Laini Taylor's Blog, page 4

Vampire Happiness

Okay, so tell me how weird this is. Jim and Clementine and I were away for the weekend at the Oregon coast, lovely lovely, more on that later, but anyway, we were in one of those crap beach shops that all sell the same schmaltz, and walked past a little shelf of tchotchkes, you know, little figurines with sayings on them, super tacky? And Jim pointed at one and said, "How funny. For some reason when I first glanced at that, I thought it said ..."

And as he began to speak, I glanced at the tcho...

A guest post about cheese, with a little bit of France thrown in

As promised, here we have a guest post by my marvelous best friend, Alexandra, who went to France recently, and ate a lot of cheese! I think it might be my fault, as I texted her relentlessly with commands to "eat cheese for me today," which is what I say whenever anyone goes to France. Can we all just take a moment to sit dreamily in honor of cheese? (a favorite quote: "The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese." -GK Chesterton) And the last thing I'll say about...

Japanese zombie baseball? Plus, some thoughts on writing productivity

Because why not?

Ha ha, here's the synopsis:

"Battlefield Baseball is a tough game--it doesn't end until all the members on the opposing team are dead. In this game the Gedo High team is composed of blue-faced zombies, and their opponents on the Seido High team know they don't have a chance at beating them unless they can bring back a star pitcher who has a lethal pitch called the Super Tornado, but who has hung up his cleats and has no desire to return to the game."

(I just spelled "small" "sn...

*thrill thrill thrill thrill thrill thrill thrill thrill* (another book announcement!)

I hinted recently at more unfolding wonderfulness, and here it is! Daughter of Smoke and Bone has sold UK/Commonwealth rights to the AMAZING Kate Howard at the AMAZING Hodder & Stoughton, who have totally rocked my world. I'm such a goob about all things business, that it didn't totally register with me that my wonderful agent, Jane Putch, had held onto UK rights (psst, writers, in the "to agent or not to agent" question, I come down firmly on the "agent" side!), but man, I'm so glad she did....

Photo Catch-Up

I just downloaded the camera for the first time in a while; it was almost full! And in its belly I found these recent memories, and thought I'd do a little catch-up, since I haven't been posting much lately, and photos even less than that.

Miss Clementine Pie turned 11 months yesterday. Yow! How the time, she does fly.





Huh. I wonder where this kid gets her blue eyes from.
So, nose-biting (my mom, here). Some time last month, Clementine decided, all for herself, that biting noses is funny. Well,...

And some days I want to kiss my brain

And often, the broken brain days (see last post) are followed by golden days where you kind of fall in love with your brain all over again, kiss it lots and promise it a second honeymoon (somewhere warm, but not too warm), and everything is peaches. (And not the stupid Whole Foods organic peaches that rotted in a day, either. One hopes.)

GREAT day today! Yay yay yay! Mental high fives, my characters making me laugh out loud, pages finding themselves --wham!-- written. Page, meet page. And oh ...

How to mend a broken brain

Some days are like this:


I hate writing and my brain is broken. And I'm hungry. And also stupid.


(That's an email I sent to a friend earlier today.)

You just have to kick days like that in the snoot. This morning my brain might have broken for a little while, sure, okay, but it was nothing a shower and a nap couldn't fix. Or possibly this cure:
(Add "donut" to that sign and it's perfect :-)

The nap today was, in fact, more of a cuddling of sleeping Pie whilst my brain whirred loudly, like an old, ...

Coolest Video Ever

Wow. Wow wow. Awesome! Makes me want to do stop motion!

Berry Face + Writing in the Spirit of Discovery

A lovely weekend. More berries were picked, and more importantly, more berries were eaten:
hee hee hee. I was carrying Clementine on my back, and I couldn't see her face, just her little hand reaching forward to take the berries I was passing back to her, and at the end, this is what I found. You can imagine the back of my shirt looked much the same! Luckily I was wearing burgundy, ha ha.

It was also another amazing weekend in secret news, soon to be shared, and I got some writing in too, of c...

A trio of YA debuts

Thank you so much for all the good wishes! I am so excited! It's weird working on a book for so long *in secret* -- and then it finally feels REAL. Well, real as a book. A future book. How cool. I want to be a book when I grow up! Last night I googled Daughter of Smoke and Bone for the first time and it was weird. The title is still shiny and new to me, it's different from the title I've been using *in secret* all this time, so it will take some getting used to. I really love it though, and I...