Happy holidays! Have nice things.

It's the holiday season, and nice things are vital to our continued equilibrium. Equilibrium is nice! And so I present you with some nice things, to maintain this blessed state.

First of all, The Toby Wallpapers and Icons page has been updated over on my website. You can now download some basic wallpapers and icons for Late Eclipses, as well as wallpapers and icons for Nebelbann (the German edition of A Local Habitation). Plus there's a fantastic new wallpaper/icon set for An Artificial Night, showing dear Katie, all toned in beautiful blues and whites.

Second of all, the cover for Late Eclipses has been nominated as one of the Beautiful Book Covers of 2011. While I'd love it if you'd go and vote for me, this counts as a nice thing because some of these covers are truly gorgeous, and I hadn't seen the majority of them before. I'm really excited about the books coming out in 2011! It's going to be a banner year for reading.

Third of all, because I am me and I truly do regard this as "a nice thing," here is a list of really cute animals that will seriously fuck you up if given the opportunity to do so. Hooray! Some of these animals are really cute. And all of them are really included to make you wish that you'd never been born. I tend to regard this as awesome.

Happy Wednesday!

InCryptid. It's a big cast.

So as you know, I really, really love it when I can get artwork to go with my books, whether it be a fabulous cover or illustrations of the characters themselves. It's a silly thing, but it helps me focus. I can't get photographs of the people in my head, so I settle for the next best thing, and regularly bat my eyes pleadingly at artists of my acquaintance. I'm pretty good at it (the fact that I'm willing to pay fair commission rates helps), and so I wind up going back to the same artists again and again. One of my favorite artists is Bill Mudron, who did the cover graphics for my third CD, Red Roses and Dead Things. He's awesome!

Part of what makes Bill awesome is his uncanny ability to take a simple request ("Draw this person who doesn't exist for me, okay? Oh, and make it cool...") and turn it into something amazing. So when I started working with Bill this most recent time, I felt confident in asking for some pretty tricky imaginary people—specifically, Alice Price-Healy and her wayward husband, Thomas Price, and Sarah Zellaby and Arthur Harrington.

Alice is the grandmother of Verity Price, the protagonist of Discount Armageddon; Thomas is Verity's grandfather (naturally). Thomas has also been missing for oh, about thirty years now, thanks to a really poorly-considered energy exchange with one of the nastier local dimensional gateways. Alice refuses to admit that this could mean he's dead, and has been wandering through the various levels of reality looking for him ever since. She's maybe not the most stable cookie in the box.

Arthur Harrington—he usually goes by "Artie"—is Verity's cousin. His mother, Moira Harrington-Price, is the daughter of Alice and Thomas, and his father, Theodore Harrington, is surprisingly good at dealing with his wife's family. This is because Uncle Ted is the most mellow man on the planet (it's a survival trait). Sarah Zellaby is considered a cousin, since she was adopted by Verity's mother's adoptive parents (yes, these books will come with a family tree). She's not human, but no one really holds that against her.

( Cut because posting large graphics without a cut tag is a really good way for me to get smacked upside the head by my friends. )