Rose-Owls and Pumpkin Girls

Tomorrow night, I will be participating in the fifth annual LitQuake LitCrawl, as one of the featured authors on the second stage of the Crawl. For the full schedule, and details on who else you can catch reading tomorrow, check out the website here:

http://www.litquake.org/category/schedule/

My stage of the crawl will run from 7:15 to 8:15 PM; I'll be showing up at my assigned venue, the lovely and ever-popular Borderlands Books, at around 6:00 PM (6:30 at the latest), so feel free to wander by, get things signed, and get yourself well-positioned for the readings to come. There are three authors reading during our assigned one-hour time frame: myself, John Levitt, and Loren Rhoads. I'm the second author up, but can't tell you exactly when I'm going to start, and I'll be reading a story you have Probably Never Encountered Before (dun-dun-DUUUUUUUUN).

This is a great opportunity to support local authors, support local literature events, and best of all, support your local bookstore. And, on a personal note, not only would I love it if you could come out, but Rosemary and Rue [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] was the best-selling mass-market paperback at Borderlands for the month of September, and it would be awesome if we could finish out October at least in the top five. So if you've been considering nabbing another copy (they make great trick-or-treat prizes!), this would be an excellent time to swing by and snag it. I'll even sign it for you. Or for anybody else you want me to sign it to.

Hope to see you there!

Current stats:

Words: 3,620.
Total words: 60,091.
Reason for stopping: finished chapter sixteen, bedtime.
Music: my soppy love songs and angry punk scramble.
Lilly and Alice: asleep on the bed and begging for attention, respectively.

When last we left our intrepid manuscript, it was four pages shy of two hundred pages (one of my big personal milestones for any book). Well, now it's two hundred and eleven pages in length, complete with the whole of chapter sixteen, which was, um, exciting to work on in so many ways. I love anything that involves Holy Feasts and fried chicken, and this book gives me the opportunity to mix-and-match the two with wild aplomb. Besides which, we are now officially at the high point of that big hill, and it's all bang-bang-boom from here, baby. Bang-bang-boom.

Sadly, while I understand that I'm currently busting pages on this book primarily because my hindbrain is occupied, stegosaurus-like, with the contemplation of the big science questions for Blackout (and this book will hence shortly be tabled again, in favor of things which have current deadlines), I could not be more pleased with how things are going. Oh, there are bits to fix and errors to catch, but on the whole, it's clean, it's quick, and it's just fun, in a way that so very few things are.

CHEESE AND CAKE!