In which Seanan assesses stock, and is startled.

Last night, in the process of unpacking from Westercon/Conchord, I had cause to return some unsold CDs to the CD storage shelf. I've been shuffling things around recently, preparing for the arrival of Wicked Girls, which means that my stock is about as consolidated as it's ever been. Everything is, within a variance margin of maybe twenty disks, in the same place. Bearing this in mind...

...I now have sixty-seven copies remaining of Stars Fall Home.

Stars Fall Home was my first studio project. I joke that the theme of the album was "holy crap, I'm making an album," but that's not too far from the truth. Songs were being added and dropped right up until the last minute; tracks were recorded everywhere from the United States and Canada to the United Kingdom; for a while there, I really seemed to be doing my best to get everyone I'd ever met onto a single disk. I learned a lot about the recording process from this album. And I learned that I am incredibly blessed in the people who share my life.

Anyway, this is all sort of by way of saying that if you want to own the studio version of "Pretty Little Dead Girl" or "This Is My Town," my cover of "Still Catch the Tide," or any version of "Evil Laugh" or "Earthquake Weather," now is the time on Sprockets when you should probably consider ordering an album. I'm not planning to re-print for some time, if ever, so when they're gone, they're gone. And their shelf space will be given over to other albums, while the remaining copies of Pretty Little Dead Girl mutter about their neighbor who moved away.

It is so weird to realize that I'm almost out of an album. So weird.

100 Books That Rocked My World, 2010 Edition.

In 2008, Entertainment Weekly decided to rank "the new classics," and made lists of the "100 Most Influential" bits of various media in the last few decades. They had a list of movies, a list of books, a list of TV series, and so on. This, naturally, made me grumpy and contemplative, because their list looked absolutely nothing like mine. I then took umbrage, as I am wont to do, and made my own list of books that influenced and informed my reality. I proceeded to update it in 2009, because things can change considerably in a year.

I bet you know what comes next.

Books on this list aren't necessarily high literature; they're not necessarily classics; they're not even necessarily particularly good, although I think the bulk of them are. They're just the books that combined to construct a me. They are, in short, not the books I was supposed to fall in love with; just the ones that I did.

Your list will probably be drastically different. You may still want to take a look at mine. You might just find a few things that will surprise you.

( Click here for Seanan's updated list of 100 books that have influenced and rocked her world, and which may have influenced and rocked yours. Complete, in some cases, with commentary. Because she can, that's why. )