Filk Fund DVD now available for purchase!

Hey, folks, are you planning to attend DucKon, aka, "Seanan and company rock it down in Illinois"? Were you wishing for a little slice of awesome to have and to hold forever and evermore? Well, it seems that I may be able to help you out with that.

Please visit the DucKon Filk Fund Page for details about the concert recordings which are currently available through the DucKon store. These are currently Schrodinger's recordings, as we're asking you to order something that doesn't exist yet. In an attempt to make this not so surreal, I'm offering a little sweetness: if you place your order before June 8th, and if you comment here to confirm that you have done so, on the 8th, I will select one commenter to choose a song from a special list*. This song will be guaranteed a place in the concert, barring rain of frogs or other amphibious mayhem.

(*By "special list" I mean "something we already know." I live in California. None of my partners in crime live in California. I enjoy Tony not beating me to death with an amplifier.)

Comments received after June 8th will be ignored. Comments going "oh, I know Bob ordered one" will be ignored. Demands that we play "Freebird" will be ignored.

Game on!

First review is in!

Hooray, hooray, the...um, well, the end of May. But we're celebrating the glorious end of a glorious month with something truly glorious beyond all measure:

The first officially published review of Rosemary and Rue!

Look at it. Isn't it preeeeeeetty? I just sort of want to cuddle it and love it and call it "George." Or maybe "Dave." Or maybe "to come over for drinks," although that could just be my inner Jane speaking. Big, big thanks to Rae for both reviewing the book, and for admitting to her biases right up front, thus making her a responsible reviewer who can be believed. Because nothing says "love" like being up-front about the things that could potentially

sway your hand.

(To be quite clear, I actually do trust Rae to be objective, because I've seen her savage things by creators she loves. She's like a cuddly wombat, totally harmless until she transforms herself into a WHIRLING BLENDER OF TOOTHY DEATH. I appear to have missed the "frappe" setting, and for this, I am truly glad.)

Book reviews. They, like milk, make a body glad.

Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.

There are a lot of ways to edit. Mostly, I edit on the computer, feeding drafts to my dedicated pool of machete-wielding psychopaths and trusting them to give me back something bloody, beaten, and better than it began. I also do a lot of my own rewriting, but like so many, I've "gone green," working almost entirely in the virtual world. It's not uncommon for a book to make it through multiple drafts without ever existing in a physical form. Not bad for a girl whose first two books were written entirely on typewriter, huh? (And no, you can't read them.)

Sometimes, though, the damage is too deep, and you need to take a new approach to making things not be broken. That's where the red-line edits come in. I have printed a copy of Late Eclipses—yes, the entire multi-hundred page epic—and am now going through it chapter by chapter with the red pen. It's fascinating. Passive voice and wishy-washy modifiers fall before the tide of crimson ink like trees going down before a particularly dedicated logging crew. Things that looked just fine on the screen make me cringe when I see them on paper. And then I fix them. Because I can.

There are definite limitations to the red-line process, not the least of which is "you have to carry whatever it is you're working on." But I gotta say, when I get to this particular level of nit-picky correction, where it feels like the book is winning, it's nice to know that I have a dark alley to lure the text unsuspectingly down. And in that alley, I have a brick. A brick made entirely of red ink and causing pain.

Sometimes my taste in metaphors worries me. But my manuscript looks like it's been the victim in a low-budget slasher film, so I really don't care.