Lilith Saintcrow's Blog, page 169

Monday Cover Reveal

Here’s the cover for the second Tale of Beauty & Madness–otherwise known as “that crazy fairytale jag Lili’s on.” Readers, meet Ellie.

A Charmer’s Ball. Midnight. And one glass slipper…

Newly orphaned, increasingly isolated from her friends, and terrified of her violent stepmother, Ellen Sinder still believes she’ll be okay. She has a plan for surviving and getting through high school, which includes keeping her head down and saving any credits she can earn or steal. But when a train arrives from over the Waste beyond New Haven, carrying a golden boy and a new stepsister, all of Ellie’s plans begin to unravel, one by one.

Just when all hope is lost, Ellie meets an odd old woman with a warm hearth and a heavenly garden. Auntie’s kindness is intoxicating, and Ellie finally has a home again. Yet when the clock strikes twelve on the night of the annual Charmer’s Ball, Ellie realizes that no charm is strong enough to make her past disappear…

In a city where Twisted minotaurs and shifty fey live alongside diplomats and charmers, a teenage girl can disappear through the cracks into safety–or into something much more dangerous. So what happens when the only safety you can find wants to consume you as well?

It’ll be out early next year, but you can currently preorder it from Amazon. As of this writing, BN doesn’t have the preorder live yet, although Powell’s does. And as always, you can preorder a signed copy from Cover to Cover Books.

Speaking of covers–you guys remember the Jill Kismet omnibus cover, right? The artist, Gene Mollica, is spotlighted over at SheWolfReads, and is giving away a signed print from his online gallery. If you liked the cover, here’s a chance to get a big ol’ signed copy of it.

And with that, dear Readers, I shall clamp a knife in my teeth and dive into my Monday.

Kiss the Toad Lily

This is my first toad lily–Samurai, I believe. I love the speckles on the flower, I love the fact that it’s a shade plant, and I flat-out adore how weird and otherworldly it looks. Between that, the Himalayan cobra lilies, and the Jack-in-the-pulpit, I’m beginning to notice a trend, sorta. *looks innocent*

In a couple years, the garden is going to be AMAZING. It’s a new thing, to put down roots like this. I felt temporary for over a decade at the old house, because it was only rented, after all. Now I finally feel like I have a place to belong. After growing up a military brat and my peripatetic life afterward, it’s a relief.

Pickling!

So yeah, I saw this Smitten Kitchen post, and got a wild hare about…pickling. This morning, bright and early, I went a-marketing for mustard seed and veggies to soak in brine. I even went a little wild…and bought some cabbage. Now, I dislike cabbage as a rule, but I’m going to see if pickling it–and making my own sauerkraut–will help me over my fear and distaste. Also, homemade sauerkraut is supposed to do good things for your gut bacteria.

And now…for the pickle odyssey! (Pickdyssey? Odypickle?)

Cup of water, cup of vinegar, sugar, salt, mustard seed…multiply as needed…

The dough bucket on the right is full of a poolish-based rye-and-whole-wheat bread dough undergoing its bulk rise. Which is in the oven as I type this. Kitchen chemistry and biology is pretty damn awesome.

Chop, chop. Chop chop chop. Chop. Chop. And chop some more.

I realized that I could spend a LONG TIME julienning everything, and realized at the same moment that I have a very spiffy food processor. This provoked a happy kitchen dance, during which I almost, almost forgot I was holding a knife.

But not quite.

There was even a bowl of odds and ends for the cavies! No cabbage, though. If they get gas and blow up like little balloons, the kids would be very upset. I’d be pretty vexed too.

That’s cabbage down at the far end, waiting for the brine all by its lonesome. I do have some sauerkraut on the kitchen counter, but the jar here is pickled instead of fermented. I am not sure how either of them are gonna pan out, I have to tell you. At least it’ll be a fun science experiment.

I had to make another batch (or three) of brine while the jars waited patiently.

Aren’t they pretty?

The aftermath. Not so pretty. Fortunately the dishwasher hasn’t given up on me yet. I

Whew. Picklin’ ain’t easy. I’ll keep you guys updated on the sauerkraut…

On Groups, Workshops, and Agendas

Crossposted to the Deadline Dames. This is a post I wrote a while back and lost when my site was hacked. I managed to find a backup copy, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, so here it is, slightly edited but still crunchy. Enjoy!

Come in, sit down, have a drink. Let’s talk about groups.

Let me begin by saying that I know writer’s groups, critique groups, and workshops do work for some people. I know a few (far too few, IMHO, but that’s beside the point) people have been helped by them. I don’t dispute that under the proper conditions and with the proper safeguards, they can be safe and fun. So can cars, stand-up comedy, juggling, and sex.

But I don’t attend workshops and I don’t have a group. I very rarely (like, maybe once a year) partake in a critique group. I am very wary of workshops and groups in general, just like I’m wary of writing “classes”. It’s all because of ersatz jolts and agendas.

Writing is hard, and support and community are good. I don’t dispute that. I do have what I consider a community, and a good beta reader. I find both invaluable–but it took me a long time to find either. I had to find people whose agendas matched mine. My agenda is to make rent as a professional writer, and to have as little bullshit as possible going on around my work. This means I have no time or patience for the usual “critique” group or workshop.

This is not the fault of the really earnest and dedicated people who organize or attend. It’s the fault of the Speshul Snoflakes and predators, conscious or unconscious. It’s also the fault of the “self-help” component of lots of classes, workshops, and groups. Let’s talk about that component first.

I don’t like self-help books for the same reason I don’t like writing books, or the diet industry. If there was a magic bullet that let you do all these things without hard work, the billion-dollar industries would tank overnight. While there might be one or two things of value in these books, people end up mistaking the effort of reading them for effort toward changing whatever it is you’re unhappy about. It’s an ersatz jolt that people mistake for real work. After a while it wears off, and you run to the bookstore, begging another self-help book to take your money and give you that jolt again.

This is the trap.

Notice that I do not dispute there is some use to self-help, writing, or diet books. But to my mind, that use is far outweighed by the risk of mistaking the passive effort of reading for the active effort of doing the damn work. I fully admit to falling into this trap over and over again until I realized nothing was changing and got disgusted with the whole thing. Even now I feel the siren song of self-help or diet books. It’s hard to resist that prettily packaged temptation.

I see a lot of talented and otherwise self-directed new/young writers getting caught in mistaking the emotional jolt of workshops or crit groups as a valid replacement for the thankless slog of writing every day, submitting and getting rejected, and just generally working your ass off for very little pay. Which, to be honest, is what writing is. I view workshops and crit groups as a nice occasional condiment, but in no way comparable to the main course. So to speak.

I realize that I come to this as a working writer with kids to feed. Mine is not the only writing “agenda”. There are hobbyists, people who don’t want/need to make a living but do want to get published, and then there are the Speshul Snowflakes. Any time you have a group setting, you have people with different agendas. And there are many people whose agendas are not about writing, per se.

These are the people with emotional agendas who hijack groups and workshops. Suddenly the group/workshop is not about writing, it’s about Them And Their Drama. They can get Passive-Aggressive, Abusive, Loud, or just plain Backstabbing And Horrid.

This is the largest reason why I don’t do groups and workshops. I have seen too many of them get hijacked by a Speshul Effing Snowflake. Or by the person who can’t take honest crit because YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THEIR GEEEEENIUS; the person that doesn’t need an editor because editors only cramp their style, dontcha know; the person who is so avant-garde and groundbreaking that The Business Won’t Understand Them–do I have to go on? If you’ve attended a group or a workshop, I will bet you money you’ve encountered one of these, or one of the many others I could list.

These people waste a lot of time. In a group, they can be toxic because sharing one’s writing is an emotionally vulnerable exercise. There are people who are writing and crit-group predators. (Any source of vulnerability/prey will draw them. This is just a fact of life.) If the group dynamics don’t exclude them and exclude them HARD, they will destroy your group, do their best to destroy your peace of mind, and move on to the next feeding-ground. So many writer’s groups have no boundaries when it comes to interpersonal behavior. Critique can get very personal with very little provocation. It’s a recipe for disaster.

With workshops, you get a slightly different class of predator–the predators who paid to be there just like the folks who honestly want to get writing practice/advice instead of drama out of the workshop. Forking over the cash does give them some rights, but not the right to completely hijack the workshop and behave inappropriately. If the people running the workshop don’t watch and set boundaries (and refuse to take any shit), the situation quickly becomes unbearably toxic, and a complete and total waste of money and time for the people who really needed to get something other than drama out of it.

Because of the emotional component of writing, and because of the way we treat creativity and artists in our society, groups and workshops are playgrounds for predators, from the sad and pathetic passive-aggressive to the finely-tuned killing machine. Writing groups implode regularly from this type of stress, so do crit groups. Perennial workshop attendees can be predators, dead weight, or people mistaking the drama and ersatz jolt of a workshop for real work. (They can even be nice people who find the workshops stimulating and useful. I don’t rule that out.)

The chance of drawing a decent writing group or attending a workshop that won’t get hijacked is, to my mind, analogous to the chance of winning the lotto or having an airplane part fall out of the sky onto your head. It CAN happen, sure. But my money is on writing every day and getting to the point where you can spot the people with Emotional Agendas, not writing agendas–and AVOID THEM LIKE THE FUCKING PLAGUE. Then you’re ready to sift through your community, online or not, and find a good beta reader or a nicely-balanced group, if you really think you need one.

Community is a wonderful thing. I have a great one, and I have a beta reader who is worth her weight in gold. Literally. (Yes, Selkie, I’m talking about you.) It took me over a decade to find my beta, and I had to function as a professional, largely on my own and without a community, for a long time before I did.

If you need a group, if you really think you need workshops, fine. If that works for you, go for it. Just be careful and watch out. It’s a dangerous jungle out there.

Good luck.

Until It Stops Working

So far this morning I’ve run 6k, finished the huge pile of shredding I had to do, and polished off the last of the cocoanut bonbons.

Yesterday I knocked off fifty pages of revisions and got my filing cabinet cleaned out and under control. (Hence the shredding.) I discovered that working in twenty-minute increments, shifting back and forth between those two tasks, made me a lot more productive than just sitting down and finishing one. thing. at. a. time. I’m sure this strategy only has limited uses, but I’m going to stick with it until it stops working.

Also in the category of things I’m going to stick with until it stops working: I’m going to a Transcendental Meditation talk this upcoming weekend. If it isn’t heavy on the cult vibe, I may even pay for the training. Or, maybe–maybe–ask for the people who know my birthday to contribute toward the course fee for said birthday next year.

I should probably explain why this is a big deal: I LOATHE my birthday. I don’t hate getting older, far from. Each year I get older is another year away from the helplessness and pain of my childhood, and that’s a good thing. I hate it because every year I would get panicked and nervous for weeks beforehand wondering what explosion would occur if things didn’t go “perfectly” according to someone else on that day. That sort of stress, year after year, has a habit of echoing. I’m happiest when that day passes in routine, with nothing special to mark it at all. I love other people’s birthdays, I just find the thought of presents or anything else on my own so stressful I’d rather lock myself in a cave during it, and for about a week on either side.

According to the few people who do know about my birthday, maybe I should learn to relax a little bit. So, I might take the plunge.

Maybe.

Anyway, I’d stay and report about the pictures I got of Josephine!Squirrel at the birdfeeder outside the kitchen window, not to mention the grazing Odd Trundles is doing for stray hay and bits of shredded paper on the office floor. (Seriously, it looks like fucking Mardi Gras in here, except no tits.) But my time for blogging is up, and I must dive into these revisions so my editor doesn’t come hunting me down with an axe.

Go on, laugh. I did too, at first.

*winks* Over and out.

photo by:


emrank

Too Many vs Aesthetic

I go back and forth between “Lili, you have too many earrings” and “Wow, you certainly have an aesthetic, don’t you.”

That being said, I want to go look at earrings at Cost Plus again. It’s an illness, I tell you.

Yon Cavy Hotel

Today THE IRON WYRM AFFAIR is a Kindle Daily Deal–$1.99!

The signing with Kate Elliott last night was a blast. I got home late (there were hijinks and shop talk, not to mention wine and tater tots) after the bookstore closed down. Kate read from upcoming work, including an upcoming YA that sounds incredibly awesome. I couldn’t decide what to bring so I offered the audience a choice: an unpublished short story or the unedited first chapter of the third Bannon & Clare book. (They chose the latter.)

I arrived home to find the house still standing and the new guinea pig cage completely assembled. The Princess had even put Bandit and Critic into said new cage, which is OODLES larger than the other one. (I think bandit is still vexed with me,” she informed me with a grin.) The little fellows are quite pleased with all the new space, and with the loft area full of toys. For those interested, it’s a coroplast and grid cage from here. I have to say, both the customer service and cage quality from that particular site were awesome. I highly recommend them if you have the little critters.

I mean, just LOOK at the thing.

Of course, I can’t reach my cork board behind it, but that’s a small price to pay for happy, healthy little cavies. They’re burbling as I type this, munching on sugar snap peas and just generally chillin’ in their new digs.

Anyway, today’s for recovery and getting final revisions on Ellie’s story done so it can head off to that magical land where they make galleys.I must be getting old, trundling home late makes me logy the next day.

Over and out!

Signing at Powell’s!

Tonight at 7pm, I (and my anxiety) will be signing at Powell’s Cedar Hill Crossing with the fabulous Kate Elliott! I still haven’t figured out what to bring to read, and may just do a Q&A. Nothing I’m working on now feels good enough to read in public, but if I do bring a reading, it will probably be the first chapter of the third Bannon & Clare book.

After much thought, I have decided not to bring the zombie gnome this time. I may be able to remember some fresh-clipped rhubarb as I run out the door. (The things I do for my fans.)

Anyway, come on out and see me! It will be a huge hoot. I’m told I’m hilarious when I’m nervous in public. And I’ll be wearing heels, so the hijink possibilities are endless! Note that if you bring me booze (or a llama) I’ll be your best friend. At least until the booze wears off and/or the llama evacuates upon the bookstore carpet. Powell’s sort of frowns on that, even if I’d be thrilled to sing “Me and My Llama”. Especially after booze.

See you there!

photo by:


Daniela Vladimirova

Events, New Editing Packages, and Rhubarb

If you want to meet me, I’ll be signing with the fabulous Kate Elliott at Cedar Hills Crossing Powell’s on Tuesday, July 9th, at 7pm. (That’s tomorrow.) I’m trying to figure out what to bring to read–maybe some of the third Bannon & Clare book, though it’s just in first draft form? I don’t know. I’ll think of something. Mostly I’ll just be keeping the crowds from crushing my fellow author.

I do possess a dress, and I might wear it. You’ve been warned.

In other news, I’m offering a brand-new editing service–full manuscript edits! That means that for $150 plus $1.75 per (properly formatted) page, you get a thorough, hard-core Track Changes edit from Yours Truly. The manuscript must be finished, but it can be any length–novella, short story, novel. I won’t contract for series and there may be an additional charge for anything over 100K words. Also, my waiting list for 25-page edit packages has just opened up.

Between all that and cleaning the cavy cage (my God, can those rodents eliminate!) I’m working on Ruby’s story and gearing up to research Hong Kong at the turn of the century. I may end up having more work than even I can handle, which is a great place to be in.

So, I guess if you’re around, I’ll see you on Tuesday. I may be bringing rhubarb from my garden for a certain fan…

GNOMEPOCALYPSE

I found my old Gnomepocalypse pics this morning, and thought I might as well resurrect the event, which is part of what was lost when my site got hacked. I had an incredible amount of fun doing this–it was back in the old house, which was good for some things, and the Princess still remembers me chortling with glee as I staged each shot.

A Box has arrived! It is strangely heavy. What doom lies within?

“Mum, what did you do this time?”

“Oh, you’ll see. YOU’LL SEE.”

 

 

What is it? Is it animal, vegetable, mineral? It reeks of rotting concrete. And fear.

“It looks like a mummy.”

“Oooooh, close. But more rotting and less love story.”

“No O’Connell?”

“Not in this box.”

 

 

 

It claws forth, hungry and slow, one tiny bubble pop at a time.

Crunch.

Pop.

Crunch.

Pop.

“MUM JUST OPEN IT.”

“Why, when I can make you suffer with anticipation?”

 

 

Investigating the strange new beast. It is slow, but it has teeth. Not particularly dangerous, as long as you keep moving.

“It’s a…gnome.”

“A ZOMBIE gnome.”

“Mum, you’re weird.”

“I know.”

 

 

“THIS GARDEN IS SMALL. I REQUIRE MORE SPACE. AND MORE BRAAAAAAINS.”

“What are you doing?”

“Documenting our new arrival for posterity. What does it look like?”

“Don’t make me answer that.”

I suspect this was the point at which the Princess began to feel faintly alarmed at the amount of fun I was having.

 

“WHAT IS THIS? IT BURNSSSS USSSS, PRESHUSSSSSS. NASTY ELVES MUST HAVE MADE IT.”

“Please stop with the Gollum voice.”

“No can do, preshussssss.”

 

 

 

“NOW WE MAY SEE OUR PREY BETTER, YES. AND THE SMELL, IT HIDES US. MINTY FRESH!”

“You know your face squinches up when you do that?”

“You can’t do Gollum with a straight face. Ask Andy Serkis.”

“…oh yeah, when I meet him, I TOTALLY WILL.”

 

 

“NATURE FULFILLSSSSS US, PRESHUSSSSS. BEAUTY MAKESSSSS US HUNGRY.”

“It’s a concrete zombie gnome. What does it eat?”

“Brains.”

“What kind?”

“I don’t want to get close enough to find out.”

“And yet you’re taking pictures.”

“Shut up, kid.”

 

 

“SINGLE ZOMBIE GNOME SEEKS BRAAAAAAINS. LOVES STALKING PREY, CLIMBING TREES, AND PINA COLADASSSSSSS. AVOIDS RAIN–IT ROTS US QUICKER, YESSSS.”

“You’re not going to put the gnome in a TREE, Mum.”

“OH YES I AM. Look, it’s like a profile pic for online dating!”

“Oh God, don’t tell me you’re online dating.”

“No, the gnome is.”

 

“PEEKABOO! I SEE YOUR BRAAAAAAINSSSSSS!”

“Mum, seriously?”

“Shhh, the gnome is HIDING.”

“Mum, this is weird.”

“Don’t sound so surprised. You’ve lived with me for HOW LONG?”

 

 

 

“OOOOH, PAINT ME LAHK ONE OF YOUR FRENCH ZOMBIES.”

“Oh. My. God.”

“*laughing too hard to speak*”

“Mum? Can you breathe?”

“*still laughing*”

“Oh God, my mother’s been killed by a concrete zombie gnome…”

“*laughs harder*”

 

All of a sudden, Phil had the odd feeling that he was being…watched.

“What am I going to tell my friends?”

“That this is what happens when you feed a garden gnome after midnight.”

“What does that mean?”

“…God, I feel old.”

“Okay, that’s creepy.”

“Don’t look away. When you look away, they move.”

“MOTHER!”

Good times, man. Good times. Beware the gnomepocalypse…

You can find your own zombie garden gnome here. Go on, thank me later…