Kim Harrison's Blog, page 72

That was a great adventure

There is a brew-ha currently going on over the last Sookie book, the ending of which was leaked by a disgruntled reader, and die-hard readers are being both wonderfully supportive and aggressively loud in their disappointment of the final book’s direction.

I’m trying to stay out of it because my opinions don’t matter, but I did voice my sympathy to Charlaine that her final book’s ending was leaked by an unhappy reader. I’ve had my joys trumped by one person before, and it’s very sour.

So now I’m waiting for the noise to spill onto my boards, as it usually does, and I’m asking up front that unhappy Sookie readers don’t threaten me with not reading my books if “you do what Charlaine did.” The books are what they are, and though you can’t please everyone, if you are the one spending the year writing, rewriting, copyediting, proofing, and creating . . . then you ought to please yourself, especially in long running series that have encompassed a decade or more of your life.

It’s the writer’s job to take the reader on a journey. Not all the turns will be the ones the reader would take, but if the writer does his/her job, the reader will always look back and say “that was a great adventure.”

Read it before you decide it wasn’t.

Spring’s spring is broke

Ya know, I grew up in Michigan, eh? So unpredictable weather is not unusual for me, but yesterday’s snow was totally unnecessary. At least it didn’t stick. Fortunately most of the trees have only flowered, if that, and no new leaves were damaged. Tulips look nasty, but they will perk back up, and the daffs, as you can see, are fine. (Boom baby!)

We’ve got one more cold night of hovering around freezing where I live, and then it supposed to warm back up again. The maple syrup crop is the only one that does well with warm day temps and below freezing temps at night. It keeps the sap moving from roots to crown and back again, and I’m looking forward to a good local harvest. Also, I’m seeing bees, tons of bees at my front corner garden where I put in pansies two weeks ago. I’m hoping they are there for the pansies and not making a nest. It’s hard to tell with them flying six inches off the ground the way they are. And if you’re not familiar with pansies, they can take the cold. Sometimes, they even overwinter.

I’ve started a new soft sculpture project. Doesn’t that sound more exciting than knitting? Found this at Ravelry, (Kim at Ravelry) but because I’m a cheap SOB, I won’t pay for the pattern and am making one up on my own. (Seriously, it’s not that hard of a pattern, and I’d only modify it anyway.) Soon as I get my act together, I’ll get up a picture of my stable of horses. One still needs ears.

 

Queen of the geeks? Almost!

Apparently Kindle had a contest as to who is king and queen of the geeks, and amazingly, little old Kim Harrison came in as first runner up after Ms. JK Rawlings! So if the procession was real, it would be Rawlins and Whedon as queen and King, Me and George RR Martin, Steven King and Charlaine Harris, Neil Gaimen and Stephenie Meyer, and JJ Abrams and Suzanne Collins.

What a lovely group to be in! I don’t terribly mind being first runner up in a contest of geekness, especially when the company is so good, but I did take a moment to reassess my life.  I mean, a geek? But alas, I fear they are perhaps correct. Take off the nail polish and classy boots, and under is is a woman who built her website over a decade ago and continues to maintain it, has more social electronic outlets than face-to-face ones, and spends more than 90% of her work day with fingers on keys and eyes on screen. Where’s my geek flag? Maybe I should knit one! (Oh God, they’re right . . .)

But I did find one thing interesting. Of all the wonderful name in that list, there is only one who never had his/her work translated to TV or big screen. It’s a pretty good feeling knowing my work has stood on its own that well against that much publicity. A lot of that success is at your feet, and I thank you for it again.

Link to original article. http://www.kindlepost.com/2013/04/and-the-king-and-queen-of-the-geeks-are.html

A touch on my shoulder

So, my grandparents passed a few years ago, a bare handful of weeks apart, but we have since moved to where they grew up and lived, where I grew up, actually, and the memories are thick. It feels good. But yesterday, it was as if my grandfather touched my shoulder and smiled, reminding me how close the ties are though we may believe they are sundered or even not there. It wasn’t that big of a thing either, just me being me, and him having been him, and all of this circled around a silly word that I’d found the week before while looking up the spelling of something else.

The word had sounded familiar enough that I paused and checked out the definition, wanting to know if there would ever be a time I could use it, and, seeing as it basically means being calm under pressure due to having a pattern of action, I decided I could. Even so, it’s one of those words you can only use once a book, though I will probably limit myself to using it once ever four due to its uniqueness. I wanted to use it, and I wanted to use it bad.

As it happened, my family was over for dinner that weekend, and when the conversation turned to what I was up to, I brought out my shiny new word with the help of Thing Two going out to my office for the sticky note I’d written the word on. We had a laugh over it, and everyone that night worked with a sangfroid calmness as we cleaned the table and packed up the leftovers.

The touch on my shoulder came a few days later when my mom emailed me to tell me that she had, in a quiet moment, pulled out my Grandpa’s dictionary, the one he always marked unique words he found while reading and wasn’t sure of their meaning. My new word was marked. And I felt a kiss on my cheek and a pat on my shoulder . . . and I smiled.

EVER AFTER sale over, but . . .

The bookseller sponsored weekend sale of Ever After that happened this weekend is over! Thank you everyone who liked or commented on my “heads-up” posts I did on FB in order to help get the word out. Because of your likes at FB, my post went to ten times the number of people it usually would. (3000 vs 30,000 in one case. Yes, you might have signed up for getting all my posts on FB, but they treat celeb pages different from regular accounts and only well-”liked” posts of FB go to a large number of people. The rest simply don’t get them.)

But the 7.99 sale, in any case, is over, and I hope you had a chance to take advantage of it, either to expand your e-library, or maybe gift it to a friend to try to get them hooked. If not, there are still some inexpensive ways to round out your library or perhaps find a new author to sample. Jocelynn Drake is having a mega sale on her entire series (to celebrate the upcoming release of DEAD MAN’S DEAL), which you can pick up for .99 each. Seriously! I’m going to give you a couple of links, but to get the deal from her, check out her post from a few days ago: http://jocelynndrake.blogspot.com/2013/04/dark-days-asylum-tales-on-sale.html or if you already are familiar with Jocelynn’s work, you can jump right to the sellers and scarf up some serious bookage.

Jocelynn Drake’s Kindle Page on Amazon

Jocelynn Drake’s Nook Page on Barnes & Noble

Jocelynn Drake’s Page on Kobo

Also, Vicki Petterson’s CITY OF SOULS is on sale for .99 at Amazon. I’m not sure if it’s a real sale or an artifact from over from her last sale, but there it is.

 

Me, I’m working on Grace again. This baby is going on paper and I’m so excited! Had a break through Friday on one of the characters, and it’s all going to work, and work well.

EVER AFTER 7.99 e-book sale

It started with Barnes and Noble, and it’s spread to Amazon! If you’ve not yet picked up EVER AFTER, or you want a more portable version, or just trying to get your buddy hooked on the Hollows, this is a very good chance to do it at a drastically reduced price. For a short time, here’s the links to the Kindle and Nook 7.99 special.

Amazon Kindle: special Ever After price http://www.amazon.com/Ever-After-ebook/dp/B0089LOHT2/ref=sr_1_1_bnp_1_kin?ie=UTF8&qid=1366423510&sr=8-1&keywords=everafter+Kim

Barnes and Noble Nook : special Ever After price http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ever-after-kim-harrison/1111398042?ean=9780062228154

Blank page

I’m looking at a blank page this morning. Yay! Decisions, decisions . . .

The computer will be off today, and I might actually bring out a footstool and sit in a chair with pencil and paper. Time to do some brainstorming. What goes down today will be crap, but from crap springs the best flowers, right?

Wish me luck. This is going to take a while.

Have a great weekend! I’m heading off to see the latest Tom Cruse move tonight. I need to see something so dingy and sharp you could get tetanus from it.

I love me some weather channel

We had a series of storms blow through last night, and by the looks of it, we’re going to get the same today and tonight. I don’t mind too much since we need the rain, but I hope we don’t lose power. I also I hope that  the jet stream is done vacationing in Mexico and swings back north where it belongs. I don’t want any of that snow, and though the Great Lakes afford us some heat-sink protection, it’s still kind of early in the season for the water to have absorbed that much heat.

Here’s hoping . . . It feels too much like spring to have even a dusting right now.

Green Stuff

I love this time of year when it is 6:00 pm and the sun is still up. I know that later on, it will be almost 10:00 before the sun goes down, but right now I’m still enjoying the novelty of the sun shining when I finish work. My daily walks around the house have become more interesting with green things popping up and squirrel divots caving down. I’m trying blood meal this spring as a way to keep them out of my moss, which can’t take being dug up like that. We’ll see if it works or I end up killing my moss with the Ph shift. Maybe I’m not changing anything that drastically, but moss can be funny like that.

This year, I’ve got a bunch of spring bulbs coming up for the first time. The Siberian Iris are brand new to me, and I hope they naturalize. I had to take a picture when I came home from a walk and found the late sun falling almost horizontal on them, though you really can’t see it from this photo.

I Siberian Iris

I’ve got them in my miniature garden, which was kind of a happy accident. When we moved in three years ago, this bed was overgrown with junipers, bulbs (which I’m still trying to get out) bluebells, (again, still trying to control) and rocks. I spent about 40 hours over a couple of weeks thinning out the junipers to make them bonsai-like, and added more rocks since we had a pile of them from the basement-tidy, and then moss, since that was what was in my yard. It turned out great, and there’s still enough to do with it to keep me busy for an hour when I feel like it, instead of all weekend when it was brand new. Now you see miniature gardens with fairies and such all the time, but I’d never heard of them when I started ripping out junipers.

Long Game

You ever have someone do something for you unexpected and yet totally on the mark? I’m not talking about letting you go first at a stop sign or the grocery store line, though those moments are nice too. I mean a total stranger who–for no reason other than simply wanting to make things right–gives you something that you’ve wanted, tried for, and then reluctantly let go of because, well, you can’t have everything you want, and that is life. Something that really makes no diff to anyone but you but you can’t seem to reach it? Sort of like wanting your grandmother’s vase that vanished the last week or her life, and you know it’s somewhere because someone thought it went with their drapes, not knowing that you have memories tied to it of cutting flowers with her and arranging them every time you went to visit? And then, someone just . . . hands it to you because they knew it meant something to you?

Yeah, I had one of those days last week/month, and though it doesn’t have anything to do with vases or fond memories, it still has that feeling of this-is-important-to-me, why-do-you-even-want-it? about it.

I’ve always been a big believer in paying it forward when you can, and though lately it feels like I’ve been focused very closely on my bellybutton, so to speak, this was a reminder that though Slipknot is right about some people being S*it, that there are still people who are knights in shining armor, gallivanting about the desolate wasteland with a bright sword of power.

So Bill, if you read this, know that even though a nasty antagonist in my next series has your name (Really! His name has been Bill for over a year now.) that you will always be one of my heros, standing on a hill beside your white horse with your sword held high and bright. Thank you. My faith in humanity is refreshed.