Ragged Feathers

There’s an interview with me over at the USAToday Happily Ever After blog. In which I talk about stealing time, how I know when a series is done, and what I say to people who look down on genre.

Also, this past weekend was the first annual Author Faire at Cover to Cover Books. It was a roaring success, even if I do say so myself. Picturespam after the jump!

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

Steel-toed boots. Eyeliner. A good-quality trenchcoat. A Zippo, just in case. A pocketknife, a handkerchief or two, electrical tape, and a tiny first-aid kit. These are the things no girl should be without. You can, I suppose, substitute duct tape, but a roll of that is kind of hard to stick in a pocket. Though I have. Once or twice. Just to be sure.

“You need chains,” the Selkie told me, and proceeded to equip me with such. They go in the back of the car, along with the two first-aid kits (softcover survival and hardcover medical), the gallon of distilled water (great for washing the floormats after Sir Pewksalot gets excited), some rolled-up towels, bungees (you can never have too many) and granola bars, the roll of toilet tissue and the extra plastic bags knotted up and stuffed into a milk crate. Antibacterial handi-wipes and extra ibuprofen in the center console, a Sharpie, a tiny tub of Carmex (even if it melts, it will be okay, unlike a tube) and a multi-tool that can break a car window and slice a seatbelt…just in case. Ice scraper. Extra dog leash.

In the garage: the axe handle, the heavy bag, canned supplies and water, extras and just-in-cases on shelves next to the decorations and the boxes of author’s copies. (Maybe I could chuck them at an intruder. That might work.) In the house: bokkan scattered about, the linen closet stocked with first-aid and cold medicine and light bulbs, cleaning supplies, and a weapons check every day. Going through each room and making sure that no matter where I am there is a weapon within easy reach. It doesn’t have to be anything someone else would think of as a weapon, just something I can use for self-defense. Even the souvenir rocks from road-trips can be chucked at a poor soul who won’t know what hit them until too late.

Baby wipes. Sleeping bags. Extra umbrella. Go bags by the front door, both for paranormals (haven’t had a client in years, but still keep it packed and ready) and for emergency/disaster. Important paperwork stashed. Extra pens. Scarves hanging on pegs, gloves in a bucket just in case, flashlights checked and batteries tested. Charcoal, tealights, another survival kit, spare sheets for God knows what, a stack of rag-towels for sopping up spills or ripping into bandages. A stack of old cloth diapers, because they are useful. Cat litter, not just for the cats but also for cleanup of who-knows.

I was told, all during my childhood, that I was flighty. That I’d never make it in the real world, because my head was in the clouds. Instead, I’m the one with a stick of gum, the aspirin in the bottom of the purse, the pocketknife, the GPS or the candle or the cigarette lighter. Motherhood taught me some of that, but my instinct, even while living rough, has been to prepare, as far as possible, for whatever.

I am either going to be in great shape when the zombie apocalypse hits…or on an episode of Hoarders. It’s anyone’s guess which.

The weird thing is, I still think of myself as stupid and flighty. I still have the knee-jerk “oh, I’m a mess, I’m never prepared,” even when I’m the one with the spit and baling wire. I am rarely caught-without in any major way, which is probably helped by the fact that I’ve lived in this house for a good decade now. Which is another thing–even after that long, I’m ready to move at any moment. Ready to pack and torch and flee if necessary. I always have been, but if it hasn’t been necessary for the past ten years, well.

My point (and I do have one) is that readiness is a process, and that I am rarely as helpless as I am afraid I might be. As life lessons go, it’s a good one. I just wish I could get it into my skull so I could relax. Well, at least fractionally. But until that happens, it’s the trenchcoat and a pocket check before I leave the house. It’s checking the go-bags every month and eying the linen closet weekly. It’s packing for just in case and hauling what I might need if disaster, either physical or otherwise, hits. It’s getting ready, being ready, as a state of mind.

What do you do to get ready, kids? I’m interested. I’m always looking for readiness tricks to shamelessly steal borrow. Yeah, borrow. That’s it.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

A quick note/reminder: I am attending the Sci-Fi Fantasy Authorfest at Cedar Hills Crossing Powell’s Sunday (tomorrow) at 4:30PM. Due to the flu I may have to leave a trifle early, but I will definitely show up and stay as long as I can to sign books and caboodle. Other fantastic and much more interesting authors like fellow Dame Devon Monk and Ursula LeGuin will be there, too. So come on out and have a good time!

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

So we made it to Spokane for SpoCon. The trip was not without its hazards, including one episode of carsickness (thank the gods for all-wheel drive; when one ends up in the construction gravel on the side of a road going up the Gorge it’s nice to know one’s trip isn’t over.) that a pair of bemused survey guys from the county curiously watched me clean up after, lunch at the weirdest Subway on earth (don’t ask) and Spokane desperately trying to keep me from entering its environs. (Oh, I90, you gave it a good go, but I’m more determined AND tougher than you, m’dear.) So here we are. The kids enjoy hotel television (Looney Tunes! In the wild! OMG!) and my first panel starts at 2:30pm.

For those of you wondering, my con schedule is here. Expect live-Tweeting and shenanigans. (They do have a bar here. I’ve checked.)

Onward!

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

It is just way too bright and sunny today. And it’s a good thing I’m damn stubborn, or I would have quit after three miles today and not had that awesome endorphin-kick runner’s high. Not to mention the drift of honeysuckle, the cheerful “good morning”s from other runners–I content myself with a “Morning!” in return, because I can’t be cheerful while struggling to stay upright and moving. I would have also missed having the shaded park all to myself for a few glorious circuits. That was nice.

So, announcements!

* If you’ve ever wondered how Selene returned to Saint City, you can read the brand-new Selene and Nikolai story, Just Ask in the upcoming Mammoth Book of Hot Romance.

* Also upcoming is Reckoning, the final book in the Strange Angels series. The end of August will see a bindup of bboks one and two, Strange Angels and Betrayals with an all-new, lovely cover.

* November will also see the final Jill Kismet book, Angel Town.

* You can now buy all five of the Dante Valentine novels in one smoking-hot omnibus. (Personal demon not included, sorry.) Also, Graphic Audio has released parts one and two of Working For The Devil, I believe part 1 of Dead Man Rising is also available.

* I will be attending SpoCon in August. Not quite sure what my schedule will look like, but I’ll be there on panels etc. I will also be at the Cedar Hills Crossing Powells annual SF/F Authorfest in ?November?, more details on that as it gets closer.

* There’s an interview with me up over at the Gatekeeper’s Post.

* I can’t really talk about this yet, but it’s up on Amazon. Tempty tempty.

* A big “welcome home” shout-out to TP, back from the wilds of Europe. *evil wink*

…I’m sure there’s something I’ve forgotten, but I haven’t even finished my coffee yet, so forgive me. Off I go to find a name that means “a hunter” for a wooden garden-boy. He wants Calhoun, but I’m not sure he should have it. He’s not the protagonist, so he doesn’t really get what he wants as far as names.

Damn characters. Over and out.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

Neat stuff–I’ll be participating in tomorrow’s TorChat!

Also, Chicks Kick Butt, featuring an Eleni and Tarquin story, Monsters, is now out. I love Monsters–I very much wanted to tell a vampire-hunting story from a vampire’s point of view, and Tarquin has been knocking around in several unfinished stories for a very long time. He and Leonidas are great characters, Eleni surprised me as a protagonist, and I very much like Wolf. Maybe I’ll get to go back to them someday.

In other news, still going full-bore on the alt-Renaissance-France story I can’t really say anything about. Keeping it under-hat is pretty much killing me, but there it is. Anyway, I came to a fresh realization yesterday about how much writing freaks me right the f!ck out.

It was another instance of a secondary character, one I didn’t much care for, suddenly becoming incredibly useful and necessary to the story. I’ve learned to obey that little tingle that tells me just wait, this is important, leave it in. Sometimes I don’t even notice, I’m in that creative fugue state and when I look back over the wordage, I flat-out have no memory of writing it or inserting some detail that turns out to be incredibly important later. This is particularly eerie when I’ve reached an impasse and have backed up to take a look at the bigger structure of the story–and I find, half-buried in the sand, a priceless artifact I had no idea even existed.

I can’t figure out which weirds me more: obeying the internal tingle that tells me a minor character or detail will be important later, or having absolutely no memory of writing something that turns out to be critical to the later parts of the story.

Of course, I could just be losing my mind or amnesiac. That’s always a possibility.

Oh well. Back to the word mines…

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

Holy moly, was last night intense. As usual, Peter H. and Milo and the rest of the crew at Cedar Hills Crossing Powell’s made everything run smoothly, and the crowd was amazing! (Special thanks to my inimitable writing partner, who did the driving for me.) Ilona and Gordon were Fabulous with a capital Fab, and Dame Devon was, as usual, gracious, prepared, supportive, and just all-around fantastic. I was not arrested or thrown out. Everyone wins!

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Lili, shut up and get to the damn pictures. Okay.

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

I can’t afford to get sick. I have too blasted much to do. Unfortunately, my body is not listening, recalcitrant thing that it is.

For those of you asking: I don’t know what’s going on with Those Who Fight Monsters. It was supposed to ship in March; the publisher will have a clearer idea of what’s up. (ETA: There’s a giveaway here.)

I’ve also finished the Gormenghast novels. I was ambivalent about Titus Groan, I quite liked Gormenghast, but Titus Alone lost all the goodwill the first two books earned. (Can we please stop having the Callow Adventurer being so Irresistible To The Laydeez? GAH.) Peake’s genius for names and the decaying Gothick splendour of the castle itself were magical, and I could even see the first two books as a sort of social allegory. Steerpike was my favourite character, with Fuschia and the Doctor as close seconds; but Peake betrayed every single woman in the book dreadfully. Anything with ovaries was a cipher, and not a very well-drawn one at that. However, props to Peake for taking Steerpike to his logical conclusion, and not flinching. I said it before and I’ll say it again: I think Dr. Prunesquallor was Peake himself, and Titus was what Peake wanted to view himself as. This leaves Steerpike as the id, or the Shadow. (My vote is for Shadow, but I might be biased.) Once Steerpike was gone, the book ended. If the story belongs to the character that changes the most (as Laura Kalpakian, I believe, said, though I’ve attributed it before to Karen Fisher), then the Gormenghast books belong to Steerpike.

End result: I’m glad I read it, though I probably never will again. I may go back to Gormenghast and read for Steerpike, but that’s about it.

A majority of this weekend will be spent sucking on cough drops and helping with the grand reopening of Cover to Cover, my favourite local indie bookstore. I was down there today, breathing in the new paint fumes as bookcases (recently cleaned of smoke, the old location suffered a dreadful fire) were carried in, as well as various sundries–and I just got a call telling me that the gigantic ziggurat of book boxes was making its way into the store. The books were lovingly cleaned and taken care of by the staff at Servicemaster (who have been incredibly wonderful, and gentle, thorough, and kind) and are almost ready to go up on the shelf. We just have to drag the shelves around and reassemble them.

So yeah, there’s my weekend. There will be pizza, and sore muscles, and a great deal of dust and excitement. All in all it’s a good way to finish saying farewell to a character or two. The old Cover to Cover saw many a long discussion with my writing partner, where we both hashed over aspects of a book (hers or mine, didn’t matter) or generally noodled on about writing. Soon we’ll start treating the book-lined walls of a new place to long discussions of plot and genre and animus, pop culture and lit fic and ships and seas and sailing wax, cabbages and kings.

You can tell I’m excited. I have a ton of pictures from the moving in. Including pictures of Shirley the penguin, perched on a high shelf as is her wont, staring dramatically at the ceiling. (Yes, we have a two-foot high plastic penguin, and her name is Shirley. Just one of the many reasons I love this store.)

Oh, and there’s more trouble to get Bannon & Clare into as well. I think it’s about time they met an Adventurer…

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

Crossposted to the Deadline Dames. Check out our new shiny!

Good afternoon, my dears. A couple things, then a small Friday post, then off into the wild blue yonder.

* If you look at my events calendar, you’ll see I’m at the Auburn, WA, public library tomorrow (Saturday), and on Sunday I’m at the Cedar Hills Crossing Powell’s for the SF/F Authorfest. I’ll gladly sign books at both events, though there will be no books for sale at the Auburn library. I’m beginning to get pre-event nerves (nobody will show up, my heart will stop from sheer terror, someone will throw rotten fruit, etc., etc.) so I will just content myself with saying, if you’re in the area, both events promise to be a lot of fun.

* Want to know what makes me feel really, really unclean, and not in a good way? This article about James Frey preying on creative writing graduates.

This is the essence of the terms being offered by Frey’s company Full Fathom Five: In exchange for delivering a finished book within a set number of months, the writer would receive $250 (some contracts allowed for another $250 upon completion), along with a percentage of all revenue generated by the project, including television, film, and merchandise rights—30 percent if the idea was originally Frey’s, 40 percent if it was originally the writer’s. The writer would be financially responsible for any legal action brought against the book but would not own its copyright. Full Fathom Five could use the writer’s name or a pseudonym without his or her permission, even if the writer was no longer involved with the series, and the company could substitute the writer’s full name for a pseudonym at any point in the future. The writer was forbidden from signing contracts that would “conflict” with the project; what that might be wasn’t specified. The writer would not have approval over his or her publicity, pictures, or biographical materials. There was a $50,000 penalty if the writer publicly admitted to working with Full Fathom Five without permission. (Inside Full Fathom Five, p. 3)

In case you’re wondering, these are bad, bad terms. They’re the sort of terms Guy Pearce’s Warhol offered Sienna Miller’s Edie Sedgwick, only without the initial friendship. Or the sort of terms Lord Ruthven might have offered one of his victims. I’ll just content myself with noting that Frey’s earlier hijinks make me feel filthy about this in a way that James Patterson’s or VC Andrews’s ghostwriters don’t. Also, dude, if you’re a rebel, you don’t need to go around saying what a rebel you are. Henry Miller would kick Frey’s ass for presumption.

“But wait!” you might say. “Nobody’s forcing these people to sign with Frey’s company! He’s not holding a gun to their heads or anything!”

True. But Bernie Madoff didn’t hold a gun to anyone’s head either; scam artists don’t have to and we still prosecute them–or at least, evince some distaste for their methods. As a professional, I cannot condone Frey’s behavior and I hope one or two aspiring writers might decide in light of that article not to lend themselves to this nastiness. ‘Nuff said.

* Also, while I’m in take no prisoners mode, there’s the same kerfluffle there is every year over NaNoWriMo. (No, I’m not linking to the kerfluffles. They make me tired.) NaNo is great for one thing: teaching aspiring writers to shut up, sit down, and make writing a priority. That’s great, and it’s just the sort of lesson a lot of people who want to write often need. But writing only one month out of the year is not a good way to maximize your chances of producing quality, publishable work. That’s like saying a two-hour class can teach you to safely be a trapeze acrobat. I’m not knocking NaNo–I’ve participated several times, and plan to participate next year. It’s a good thing, but it’s not the sole means of becoming a writer or of learning to consistently produce publishable work.

Anyway. I promised another process post, didn’t I?

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.

I should know better than to declare any day a mental health day. It only leads to trouble. Still, all’s well that ends well, and it’s only 11AM.

How was your Samhain, dear Reader? Ours was fabulous. The pumpkins were carved, the trick or treating was accomplished–and let me tell you, I’m shocked that the Little Prince was finished only an hour or so into the trick or treating; in my day we went until the porch lights flicked off. It was a couple of very tired, very happy little ones I put to bed after the ceremonial burning of the New Year wishes on perfumed joss paper. This is the only holiday I really go all-out for, and I love it every year. I even attended a party this year. Our across-the-street neighbors threw a Halloween bash, and I went to a real actual grown-up, social party. It’s been years.

You can tell I don’t get out much.

I had an extra pumpkin, so today I’m attempting to make pumpkin butter for the very first time. We’ll see what happens. Also this week, I think I’ll attempt curried squash soup. I feel the need for comfort food, and although I hate squash with a passion (long long story) I’m told the soup is quite good. Curry will overcome my squash-loathing.

News! I will be announcing the winners of the Release Week giveaway on Friday. On November 13 I’ll be at the Auburn Public Library, from 2-3PM. I’ll be talking about how much I love libraries, the Strange Angels series, and answering all sorts of questions. You can bring your books, too, and I’ll sign them. No word yet on whether we’ll have books to buy.

I’m also trying to get together another giveaway for the newsletter. I know I haven’t sent out a newsletter in a while, but it’s about time. It’s just been…well, you know. Even if I don’t say much about it here, I think it’s obvious that the past two years have been…interesting. Thank goodness everything is calmed down and getting back on track now.

Also, today is the first day of NaNoWriMo. I’m not sure I’m participating this year; I have to see what my revision load for the last Kismet book is. If I do participate it will probably be something steampunky. If you’re doing NaNo this year, yay for you! Count me in for cheerleading you on!

That’s about all the news for right now. There is more SquirrelTerror, but I have to wait until I can really sit down and do it justice. Frankly I’m a little creeped out by the whole thing, but…well, you’ll see.

Anyway, today is for recuperating from Halloween. (“Candy is goooood,” the Little Prince chimes in.) And the pumpkin in the oven is starting to smell kind of…good. I’ll wait until the molasses and sugar and apple cider vinegar is added to really make my decision on the whole pumpkin butter thing.

Over and out!

Posted from A Fire of Reason. You can also comment there.