Lili St. Crow's Blog, page 197

Eating My Harmony

The weekend was full of storms. Yesterday in particular, the wind made the cedars thrash, and the honeysuckle on the north side-fence narrowly missed being flattened by a fir bough. The noise made both dogs nervous, and the presence of punch balloons turned Odd Trundles into a ball of protective rage. (He was also bathed, so that probably had a little to do with his mood.) I had to put a couple balloons on the floor and pet them to make Trundles realize they weren’t enemies, and wouldn’t harm him. Poor little fellow.

This was also the weekend we discovered a lemon cake with chocolate frosting was not necessarily a good idea, though the kid who requested it loved it to stomach-burning distraction. I was glad to provide such joy, but really, lemon cakes belong with super-sour lemon glazes, in my humble opinion.

It was also (so much happened!) the weekend the Princess and I got addicted to Egg Baby. They’re cute! You tickle them! You feed them and bathe them and they hatch! There’s an achievement for letting an egg die, but neither of us can bear to do that. We’re bonding over fire eggs and ghost eggs and how long to let them sleep.

Hey, when you’ve got teenagers, you take every bit of commonality you can. I’m just thrilled both of them want to talk to me as often as they do. I gather it’s not normal for them to actually want to converse with a parental unit, so I’m glad to be bucking the trend.

Come Sunday, we were all in the living room. I was tending eggs and reading Che Guevara, the Prince was playing Fantasy Life, and the Princess alternating between egg-tending and Animal Crossing. The family that games together ends up not throttling each other, I guess.

I did finish the Guevara reader. It wasn’t until I got to the letters in Part IV that I realized Guevara had more than one child. Being left alone with multiple children to raise while a guy hares off to Bolivia isn’t my idea of a good time, but I guess Aleida March was okay with it. She wrote a book about the relationship, which I should add to my reading list just on general principle. I’m generally more interested in what those who actually raised the children have to say about revolutions.

What I didn’t get done over the weekend: finishing Cal & Trinity. I hoped I would, but last week the horrorshow of stress coming from a publisher’s extremely sloppy manner of business (yes, still waiting to be paid) put a dent in my productivity. I suspect I could work much more effectively if the worry over whether or not a contractually mandated cheque will arrive WEEKS AFTER it was supposed to wasn’t eating my harmony. This is another thing plenty of new authors aren’t told: employees of publishing houses generally don’t understand that for a writer, late cheques are like the salaried’s paycheck just not showing up. “Oh, we’ll fix paying you…eventually…” isn’t good enough for a salaried employee, but it’s expected to be good enough for a writer. It’s not fair, it’s pretty hideous, but it’s the way things are and one needs to be prepared for it. This is the sort of situation where having an agent is crucial, because, in Caitlin Kittredge’s immortal words, you can lose count of the many ways in which you’ll be screwed without one.

*looks back over preceding paragraphs* God. I feel like I need a nap just to recover from the weekend. But the kids are at school, the music is playing, and I’ve got work to catch up on. The proof copy of Rose & Thunder arrives today for my approval, and hopefully I’ll be able to approve it and have the paper version on sale early. We’ll see…

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Exothermic

Bird

This poor little fellow showed up in the yard the other day. Colorful, but very dead. It didn’t seem as though one of the neighborhood cats had been at it, and the location right under the garage window made me think she’d mistaken said window for a piece of clear sky. I carried her out of the backyard so the dogs didn’t get interested. If I interred every dead bird I found in the yard I’d quickly run out of room in the Pet Sematary the rose garden is becoming.

My altruism only extends so far. *sigh*

But she was a beautiful bird, and her compatriots are greeting the dawn as I write this, with a fullthroat serenade.

Rose & Thunder Cover Reveal!

Your eyes do not deceive you, dear Reader. Ebooks of Rose & Thunder, my very own retelling of Beauty & the Beast, are now available for preorder at Smashwords, Amazon, and All Romance Ebooks! (Please note, this is only the ebook edition!)

I’m pretty thrilled; this is my favorite fairytale, and my own telling of it owes a great deal to Robin McKinley’s Beauty, as well as to a lovely Persian version that still gives me chills. Nods are given to Tanith Lee’s Estel, and the Brothers Grimm, of course.

Beauty…

Isabella Harpe, last in a long line of witches, drifts with the wind. Her tarot cards always ready to bring in enough to live on, and her instincts keep her mostly out of trouble. Unfortunately, bad boyfriends and even worse luck strand her near the most dangerous place for a witch to land—beside a cursed town, and an even more cursed man.

The roses…

Jeremy Tremont’s family built their house over an ancient place of power, turning it into an uneasy, rose-choked sanctuary for the weird and the dangerous alike. Scarred, quiet, and difficult, Tremont’s not Isabella’s idea of a prospective employer, no matter how badly she needs the money. He’s paying well, and there’s only one catch: she has to be home by dusk. Because in Tremont City, bad things happen after nightfall.

And the curse.

Secrets hide in every corner, an ancient curse cloaks itself in silence, and Isabella’s arrival has begun a deadly countdown. Despite that, she may have found a home—all she has to do is figure out how to break the curse.

Oh, and survive in the dark…

The paper edition is scheduled for a March 20 release, but in the meantime you can preorder the ebook, if that’s your thing. Thanks are due to Skyla Dawn Cameron, my own personal saint of layout, formatting, and cover design.

Legendary Stubbornness

That Bach polonaise I’ve been working on for months? I can finally find the notes with both hands, in some places slowly, in other places with more facility. It’s not the Turkish Rondo, but it’s a challenging enough piece that I suspect it was well beyond my capabilities and the danger was in me getting frustrated enough to just rage-quit.

Fortunately, though, my stubbornness has been honed by years of constant and consistent practice.

You know who else’s stubbornness is legendary? Odd Trundles. He’s grumbling at me right now because he wants ear-rubs, dammit, and he will keep moaning until he gets them. Between the seizures, his poor paw, the seasonal alopecia, and his facial pockets, he’s just a mess all the time, and requires much petting and ear-milking in order to cope. His other Perpetual Endeavor is trying to catch the Princess’s backpack as she heads out the door in the morning. He thinks that if he can just get his jaws on that and kill it, she’ll stay and won’t leeeeeeave him alooooooone. And if she can’t leave, then the Prince and I can’t either, and we’ll all be RIGHT WHERE PRINCE TRUNDLES WANTS US.

Sadly, this does not happen. But to be a Trundles is to be full of hope.

I hear there were a lot of people on a subreddit recommending my books yesterday. Thank you! It’s nice to know. It somewhat soothes the ache in my lower back from the hauling of boxes and bins of author’s copies.

Which reminds me, I have to find desiccant packs. The last thing I need is boxes of moldy copies. There’s also the foul matter (I love calling it that) to be sorted and archived.

For now, though, I should finish my coffee, give Trundles enough ear-scrubbing and attention to completely bewilder him, and get started on revisions for Blood Call. Later, of course, I’ll practice piano.

It might even be time to attempt a new Bach piece. Never rest on one’s laurels, you know, and all that.

photo by:


arquera

Dead Matter

I finished Lee Jackson’s Dirty Old London yesterday. It was highly enjoyable, Jackson’s work always is, and his site is a treasury of Victorian London awesomeness. I highly recommend him if you’re interested in Victoriana at all, he’s a fabulous resource and extremely readable.

The weekend was full of running hither and yon, what with birthday party doings (not my own, don’t ask) and spring cleaning. The author copies I’ve been holding onto have moved on–I do not need sixty copies of every book I’ve ever written, for God’s sake. I know some authors sell their copies, or send them out for review, but in both cases the cost of postage is prohibitive, not to mention the time investment. The remaining author’s copies–I keep five of each title, I think that’s reasonable–are now in bins instead of boxes, and all I need now is to pick up silica desiccant packs to throw in each bin, and all will be well. The garage is no longer choked with boxes, there’s room to breathe in there. Thank goodness–it was getting a mite thick.

The next step is going through old “foul matter,” proofs and manuscripts that have been superseded and so were sent back to me. (Also called “dead matter.”) I do want to keep those, but they need nice bins too, and the endgame is for those bins to be labeled so I know what I have. It’s a small dream, but it is my own.

Next up on my reading list is a collected works of Che Guevara, and an edition of his Guerrilla Warfare. After that, I intend to read the first Kurt Wallander book by Henning Mankell. We’ll see what happens.

But for now, it’s time to get out the door for a run, and crank out wordcount on Cal & Trinity, not to mention get my Latin lesson in and begin eyeballing copyedits. It’s definitely a Monday.

Beginnings

They happen all the time.

The bookstore is closed. This start is from the philodendron that used to be in the children’s section. The original is in my office, but I couldn’t let this tiny cutting get away.

I also have Shirley the penguin, the rubber plant that was in the children’s section as well, Clara the vulture, plenty of books, and over a decade of wonderful memories from the store. And yes, it’s closed, but my writing partner will have more time to, well, write.

Plenty of beginnings are built on scorched earth. I’m hoping this one takes root.

Release Day: KIN!

It’s release day for Kin, the final fairytale retelling in my Beauty & Madness series!

Full moon. Glowing eyes. Red lips. And such sharp, sharp teeth…

In the kin world, girls Ruby de Varre’s age are expected to play nice, get betrothed, and start a family—especially if they’re rootkin, and the fate of the clan is riding on them. But after a childhood of running wild in the woods, it’s hard to turn completely around and be demure. Even if your Gran is expecting it.

Then Conrad, handsome and charming, from a clan across the Waste, comes to New Haven to seal alliance between their two families. The sparks fly immediately. Conrad is smart, dominant, and downright gorgeous. Yet as Ruby gets to know him more, she starts to realize something’s…off.

Then, the murders start. A killer stalks the city streets, and just when Ruby starts to suspect the unimaginable, she becomes the next target. Now Ruby’s about to find out that Conrad’s secrets go deeper than she ever could have guessed—and it’s up to Ruby to save her Gran, her clan, and maybe even herself….

Ruby’s story was so, so difficult to write. I didn’t want to say goodbye to the girls. All three hold a component of the young woman I was, perhaps, and it’s difficult to let that go. Not to mention these books, like the original fairy tales, cover some very dark territory indeed. I leave it to the reader to decide if they serve.

I would be remiss if I didn’t add that Ruby owes a great deal to Sarah Dessen’s Dreamland, a book that told me I wasn’t the only one long, long ago. Ruby also serves as a reminder to me that even the people who seem the most “together” have secrets, flaws, and fears all their own.

Above all, Ruby (and Cami and Ellie) belong to the world at this point. I’m so glad their interconnected tales can all be seen at once, now. And if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to spend the rest of release day in my usual state of nerves and adrenaline, with a heavy soupçon of hiding in the corner…

Real Commitment

Issue 21 of Fireside is out, which means more Geoff and Abby! True to form, Abby’s decided the most efficient way to get what she wants, and in this case, that means getting into a bar-brawl.

Do I even need to say how much I really like this character? Once she makes up her mind, she is ALL IN, no matter the craziness. I respect that, both in characters and in meatspace. It shows real commitment.

Also, tomorrow is the release day for KIN, my retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. Preorders and first-week book orders are important, so I’m going to be hitting the marketing gong for a little bit.

This is the last YA book I’ll be releasing for a good long while, possibly ever. Publishing in YA for Strange Angels was a wonderful experience, but there was a certain friction between the publisher, I think, wanting something a little more “marketable” and me in my corner, just not that sort of writer. The issues became somewhat acute during the fairytale retellings. I do not write by committee and will resist, in any way possible, any suggestion meant to take the blood and guts out of a story because “kids can’t handle that!” I refuse to “talk down” to younger readers, and while I think the fan response justifies that, it’s nerve-wracking for a publisher. I perhaps wasn’t as graceful as I could be during the whole process, either. During Wayfarer, the Cinderella retelling, I was buying a house, and we all remember how stressful THAT was.

So, yeah. The constraints of YA, and the energy spent fighting against dilution and bullshit in that genre, mean I’m tapped out and won’t return there for a good long while.

All that aside, I love the fairytale retellings with a fierce, fierce love. I fought for them, and the covers are wonderful, and I think in each of them I ended up saying what I set out to say. I think that comes through in them. I hope readers agree.

Hazelnuts

The Princess did homemade Nutella for a friend’s birthday–a true labour of love that involved blanching and peeling, then roasting, the little bastards. Hazelnut skins dye things a very strong red, as we found out. The towel she’s using still bears the marks, and there was a ring inside the pan used to blanch them that defied all sorts of scrubbing. The ring has since faded, but the towel is still streaked with red, and we affectionately call it the “hazelnut towel.”

She may make more Nutella for my own birthday. Because she’s amazing. My girl.

Squirrel From the Jaws of Victory

Tossing and turning, sweat-drenched, all last night. As a result, I am zombie-shambling.

Today my girl C has her very last chemo! I am not on deck as helper for this one, which is good because the last thing a whole clutch of chemo and other infusion patients needs is me breathing a cold all over them. I am going to drop off a care package for her, though. I’m wondering if I should wear a facemask. That will cause no end of hilarity, I’m sure.

Speaking of hilarity…

Yesterday, late morning, I took the dogs out into the sunshine. I headed for the compost bin, meaning to check on it and also on the roses in the south yard. I didn’t get that far, however, because as I rounded the corner near the far rhododendron, I heard a familiar chittering yell.

“SWEET MAIDEN! FEAR NOT! I, BEAUREGARDE THE UNASHAMED, AM HERE!”

He stood at the bottom of a Douglas fir, quivering with glee, and might have been brandishing a twig-sword…and Miss B neatly snuck around the tree from the back and nabbed him, with a dart of her long nose.

“Oh Jesus Christ PUT THAT DOWN!” I yelled.

“MRPLE GRRR ARGH!” Beauregard screamed.

“NEW FRIEND?” Odd Trundles, thankfully, had been at the far end of the yard, peeing on a hosta I just put in the other day, probably to teach it its place in the garden hierarchy or something. He began barking and hurrying his unwieldy self across the yard in triple-time, throwing up chunks of damp sod, to see what the ruckus was.

“WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON OVER THERE?” Norbert demanded from the garden, on the other side of the compost heap. I ignored him, dashing at Miss B, who stood stock-still for a moment, unable to believe she had actually, really, no-foolin, honestly caught the little bastard. She danced away from my attempt to grab her ruff, and I stopped short.

“Put it DOWN!” I commanded. Visions of another dead squirrel, rabies (even though squirrels don’t often carry it) and all sorts of shenanigans danced through my head.

“Mrrrph?” Miss B meant to ask a question, but she had her mouth full. Beauregarde began using some very unchivalrous language indeed…

…and Odd Trundles, having acquired a good bit of momentum, plowed into Miss B from the side.

Beauregard, knocked loose, sailed in a majestic arc and landed near the Goddamn Ineradicable Zombie Rhubarb (it KEEPS COMING BACK) with a thud much bigger than a half-grown squirrel knight errant should have produced. (Maybe it was the tinfoil armor.) Odd, much of his kinetic force transferred to the hapless Miss B, glanced off her side and ran into the fir tree. Miss B got her legs under her and darted for the rhubarb corner, as Beauregard staggered.

Me? I just stood there, my hands to my mouth and (I’m sure) my eyes the size of dinner plates. I didn’t even have the presences of mind to check if I was wearing shoes. (I was. Thank God.)

Beauregard shook the ringing in his tiny head off in time to see a tongue-lolling Aussie bearing down on him. He girt his loins, raised his fists (I don’t know where the twig went) and yelled “CHAAAAAAARGE!”

He darted under B, who had to dig her claws in before she ran straight into the corner of the fence, tearing up a good deal of the rhubarb’s tiny questing tendrils in the process. (Don’t worry. Nothing can kill that rhubarb. Believe me, I’ve tried.) Beauregard scurried across damp, packed-down bark dust, just as Odd Trundles, staggering and shaking his massive head, realized he was in the way.

“NEW FRIEND?” Trundles managed to bark, in a dazed mumble, before Sir Beauregarde the Aviation Wonder leapt over him, catching fir bark in all four claws.

Trundles attempted to intercept, but sadly, getting so much dense bulldog mass off the ground is a large proposition, and he thudded back to earth. Meanwhile, Miss B, having shaken herself loose of rhubarb tentacles and the corner, teleported across the intervening space and hurled herself straight at the fir tree, no doubt meaning to snatch a certain furry knight-errant from the jaws of victory.

Beauregarde felt it was time for a speech. “FAIR MAIDEN–ACK!”

Said speech was cut short by the impending arrival of the Aussie Artillery, and he scrambled further up the trunk. Miss B missed him by a hairsbreadth, hit the tree, and landed with an oof…

…right on Odd Trundles.

Poor Odd.

Anyway, Beauregarde started ranting about the Nut Table and his honor, and how he would fight them in honest battle, knaves and villains though they were. Miss B danced with impatience, barking, once she’d gotten herself untangled from poor Odd, who staggered towards me. I finally had the presence of mind to do something, but what?

Odd reached me, turned around, and sat on my (thankfully shod) feet, apparently deciding that was the safest place in the yard. Miss B, balked, kept barking until I yelled at her to be quiet for God’s sake he’s gone, he’s not coming back, at which point she was so excited and worked up she had to do a few laps of the yard, tearing up even more sod and bark dust in her excitement.

“I CAUGHT IT! DID YOU SEE ME? I HEEEEEERDED AND CAAAAAAUGHT IT! GOOD DOG! GOOD DOG ME!”

Beauregarde finished his declaiming and scrambled up the tree, chittering something about varlets and knaves. It took two or three tries for me to get my feet from under Trundles’s capacious ass, and started coaxing him towards the house, figuring Miss B would run herself out and Beauregarde knew better than to come down at this point.

Then, the Flying Aussie Bullet of Death knocked over Norbert, who began to use language he usually reserves for fat robins eating buckwheat seed before it can sprout.

*sigh*

Nevertheless, yesterday shall count as the victorious day Dame B satisfied her life’s yearning to catch a goddamn squirrel, if only for a few moments. It shall further be known as a day of victory because I had my shoes on through the whole goddamn event.

Odd, however, still plonks himself down on my feet as soon as I stop moving.

I can’t blame him.

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