave Runner from the Sunshine Pony assortment. Not that I, uh, knew that or anything.)

Therein endeth the lesson.

Have you always wanted to attend one of my book events? Well, here's your chance!

The Traveling Circus will be reuniting this Saturday, September 18th, for a gala bash at Borderlands Books in San Francisco, California! Festivities will commence at five, and continue until nine, by which point the bookstore will have had more than enough of us, and will doubtless shovel us all out into the street.

Will there be music? Yes, there will be music. With Amy McNally, Michelle Dockrey, Betsy Tinney, SJ Tucker, and Brooke Lunderville in attendance, music has become unavoidable. The musicians will be back in the bookstore this time, leaving the cafe open for the consumption of delicious, delicious beverages, and even more delicious food.

Will there be a raffle? Yes, there will be a raffle. Awesome prizes are being prepared as we speak, tucked into their box with care as we get ready for the big night. All attendees will get a raffle ticket automatically; get another ticket by making a purchase at either the bookstore or the cafe (three tickets per person, maximum).

Will there be cake? Yes, there will be cake. It's Toby's one-year publication "birthday," and cake makes every birthday better.

Will there be pendants? Yes, there will be pendants. chimera_fancies will be in attendance, with a never-before-seen batch of pendants created from an ARC of An Artificial Night. They're some of her best work to date, and will be available for sale throughout the evening. Seriously, you don't want to miss these.

Remember that, if you can't attend, Borderlands is happy to take requests for signed and personalized books, and I'd be thrilled to sign a book to be mailed to you. They have all three Toby books, Feed, The Living Dead 2, and—the last time I checked—one of the last remaining retail copies of Ravens in the Library. So show up if you can, and consider placing an order if you can't!

This message bought and paid for by The Traveling Circus and Snake-Handling Show, LLC.

I am currently in studio for my fourth album, titled Wicked Girls. It's my second album recorded at Flowinglass Music, with Kristoph Klover acting as my recording engineer and musical guru. There are going to be sixteen tracks, fourteen original and two covers (one by Dave Carter, one by Brian Gunderson—see if you can guess what they are). Michelle Dockrey appears on thirteen songs. SJ Tucker appears on two. Betsy Tinney appears on three. Amy McNally appears all over the damn place, burning up the floor with her fiddle. And it's going to be...

It's going to be damn amazing.

Vixy was down this past weekend to record her parts for the album, a process that required two days in the studio, and meant I needed to record my lead vocal lines for two songs, to give her something to work against ("Wicked Girls Saving Ourselves" and "How Much Salt?"). Working with her is a joy beyond belief, because we genuinely improve each other. I am a better lyricist for knowing that she's going to play a part in making my work come to life. Several of my better songs—"Wicked Girls," "Missing Part," even "Sycamore Tree"—were written, at least in part, with her voice in mind, either as a lead or backing vocal. I am a better vocalist because I know I have to live up to what she does.

It doesn't hurt that she's, y'know, one of my best friends in the world, and also a good sport about the amount of crazy that Kristoph and I can generate when left to our own devices. We just point her at a microphone and tell her that she's good to go, and wow...wow, does she go. I sit in the booth and I listen, and I rejoice that I have such amazing people in my life.

We listened to the rough playback of "Wicked Girls," totally unmixed, totally raw. Just voices, guitar, cello, fiddle, and djembe wrestling for control. And even without the polish that Kristoph is going to use to turn it into something real, it was...heartbreaking. We both just cried.

I love my recording engineer, and I love my Vixy, and I am going to love this album. I can't wait for you to hear it.

I need to do some .PDF conversion for the Hugo/Campbell Voting Packet. Does anybody out there have the capacity and want to help me out? I can look endearing with the best of them, and may even be able to rustle up some sort of prize, assuming you don't mind risking receipt of, y'know, a bat-shaped hair clip or something.

Also, I'm just about done inputting the receipts for the "save a receipt, win a book" Toby contest, and should have a winner Monday. Tuesday is the official release date of Feed, so if you buy the book on or after this date, remember to save your receipt; I'll be having another contest, this one, hopefully, with less confusion on my end.

Keeping this short—Vixy and I are heading back to Kristoph's for a long, hard, glorious day of recording awesomeocity. So I'll catch you soon!

1) I find it really interesting how many people, when presented with a time travel thought experiment, will proceed to do things that result in their original timeline being immediately and irrevocably destroyed. Time paradox is not a cuddly kitten that you want to bring home and play with! Time paradox is bad! Remember, kids, friends don't let friends mess around with the laws of time.

2) Books I have read and loved lately: I Am Not A Serial Killer. Saltation. Freaks: Alive On the Inside (which I found at the used bookstore, signed!). Unshelved: Volume I.

3) Books I have written and loved lately: Deadline. The Brightest Fell. This is a much shorter list, and that's a good thing, because it means I probably haven't actually sold my soul to the devil. Much.

4) I love superheroes. I love Disney. I love these Disney heroines presented in glorious super-heroic style. I especially love the zombified Snow White. This is because I am, in many ways, predictable, and I am not ashamed of that fact. Not in the slightest. Nor do I think I should be, really, as my predictability makes me easy to shop for.

5) Lilly and Alice have figured out that, together, they now possess sufficient mass and surface area to prevent me from moving when they don't want me to move. This is fine when I have a book with me and nothing in the oven, but other times...not so fine. In other news, the house did not burn down, although it was a somewhat close thing. And it wasn't my fault.

6) What he said.

7) This looks like it's going to be an amazing season for movies. My favorite so far this year are How to Train Your Dragon and Kick-Ass, with The Crazies coming in as a close third, but oh! The glories ahead! Nightmare on Elm Street, Iron Man 2, Prince of Persia, Shrek Forever After, and Letters to Juliet! Splice! Even Resident Evil: Afterlife, because my love for the franchise outweighs my scars from the third movie. What a wonderful thing a movie ticket can be.

8) I appear to be thinking in almost purely short fiction terms right now, as I recover from finishing Deadline and tackle the trickier bits of The Brightest Fell. So far this week, I've finished two Toby shorts, started a third, finished an InCryptid short, and started my story for an invite-only anthology. I'm hoping I can even get a Vel piece shoved in somewhere, before the steam runs out.

9) Guess what I get tomorrow. I get a Vixy. Do you get a Vixy? No, you do not. I am not much of a gloater, but right now? Right now, oh, I'm gonna gloat. Because I get a Vixy. Of my very own.

10) Jean Grey is dead, James Gunn needs to call me, and zombies are love.

I get off work at four in the afternoon; my flight last night didn't leave the airport until nine. This left me with a five-hour gap and, since there was nothing I was really dying to go to the movies for, I decided to just head for the airport, get through security, and settle on the concourse to get some serious writing done. (I would have stopped at Borderlands to get the new issue of Locus, but their shipment hadn't arrived yet when I had to leave the office. That's what Monday is for.) I was flying Virgin America, and since BART runs literally into the SFO International Departures Terminal, getting there was a piece of cake. I like cake!

After dropping off my luggage and confirming that my flight hadn't been canceled or anything stupid like that, I started for security. Airport security encounter one: a security guard was walking by with a kind of dog I'd never seen before hauling him along as it happily sniffed its way through the airport. I stopped.

"Oh, wow! Is that the contraband dog?"
"Yes, she is."
"What kind of dog is she?"
"She's a Dutch Shepherd."
"Oh, wow. Can she check my things for contraband?"

The security guard looked surprised, but allowed as how the dog could check my things for contraband if I really wanted her to. She did so, with much tail wagging and adoration. So here's a big thanks to Susie the contraband dog, who made my travel experience safer.

From there, I went to the actual security line, where my large laptop was pulled out for an explosives swab. Cool by me. The woman doing it swabbed down the outside, and then asked if she could open it and swab inside. (Like I was going to say no? To the TSA?) I said sure, but warned her that she would encounter a lot of cat hair. She opened the laptop.

"That is a lot of cat hair."
"I have a Siamese and a Maine Coon."
"Really? I have a brown mackerel tabby!"
"Mine's a blue classic tabby and white!"

...so if you got stuck in an inexplicable delay at the SFO International Terminal security checkpoint last night, sorry about that. I was talking Maine Coons with the TSA lady.

And after all that? My flight landed forty-one minutes early. Yes, early. The pilot actually apologized for the fact that we had reached Seattle almost an hour ahead of schedule, and I got to call Vixy to tell her that I was already there. This wasn't easy, since I think she thought I was calling about a delay, not to say "come get me."

Best travel experience ever.