Rose-Owls and Pumpkin Girls

So.

Apparently, something is wrong with the contact form, in that somewhere along the line (between it and my PA and me), some email is getting eaten. We don't know how, we don't know why, and most importantly, we don't know how much. We only know this is happening at all because I was able to confirm two instances of "I tried to contact you and it didn't go through." (One was resolved by resending with a different return email address. The other, we're not sure.)

Chris is working on a way to make sure this doesn't happen anymore. For right now, giveaways are going to have to be handled in a two-step authentication process, for which I am sorry: specifically, rather than saying "email me," I'm going to be saying "comment here and then email me immediately, so I can tell you if your email is not received." Inconvenient? Yes. Annoying? Yes. The only way I can continue to do giveaways until this problem is resolved? Sadly, yes.

I am deeply sorry for any inconvenience this has caused, especially if you were someone who didn't get a prize because your email was eaten. (Please do not contact me saying "this happened to me a year ago, give me a book." I will believe you. I just don't have the books, or the postage budget, to do anything about it.)

Whee.

One thing I've tried to make very clear about InCryptid is that it's not the story of Verity Price and how she did lots of neat stuff and maybe saved the world a few times. It's the story of the Price family, and the Healy family, and how they did lots of neat stuff and maybe saved the world a few times. There are lots of stories, many of which happened before the books begin.

Never let it be said that I missed the chance to tell a story.

The InCryptid short fiction page is now live, and features the brand new Jonathan and Frances adventure, "One Hell of a Ride." The story is available for free download in three formats. I'll add information on "The Flower of Arizona" as soon as we have a finalized cover (and will include purchase data for that one, since it's in an anthology).

Welcome to the family tree, and I hope this helps to keep you excited for the upcoming release of Discount Armageddon!

So here's the deal. I have two websites, and I maintain them both myself, manually. That means nothing changes unless I go in and change it. The sites are here:

http://www.seananmcguire.com/
http://miragrant.com/

Parts of these sites are quite out of date, because I have been a busy little bee. We are thus going to play a little game.

Step 1: Go to my website. Either one.
Step 2: Poke around until you see something that could use improvement. A typo, a missing link, an unclear question on the FAQ, even a missing question on the FAQ. (Pages that aren't linked at all, like the Field Guide, or don't exist, don't count. Those are future improvements, not current issues.
Step 3: Post here, suggesting a correction/update.
Step 4: Step away from the website.

I will be making updates and corrections, partially based on this post, for the next week. On Friday, I will use our friend, random number generator, to choose a winner of an ARC of One Salt Sea (US-only, unless you can help with postage). No matter what, everybody benefits, since the end result should be an easier-to-use website.

Game on!

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!

Point the first: If you're on Twitter, and either don't watch my Twitter feed or haven't checked in yet this morning, do a search for the #FEEDFriday hashtag. Seriously, this is hammered awesome, in addition to being your opportunity to win some free copies of Feed. Which is pretty cool. They make great gifts! Also great doorstops.

Point the second: While you're enjoying your zombie adventure, maybe you should stop off and take a look at http://www.thefeedbook.com/. Don't worry. I'll wait here for your shrieks of ecstatic glee at how insanely awesome that website is. I'm doing the flaily Muppet arms again. Now with an undead flair. Which...is a little disturbing, really.

Point the third: Yes, I have seen today's XKCD. Sometimes I think the cartoonist is peeking through the windows of me and my friends. And then I realize that no, we're just a type. Scared yet?

Point the fourth: I am almost done with my mind-numbingly massive full-sheet comic page explaining the Campbell Awards and expanding on my eligibility. Vixy and Cat Valente play the part of my lovely assistants, thus sparking the statement "The hardest thing I have left to draw is Cat Valente being eaten by zombies." My life, occasionally so difficult.

Point the fifth: I was in the car with my mother yesterday, and commented that I had purchased my tickets to Australia. The following conversation ensued:

Mom: "And you're coming back with a tiara."
Me: "Well, yes, I hope so, but..."
Mom: "You are."
Me: "Okay."
Mom: "I've been praying every night to the tiara gods."
Me: "...there are tiara gods?"
Mom: "There are now."
Me: "What do those even look like?"
Mom: "I don't know. But they're wearing tiaras."

So apparently I have the backing of the tiara gods in the upcoming race for the Campbell. Thanks to my mother for letting me know about this endorsement. Also, and perhaps more importantly, my mother is insane.

This one comes in two parts. Part the first: The Toby Daye FAQ is looking a little thin on the ground, with very few questions directly relating to the books themselves. Please give the FAQ a glance, if you get the chance, and propose new questions? I want to get things cleaned up and updated. In, y'know, my copious spare time.

Part the second: The Horror Movie Survival FAQ is going to be moving to MiraGrant.com with the launch of the new site. I know, I know, it's a sad day. But it'll fit in better there, and I'll have a lot of really awesome opportunities to update and expand.

This means I need a new "silly" FAQ for my main site...and that's where today comes in. I'm going to do a Fairy Tale and Ballad Survival FAQ. Please propose questions, offer survival tips, whatever comes to mind, and I'll get started from there! Help protect a new generation of children from evil stepmothers, wicked witches, inexplicable beanstalks, and the dangers of gingerbread houses.

Sometimes my life is awesome.

So currently, I am...

...working on The Agent's revisions to Deadline, all of which have been totally awesome, erudite, and coherent (at least so far; for all I know, I'm going to hit page 200 and suddenly she'll be demanding I insert evil clowns and flying monkeys). I'm addressing the manuscript 10% (IE, fifty pages) at a time, so that I can imagine a little progress bar guiding me sweetly toward the conclusion of draft two. Currently, the status bar stands at 20%. Since I started work yesterday, I am not yet freaking out over this.

...hammering away on The Brightest Fell (Toby Daye, book five), which, like, woke up one morning and just decided that it wasn't going to suck anymore. Seriously. This book has been a petulant brat for ages, and then bam, all of a sudden, it was all "La la la, I am ready to play nicely with the other children." So now I'm burning pages, the stakes are getting higher, the action's getting tighter, and Toby's having one of her Worst Weeks Ever. I'm always happy when Toby is having one of her Worst Weeks Ever. This is why Toby will eventually find a way to kill me in my sleep.

...getting content up on MiraGrant.com. If you go there right now, you'll still get the splash page, but I promise you, Behind The Scenes, Things Are Brewing. We'll be ready to launch super-soon, and when we do, look out world! Tara has done an incredible job with the site design, and Chris has done an equally incredible job with the coding. And of course, there's things afoot over on the Orbit side of things, and soon the whole world will be asking the question that's been gnawing at me for a while now: When will you rise?

...writing two short stories for the same anthology, since that's the only way to have a proper cage match between the two (thus letting me determine which one works better). In this corner, Toby, Danny, and Quentin do stuff involving poking things with sticks and following the basic rules of horror movie survival (IE, "When the house tells you to get out, you leave"). In this corner, Alice, Thomas, and the mice go wandering around the woods looking for fricken nests, and face the usual dangers inherent in doing what a tribe of talking pantheistic mice tells you to do. Fun!

...finishing the sixth Sparrow Hill Road story, "Last Dance With Mary Jane," in which we finally find out what actually happened on the night Rose Marshall died. This is sort of where the series turns, and where everything else that happens becomes inevitable. I'm really excited.

...really in need of a nap.

I will have a silly, silly contest starting later today, and remember, the various cage matches are still going on. Help Toby deliver the ULTIMATE SMACKDOWN, thus earning her a pretty tiara that she won't wear and a Starbucks gift card that she will use up in an afternoon.

1. I have done the mailing! Specifically, I've mailed a paperback to Australia, an ARC of A Local Habitation to our first ALH ARC contest winner, and a comic book to my web designer. (Said comic book has been failing to get mailed since July, which gives you an idea of how behind I am in certain aspects of my daily maintenance.) I probably have more mailing to do—including at least two CD sets—but this is mailing to discover, not mailing to feel guilty about not doing. Victory is mine!

2. Since the first ARC has been mailed out, I'm getting ready to open the second ARC contest. I'll be taking entries for a week or so, and then opening voting for a similar length of time. This is going to be a photography challenge (much like the LOLtest for Rosemary and Rue, but without the captions). Details will be posted later this week.

3. The redesign and relaunch of my website is just about done, which is a huge relief (for my webmaster and web designer, as well as for me, since they get constantly prodded at when I get twitchy). The new look of the site is awesome. We're going from drop-down menus to side menus, the graphics are even slicker and more incredibly cool, and soon, I'll be posting the first batch of icons and wallpapers for A Local Habitation. Also, once my main site is relaunched, we'll be able to focus on getting Mira's site off the ground. Evil twins need websites, too!

4. The Rosemary and Rue pendant sale from chimera_fancies is going to be launching later this week, and these pendants really are Mia's best work yet. I mean, they're just incredible pieces of wearable artwork, and the fact that I was partially responsible for this batch being created is just amazing to me. This is transformative art. From oral tradition folklore to urban fantasy novel to jewelry. Who could ask for a more remarkable series of connections? I'll post some previews of the sale before Mia opens it to the general public, but I'm not administrating it; all questions should go to chimera_fancies.

5. I know my Current Projects posts can seem huge and daunting and a little unreal, but I really have made amazing strides in Blackout, The Brightest Fell, and Discount Armageddon over the past month, and I'm over-the-moon excited with where they're each going. Working on all three at once is like a delicious block of television consisting of Glee, Supernatural, Wonderfalls, and Veronica Mars. So good, so snarky, and so refreshing for the soul. I know I love what I do, because it makes me less tired, rather than exhausting me.

6. My schedule for 2010 is taking shape and becoming visibly more awesome by the day. At least in part because, well, the more coherent it is, the easier it becomes for me to plan around things like conventions, book releases, and fits of hysterical giggling. My planner pages are also filling up, with a combination of major events and minor, "survive the day, week, month, year, and inevitable zombie apocalypse" items. The more regimented my time appears, the more work I'll get done. According to the planner so far, 2010 is the year I conquer the planet.

7. The first promo comic for A Local Habitation is underway, and looks awesome. I'll post it as soon as it's finished.

What's new in the world of you?

Because "done" is a misnomer around here, the ever-fabulous team of taraoshea (graphic design) and porpentine (back-end code) are hard at work preparing a redesign for SeananMcGuire.com, aka, "my website." We're not getting rid of the current content—we're not insane—but we are trying to make it a little easier to access and navigate, by doing things like shifting the majority of the menus to be down the side of the page, rather than at the top, and by making the drop-downs a little less likely to snap back up while you're trying to browse.

Among other things, I'll be revamping the FAQs, since I really do prefer keeping them as current as possible. I live in a magical cotton candy wonderland where someday, my email volume will be kept under control by the existence of clear, coherent, comprehensive FAQs. So here's the question for the floor:

What isn't currently answered in the FAQs that you want answered?
What answers do you want to see expanded?
What additional questions do you have?
Are there any sections missing? What are they?

I'll be soliciting for questions for a separate Toby Daye FAQ later this month, so please don't suggest Toby-specific questions as yet, unless they're the very general "what's the release date" or "who does your interior dingbat design"-style questions. Right now, I'm just trying to get base data.

As an aside, if you think there's a page missing that's not part of the FAQs, what is it? You never get what you want if you don't tell me what it is!

Thanks, y'all.

So I'm in the process of (once again) revamping and updating my FAQs, partially because I'm getting more writing questions (yay!), and partially because I need to be prepared to split the Toby questions off into their own FAQ somewhere around October 15th. Bearing this in mind, what do folks think I should add to my FAQ section? The current categories are...

...writing.
...general.
...music.
...horror movie survival.

The horror survival FAQ may wind up moved over to Mira Grant's site once it gets up and running, just so we'll have content there; I don't know yet. I'm not taking questions for a Toby FAQ yet, because so few people have been able to read it, and any questions beyond the very simple ones already on the site would be spoilery.

What should I be answering? Ask away!