Lilith Saintcrow's Blog, page 182

A Moment Of Calm

It's a bright sunny day, and this morning's run took me past puddles that had frozen into swords of lace, fallen branches–the wind has been sweeping vigorously, Nature's broom–and pine needles, fat squirrels bustling about. (Shouldn't they be hibernating? You'd think they would be.) A flock of seagulls and crows (not Bartholomew's crew, a totally different set) watched me and Miss B pound past, calmly side-eying the dog who would have loved to chase them, if I'd just have unclipped the leash.

One of the things I love best about running is that it drains away all fear, frustration, anxiety, it leaves only calm in its wake. Even though last night was restless in the extreme, I still feel refreshed. Of course, that could be the jolt of caffeine I took down this morning (oh, you guys, the new machine is beautiful, and I swear to God I can feel the espresso hitting my bloodstream) and the true test will come at about 3pm this afternoon when the Valley of the Nap arrives.

In the meantime, all the agony is run off and I'm left calm and reflective. Like a nice still pond–albeit one who has to figure out how to tweak a duel and a couple sieges and stuff some more double-dealing into this book. The revisions proceed apace, and while I don't particularly like Tristan d'Arcenne, I am getting to the point where I hate him a little less. Which is all good.

See you 'round the bend…

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No More Pretty Princess
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That Gargling Sound

Hear that? The gargling sound? That's the sound of one of the worst weekends in recent history swirling down the drain. I am not sad to see it go, either. This morning's run was a pounding away of stress, frustration, anger, sadness, you name it. It was only four miles, but both Miss B and I were much calmer at the end of it. Funny thing–I was told Aussies get very attached to their owners, but I didn't realize until this weekend just how attached Miss B is. She was up with me all night Saturday, corralling and helping me handle another very sick animal, and every once in a while she would give me a low, soft, consolatory woof! and a sideways glance, clearly saying "I'm right with you, Mum. Just tell me what to do next." All damn night, and she was up with me all day Sunday dealing with fallout and cleanup. When things had finally settled down and I patted the bed last night, telling her she had earned (again) the privilege of sleeping on the Big Soft, she settled down and groaned a little, flipped an ear, and was out like a light. And this morning, she was antsy because I was needing to work some of the stress off, so we hit the pavement and went for it.

I can't talk about the rest of the weekend, because dealing with other people's thoughtless cruelty just works me up into a ball of frustration. A lot of why I write what I do is to understand. But no matter how much I can paint a picture of it, I just don't get it. It doesn't make sense to me. The frustration of my own incomprehension is very large. I keep aiming to have some sort of compassion for assholes, but it's very difficult when I simply don't get it. Suffice to say the animal is in good hands and resting comfortably, and everyone here is very glad of it.

Anyway, it's Monday, and the dread beast of Revisions is nigh. I finished the proofs for Iron Wyrm and am now hard at work on revising Bandit King. I've hit the point where I have fully realized that my editor, bless her hard little heart, is right about pretty much everything, and my ego, while staggering under the blow, has accepted it and moved on. I have to go back and tweak what work I did manage to get done through the hustle and bustle of the weekend, for I suspect I was too agonized to think clearly.

So, yeah. Any work I did in the past two days is suspect. I might as well have just lit it on fire, for all the good it's going to do the manuscript in the end. Which is a big pile of argh, but it's something fixable, something I can do, and something I understand the process behind.

I suppose I'll take what I can get.

See you around…

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2012 Goals, Short List Edition

So I've finally stopped hacking like Chekhov and popping Mucinex as if I'm Burroughs popping hash. Which is a relief, because if I added one more simile to that terrible chest cold, I'd've exploded from sheer reference.

Good morning! We made it into 2012. (Insert obligatory Ancient Mayan Prophecy joke here.) Once again I survived the holidays, a feat made easier by the avoidance of vast tracts of People Who Stress Me Out. Oh, and by the application of said vast tracts of time to hanging out with the kids and the dog. Best therapy around.

I suppose it's time for the yearly list of Goals Instead Of Resolutions. I like "goals" much better; it sounds achievable and more active than "resolutions." I can "resolve" just about anything, and escape actual implementation. (Committees and office work taught me that.) Goals, though, somewhat demand to be broken into small achievable bits, then hammered relentlessly until dead and tossed into the pile of "Done!"

This perhaps says a lot about my personality.

I have a very short list of goals for 2012. Here it is:

* Continue my habit of reading one poem per day

* Find a new historical era to research for fun

* Learn to say "It makes me tired," and move on

* Make all my deadlines for contracted books

* Attend at least one Krav Maga class

* Keep running and climbing

* Get that zombie cowboy trunk novel into reasonable first-draft shape

* Work on the second Steelflower book (Shh! You didn't hear this one…)

* Be as decent as I can every day, all day

* Accept that the cat will try to sleep on my hands while I am typing, and get over it

There it is. That's it. I can't figure out whether I'm being realistic or lazy. I like to think keeping the goals small and pretty-much-achievable saves me from a death-spiral of guilt and self-recrimination down the road. I mean, because adding another death spiral to my life has been done so many times. It's getting boring.

And now it's time for me to suit up and take Miss B for a run. She has been expressing, in several long-suffering sighs and small whines, her need for some damn action instead of just sitting around typing. Silly puppy.

Over and out.

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Got My Fire Back

Dear 2011…

So, 2011. You're headed out, no time for a chat? That's okay. *points at chair* Sit down, this won't take long.

You think that's a request? It's not. Sit down.

Thanks.

You were better than 2010 by a long shot, but that's not really a compliment, is it. 2010 sucked so hard for me, you were the year of recovery. So, measuring by that benchmark, pretty much anything you did would have been okay. I'm not denigrating your ability to suck less than the previous year, not by a long shot. No way. I'm just saying, that's not doing you justice.

In the wider world, there were earthquakes and tsunamis and wars and insurrections. There were widespread protests, and they look like they'll continue. I'd say it's about damn time, and I only hope the Occupy movement gets bigger and more widespread. So, thanks for that. I guess. But the earthquakes etc.? Not so much. Well, you can't help that, can you? Nope. You're just the year, doing your job.

In my own tiny corner of the rock called Terra, well. You sucked way, way less than 2010, and I did a lot of healing. I started the year finally-divorced and ended up actually contemplating going out to coffee with a person or two. I also made my peace with the fact that I'm never going to hear an apology from certain people, and that's just the way it is. I found out that surviving the years of survival is in some ways the hardest task, and that yes, time does heal broken things. That sort of knowledge is a spiral–you always keep coming back to it, in deeper and deeper layers. Like ogres.

I also found out I can eat lasagna again, under certain circumstances. That I can nod and smile when some of my former abusers say, "I miss you…" Well, of course you do. But you miss the idea of me more than the actual me. Which isn't really missing me at all…so I can put aside the guilt I feel. It is not my fault you miss what you thought I was instead of what I actually am. Which is a human being with actual rights, thoughts, dignity, and my own reasons for keeping those secrets you're so terrified I may tell. (Go ahead and be terrified. If it keeps you away from my door, so be it.)

But, 2011, you were all in all not so bad. You taught me how to be reasonably happy again, 2011. You weren't optimal, but then again, I wasn't at my best either. We're about even. You did what you could, and so did I. I think we can call this one a success on both sides, even if neither of us ended up where we wanted to be. Thanks for the time and the opportunity. You were very patient when I was in a hurry, and pulled me along when I really wanted to be still and stagnate. All in all, we did pretty well together, considering. I finished a few books, I had some laughs. I put in another year of raising two of the most beautiful human beings on the planet, and they managed to teach me a lot inside your (completely arbitrary, but that's another blog post) boundaries. So, thank you for that.

I see you fidgeting and eying the door. You're tired, and rightly so. You've been a hell of a year. Feels like you're just as eager to be gone as I am to see the new turn of the wheel. Still, we've got a few hours here in this corner of the world. Have a drink, and relax for a little bit. I make no demands on you–you can totes hurry out the door and slam it if you want. That's okay. But it might be so much nicer if we just hang out here, you and I, just a writer and her year, and give each other a weary smile and say, "We made it."

Yeah. We made it, both of us.

*lifts glass*

Good for us.

Related posts:
Got My Fire Back
Goodbye, 2009
Happy Solstice!

The Synchronous Mailbag

Crossposted to the Deadline Dames. Check us out!

The Dames have been answering a lot of questions lately, and I'm going to join the fun. I often get emailed the same questions by a number of different people at once; they seem to come in waves. Here are the three questions about writing I've been asked by more than five people in the last two weeks, and my answers. Enjoy!

* How do you get your ideas/How do you know if an idea is good enough for a book/What do you do when you don't have an idea of what to write? (And various permutations thereof.)

I get asked this in spates, usually about every three months. It kind of puzzles me.

Ideas are not the problem. The discipline to sit down and finish something is the problem. Being worried about "not having ideas" is kind of like living in the Pacific Northwest and being worried there isn't enough mold. If there's one thing I've never had to worry about, it's a paucity of shiny things to mentally play with. If you're reading this, you're a thinking monkey with an actively-producing-ideas few pounds of meat inside your skull; if you want to be a writer, you always have ideas swarming around inside said skull screaming to get out. There are ideas lurking in your kitchen junk drawer, in the face of every passerby, in every daydream or what-if question. Believe me, the there are enough ideas around to keep everyone busy until the sun explodes, and we won't even have scratched the surface.

How do you know if an idea is "good enough"? Short answer: You don't. Longer answer: You don't until you attempt it. After a few years of constantly attempting stories, you can develop a feel for those ideas that have some meat and legs to them, weight and heft and complexity enough for a short story or a novella, or a novel entire, or a series. You also learn, in the course of those attempts, how to scratch below the surface of a story and discover the complexity in even the simplest of ideas. This can only be learned by doing, like so much else in this line of work.

As for "not having an idea of what to write"…I have never understood that. Is that an attempt to resuscitate the old canard of writer's block? (There's a cure for that.) Is it saying "I have so many ideas I can't pick one?" That's time-wasting, and a way for your Inner Censor to keep you chasing your own tail. Pick one and go. Is it saying "I don't want to sit down day after day and do the boring typing?" Well, okay, but that defeats the purpose of being a writer, doesn't it? Writers write. It doesn't matter what you write, it matters THAT you write, and if you "can't find" an idea, the problem isn't with writing or the ideas. The problem is not opening your eyes and seeing the crowd of ideas that's screaming "PICK ME! OOOH, PICK ME!" You can go to a mall or a casino and people-watch, you can open up your kitchen drawers, you can watch a few random scenes from a movie or listen to some random songs on shuffle. The genesis of story idea is usually a "What if/Why…" question, and getting into the habit of asking yourself "what if" and "why" about things is sort of the magic set of goggles that will allow you to see that invisible crowd.

* I am a new/young writer, do you have any advice?

This is an every-six-months sort of question. I'll get twenty of them in a row every half-year, usually for summer and winter breaks. I kind of want to do a form letter to send back saying "Yes. And yes. And yes. I can only add: pay attention, and do the work."

* "How much research do you do?"

Every month I get one of these. Short answer: a LOT. Longer answer: well, everything I read is research, every movie I watch is research, every new song I find is research, every time I cook it's research. All things feed the work. If you're asking me how many or how few hours of research go into each book, I can't tell you.

For example, some of the things I researched for the Valentine series included: leaf springs (for hovers), ballistics, brushing up on human and canine anatomy and physiology, the geography of Prague, the battle of Blackbird Fields, legends of the Nephilim, the Goetia, demonology, friction, strata, relative weight of a dotanuki, ethical systems–and other things, too varied to count. The research ranged from simple questions that were answered in a few minutes by looking something up to month-long binges of reading in a particular subject, strip-mining everything I could lay my hands on. I probably research less than most authors of historical fiction, who go deeply into their chosen era, but I range pretty widely. I'm more a magpie researcher; everything I pick up goes into the storeroom and moulders into a fertile sludge there. Your mileage may vary, but I am (as is pretty evident here) a big believer in creative ferment, and in everything that goes into my head serving some sort of purpose, even if only as ballast.

So there you have it, three questions I've received numerous times over the last few weeks. I expect a new crop by the turn of the year…

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Hello, DAMNATION

Well, I finished the zombies-and-cowboy trunk novel last night. At least the zero draft. It weighs in at 65K, which is a little large for a zero draft, and means it'll be closer to 80 after I revise it into a reasonable first draft. That's not going to happen for a while, though, since I'm going right back to proof pages for Bannon & Clare (due the first week of 2012, I weep for my sleep schedule) and another round of revision on the new YA (after the first of the year) plus the drop-dead date for starting the zero draft of the next Bannon & Clare is New Year's Day. Begin the year as you mean to go on, I guess.

So last night, sweating and excited, I typed finis at the end of DAMNATION. There's a sheriff with a hidden past, a schoolmarm with a secret, a gold claim, and zombies. Lots of zombies, and some bonus vampire action. I need to go back and layer in a lot of stuff now that I know the shape of the finished work, and it may be a crappy trunk novel nobody will ever buy, but at least it is no longer a crappy unfinished trunk novel nobody will ever buy. Plus, it features a death by skillet and the immortal line "He ain't gettin any fresher." Also, horses, and a group of "frails"–saloon whores–who want to learn to read and figure so they can open their own fancy houses OR stop being cheated by the saloon manager.

…Yeah, I had fun.

I am also thinking of getting bids for help in putting some of the SquirrelTerror saga into, say, a nice thin trade paperback. It would need editing and copyediting, and perhaps an index, and I'm sure I would want to add some footnotes. And a map. So editing, CE, and formatting/design. I'm not sure if it would be viable; I'd probably spend more on the editor than I'd ever make on the damn thing, but it would please me. At the moment, it's just a thought.

I have further decided I'm not going to run until next Monday. I'm told that every once in a while you have to stop beating on the flesh and give it a slight rest so you can shock it more effectively when you restart. I am sure my body will appreciate this, though the rest of me will be cranky.

And that is all the news that is fit for something, I guess, or at least all the news I can give right now. Next year promises to be very exciting. Maybe another trunk novel will fall out of my head?

*shakes Magic 8 Ball*

Ask again later? What kind of crap is that?

Over and out!

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The Pyhrric Victory of Pelennor Sunroom

Why do these things always end up with me barefoot and screaming? It must be Fate or some shit. I have to tell you, though, it's been so long I think I don't remember what happened next.

HAHA JUST KIDDING. It's burned into my tiny monkey brain like the sight of Sean Connery in Zardoz. Anyway. When last we saw Neo, the cats, and my champion herding Aussie, they were all in my sunroom. Neo had expressed his thankfulness for me saving his psychotic squirrel ass by screaming and invading my house, and the cats had taken a vote and decided that they were going to chase the little furry demon. To be fair, Tuxedo!Kitty wanted revenge for being kicked in the head, and Lemur!Cat just wanted to chase something small and snackable without a window in the way. Cranky Old Duck Cat just wanted to be sure nobody was going to eat his share of the kibble. And then, Miss B had gotten loose, and every circuit inside her doggy skull just fused together when she saw an opportunity to heeeeeerd something.

Let's halt the action here for a second, just press the pause button, as it were, and see what everyone is doing.

See that little gray blur, vibrating in place even though we've hit pause? That's Neo. He seems to have bounced back wonderfully from being hit by a truck. His tail, however, is more crooked than ever, and perhaps it's that throwing off his balance, because he's just fallen off the sunroom table and is hanging in midair.

The cats are caught in various poses. Cranky Old Duck Cat is hunched there by the kibble, his eyes wide and his crumpled ears pinned back against his skull. He has just realized that there is chaos afoot, but as long as it doesn't come near his food bowl, he's content to simply be a spectator. Tuxedo!Kitty, that black-and-white streak there? He's hanging in midair too, spread out like a starfish and hissing, because he has just realized the noise means that the dog has joined in the fun. (More on the dog in a bit.) Tuxedo!Kitty, sweet and dumb and stupid as he is, has not adjusted well to Miss B's presence in our household. In fact, he actively plots her demise, but she thinks he's cute and fluffy. Which, of course, leads to Hijinks.

Anyway. Lemur!Cat, long and deceptively lean for such a big feline, has just hit the floor and is in the process of gathering himself to levitate again. (That DERP on his face isn't effort or the thrill of the chase, it's his natural expression. He had some…problems, growing up.)

And who is that on the table, big huge doggy grin spreading drool everywhere, caught in in the act of knocking every blessed plant off and onto the concrete floor? The one who had just landed in the middle of the catboxes, causing an explosion best left to the imagination and popping back up like a jack in the box, her battlecry ("GONNA STICK ME SOME NAZGUL, I AM NO MAAAAAAAAN!") rattling the sunroom's windows and doors? Why, it's Miss B. But wait. Because she's not just there. She's also crouched in front of the sunroom steps, head down and snaking, ready to nip at Lemur Cat's hindquarters to drive him toward the open door to the backyard. She is also on the treadmill, claws digging in as she tries to nose Squirrel!Neo out of the air and into the proper direction.

I believe I have found the source of her ability to herd. It lies in being in multiple places at once. Or maybe the pause button is defective, who knows?

Well, we've let them rest long enough. Let's hit play again.

CRASH. SHATTER. BANG. "Noooooooo! Not the plants!" My cry of despair. (I kind of understand how Faramir must have felt seeing his city get the crap beaten out of it.) "GOD DAMN YOU ALL!" Shaking the axe handle, and then, I realized…

…that I was right in the path of the hurricane, so to speak.

If you've never seen a forty-plus-pound dog on top of a picnic table, baying frantically as her claws dig in (there are gouges in the top of the table you would not believe) and launching herself like Supergirl, well, you've missed out. Her tongue was out, and she looked about as joyful as it's possible for a flying canine to look. She cleared the treadmill's arms and landed on the other side, on a long wooden bench that had been holding up yet more plants. I say "had been" because the sudden application of her force on one end had predictable results, and if I had not hit the deck I might have been brained by a flying philodendron. (It only missed the glass door by a miracle.)

A misspent youth in the middle of barfights is far from the worst training for this sort of thing. I'm just sayin'.

This left me on the floor, staring as a crooked-tailed squirrel landed, got his feet under him, screamed "GONDOR NEEDS NO KUNG FUUUUUUUUU!" and bolted past me for the yard.

Lemur!Cat, committed to his leap, actually landed on me, and he was wearing his cleats for better traction. I screamed, sort-of-crawfishing on the floor as potting soil showered down on me, and smacked him. Even though the cat is a moron, he's still incredibly agile. He twisted in midair….and collided with the dog, who dropped straight down and nipped at Tuxedo!Kitty, who did not know whether to shit or go blind at this point. The sudden appearance of an OCSA (Object of Canine Size and Appearance) was too much for him, and he bolted out into the yard. Lemur!Cat, landing on the treadmill, gave another sideways leap, but Miss B actually caught him with her nose again and heaved him, neatest trick of the week, out the door.

Then she leapt over me, paws outstretched. "FUUUUUUN!" she barked. "RIDERS OF ROHAN, TO ME, TO ME!" She landed in an explosion of bark mulch outside the open door, and I found myself bleeding and barefoot, lying on the concrete floor and clutching an axehandle, in a suddenly echoingly-empty sunroom.

Well, kind of empty. Crankly Old Duck Cat still crouched by his food bowl. "THAT WAS AMAZING," he quacked. "I'M HUNGRY."

I scrambled, aiming to get to my feet but only making it to hands and knees. Somehow spilled out the door and got my legs underneath me–look, I was not the picture of grace, but you wouldn't be either if you'd just been beaten by a cat the size of a fat raccoon and the mental horsepower of a damp brick–and halted at the edge of the pavers I'd put down so I didn't have to stand in the mud while Miss B did her business out in the yard. The stone was cold, the shirt I was wearing was never going to be the same, and I realized I was calling down curses on every animal in a fifty-mile radius at the top of my lungs.

I told you, these things always end up that way.

Out in the yard, grass flying and tongue lolling, my dog had two cats and a crazed squirrel bunched up, and she was trying to herd them. Despite a stunning display of athletic prowess and outright bi- (or tri-) location, such a feat was beyond her skill.

Still, she gave it a good go. The battle ended with Neo nipping under the juniper hedge still screaming about how he knew kung-fu, and the cats scattering like marbles dropped on the kitchen floor. Lemur!Cat squeezed under the fence near the plum tree, leaving some fur behind in the process, and Tuxedo!Kitty just barely made it to the side of the garage and through a gap there. Miss B pulled up short, saving herself just barely from crashing into the gate on the garage side of the house, shook her fur, and looked over her shoulder at her human, who was still shaking the axehandle and yelling.

"…sonofabitch," I finished lamely, and had to stop for breath. I wiped potting soil off my forehead with a damp hand–look, I was sweating, you would be too–and whooped in a deep inhale. Miss B trotted to me, her skirts switching.

"THAT WAS FUN," she announced. "MORE? THROW A BALL? PLAY? FOOD? TIME FOR FOOD?"

It was at that moment I decided that never again would I feel charitable toward a tree-rodent. It took me two days to clean up the sunroom, and one of the jade plants never recovered from the shock. (It's still shuddering and whispering "—and then I fell, and then I fell…" over and over again.) It took a week and a half for the clawmarks in my side to heal, and Lemur!Cat had to be coaxed back inside with tunafish. Tuxedo!Kitty spent the night in parts unknown, and showed up the next morning loudly bitching at the dog and actually hissing at me for good measure.

I kept a sharp eye out for the goddamn kung-fu squirrel, but I guess he had to hole up somewhere and recover from his convalescence. It was a damn good thing, too, because the next time I saw him he had an angry girlfriend punching him in the face. I guess the King of the Backyard never gets a break…

…but that's another story.

Related posts:
The Battle of Pelennor Sunroom
Another Small Victory–And Dream Pie!

Stop the gig. I want to get off.

Yesterday was a just-plain-endurance sort of day. Take kids to school, a short run, climbing–but only a short session, since I've done something to my left arm, both the biceps and the deltoid are Unhappy With Me–and a return home to clean and look after a lovely little four-year-old, the Princess arriving home (half day for everyone! Oh dear!) and a blazing-quick trip out to Cover to Cover to sign a few books, home again and the extra children picked up by their mother, dropping off the Princess at her friend's house, home again to pick up the Little Prince for his martial arts class, taking the Prince to dinner afterward, home for a brief instant to get the Prince settled and then a trip out to the Princess's school to attend her choir's winter concert. Where I stood far in the back and recorded eighth-graders singing on my phone.

The future, it is here.

This morning I took both kids to school again, and it was while dealing with the demolition derby at the middle school that I suddenly looked at the entitlement of the parents using their cars in a giant game of "MINE'S BIGGER!", and realized why America is the way it is at the moment.

*shakes cane*

Anyway, with the arm the way it is, and my nerves the way they are, I doubt there will be a run today. I just can't face it. I know I'll be itchy and cranky by tomorrow, but my body needs the time off, and frankly it's pretty raw out there.

I should mention that Squirrel Neo, the One-Eyed Scourge/King of the Backyard, is still out and about even though it is cold and raw. If tomorrow is good to me, I shall sing the Lay of the End of the Battle of Pelennor Sunroom, and afterward the Tale of Neo One-Eye and the Girlfriend of DOOOOM. But for today I have some zombie cowboy romance to write.

Over and out…

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They Are Odd And Winsome Beasts, Those Writers

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!

[image error] My tablemates were Lisa Nowak and Cheri Lasota, who were kind of hesitant about sharing table space with a lunatic, but I won them over. WITH LOVE, DAMMIT. (Not really. They found me amusing and not very frightening. Which I'm glad for.)

[image error] Chris Luna, reading a poem he wrote while half asleep.

[image error] Cheri Lasota, reading from her recently-released ebook. That's a Kindle she's holding.

[image error] Bill Cameron, reading from his "Princess of Felony Flats", a short story I now have to find and possess so I can see how it ends.

[image error] Mike Nettleton, one half of the Deadly Duo, recently unshaven. And reading!

[image error] Ron Gompertz, reading from his Hitchhiker's Guide to Ancient Rome. (He brought a helmet. Which I wore, but I can't find the picture now. IT'S A MERCY, OKAY?)

[image error] Toni Partington, reading about crows.

[image error] Ann Littlewood, holding off a tiger with a bucket and a shovel. (I am not kidding.)

[image error] My tablemate Lisa Nowak reading. (The antlers are optional.)

[image error] Carolyn Rose, the other half of the a wily, elusive Publisher! In the wild! This is PROOF! They do exist as corporeal beings, feasting on the blood, pain, and tears of–oh, I'm just kidding. Lucas is a really nice guy.

Me, I read from the beginning of Angel Town. Lots of snot and gore and heaving and maggots. I think that's why nobody wanted to talk to me afterward. See, you really cannot take me anywhere.

Special thanks to Cover to Cover for hosting the event! And for sandwiches. Also, thanks to Vito, who loomed, and the Martian Mooncrab, who brought me a lawn-gnome Christmas ornament, and to Reader Rachel W., who totally made my day.

And now I've a lunch to inhale and some more zombie cowboy to write. Over and out!

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From Faires to Witch Houses

Oh, Friday, I'm not in love. But I will consider letting you buy me dinner.

* Want to chat me up and maybe get some books signed? Come to the First Annual Author Faire at Cover to Cover Books! I'll be there Saturday, December 10, from 11AM to 3PM, along with other great authors like Bill Cameron and Lisa Nowak. I plan on drinking tons of coffee so I'm bright-eyed and manic. Should be lots of fun.

* Today I'm over at the Orbit Books blog, talking about the Hedgewitch Experiment. Any day I can use the phrase "suppository supposition" is a good day.

* Oooh, they dug up a Pendle witch house!

* Big happy doings on the YA front. I can't say much yet, but it involves a new series. I hate sitting on secrets like this, so rest assured, as soon as I can give more details, I will.

* A certain Squirrel Wonder scared the bejesus out of some guys in my front yard the other day. Which reminds me, I really have to tell you guys how that convalescence of Neo's turned out. It involves me barefoot and screaming in the backyard again. It's nice to know I'm consistent…but I'm amazed you guys aren't bored yet.

* I am starting a project. It involves wine and livetweeting my reading of Anne Rice's The Witching Hour. I did the first 25 pages the other night and had a blast. My favourite? "Hi, I'm Aaron Lightner/Rod Serling. For the next 965 pages, I'll be showing you through Anne Rice's id." I kill me sometimes, I really do.

* To the skeezy guy trying to chat up the young girl with her dog near the middle-school's soccer field this morning: my earphones weren't playing music. I just don't want to talk to people while I'm running. Consequently, I heard every word you said. And yes, I was looking at you. Because YOU ARE CREEPY. I'm glad the girl fled, and I took that extra lap around the track just to make sure you didn't follow her. I'm surprised my gaze didn't burn a hole in you. NEXT TIME IT WILL.

Yeah, Friday. It's turning out to be a doozy. Let's skip dinner and go straight to the drinks…

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