Rose-Owls and Pumpkin Girls

Shirt update.

Mailing continues! I would estimate that I have three trips to the post office left to go, one domestic, two international (since I am only allowed to bring so many international shirts to the post office at one time). This has taken so very, very long, and for that I am genuinely sorry. This batch was more than twice the size of the last, with the associated administrative headaches (people asking for color/size/cut combinations that didn't exist, shirts not included in the batch from the printer, people not paying when prompted, which meant that we couldn't send the order to the printer in the first place, etc.), and as a consequence, it ran headlong into my convention season, which slowed me down like whoa.

There are a lot of reasons we're never going to do this again—this batch was the last, or at least the last "bespoke"—but the biggest is the scale. When I did the first T-shirt run, I was still a relatively new author, and so there were fewer people who cared enough to want to wear me on their chests, so to speak. The number of interested parties has increased with each run, and it's just become unmanageable. Thank you all for your patience. For the most part, you have all been incredibly kind.

The missing shirts have finally arrived, and are in their nicely sealed box, waiting for me to finish getting the first batch out the door. I will not open this box until I have cleared the space for immediate packing and shipping, to prevent excessive cat hair (or possibly a cat) from accompanying the shirts to their final destination.

Shirts!

The point of apparently vital clarification.

This past week, someone who knows me well enough to know my overall living situation, asked if something could be sent priority. I said that wasn't going to be possible, as I wasn't going to be able to get to the post office immediately, and would be putting stamps on the item and shoving it in my mailbox. My friend responded with, essentially, "Have your PA do it."

Y'all, there is no PA for this sort of thing. There is only me.

I have two functional PAs: Kate and Vixy. On a day to day level, this means they go through my website email before I see it, so that we don't have to deal with me going into a tailspin the next time someone decides to tell me that they're going to kill my cats. (A real thing, that people have really emailed me about, because humans are sometimes awful.) Vixy has a good grasp of my schedule, and while she cannot accept convention invitations for me, she can usually say whether or not a thing is likely. Kate knows when I am over-committing myself, and will smack me with a rolled-up newspaper. Kate is local enough that I see her about once a week (roughly). Vixy lives two states away from me.

When I talk about mailing things, I am talking about me, just me, going to the small, rural post office near my house, and mailing them. When I talk about doing inventory, or packing things, or sending CD reships, I am saying "these are all things I do personally, after I have finished making my word count for the day." And this is why sometimes CDs go out of stock, or it takes a long time for me to carry a large shipping batch, ten or twenty items at once, down to the post office.

I don't want sympathy, and I don't mind doing what I do; I wouldn't volunteer if I minded. But I would like people to keep in mind, when their giveaway prizes take a while or their customs forms are filled out sort of sloppily, or when I say "this is not open to international winners, I am so sorry, I just can't handle the customs forms right now," that it's just me, and I am just one person, with two hands, trying to climb an avalanche.

Thank you.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to my journal. I'm pretty sure you know who I am, my name being in the URL and all, but just in case, I'm Seanan McGuire (also known as Mira Grant), and you're probably not on Candid Camera. This post exists to answer a few of the questions I get asked on a semi-hemi-demi-regular basis. It may look familiar; that's because it gets updated and re-posted roughly every two months, to let folks who've just wandered in know how things work around here. Also, sometimes I change the questions. Because I can.

If you've read this before, feel free to skip, although there may be interesting new things to discover and know beyond the cut.

Anyway, here you go:

( This way lies a lot of information you may or may not need about the person whose LJ you may or may not be reading right at this moment. Also, I may or may not be the King of Rain, which may or may not explain why it's drizzling right now. Essentially, this is Schrodinger's cut-tag. )

So hello! Good morning, and welcome to the many people who have shown up over the weekend. Here are a few things you might want to know, as you're deciding whether or not to stick around.

1. This is not a social issues blog. Mostly, it's about writing, my cats, and me doing stupid things in the interest of not being bored out of my skull. Because I have very strong feelings about a lot of social issues, they do crop up from time to time, but they're not my focus. Rage is exhausting. I try to focus on happier things, like that new rabies/Ebola virus that's started melting people while being inexplicable and impossible to cure. It's the little things in life.

2. I write urban fantasy under my own name, and science fiction medical thrillers under the name Mira Grant. The first books in my urban fantasy series are Rosemary and Rue (for the October Daye series), and Discount Armageddon (for my InCryptid series). There's also a lot of free fiction on my website, mostly in the Velveteen vs. superhero universe and the InCryptid universe, so you can try things if you want to see whether you like them.

3. I have OCD, in the literal, medically diagnosed sense, not in the joking "that was a little OCD of me" sense. This translates to a love of lists, both to do and to generate (hence this entry). I will occasionally do things that don't make much sense, like my insistence on answering every top-level comment I receive. Don't worry about it. I do my best not to make my problems anyone else's concern, and will let you know if there's a problem.

4. I do not ban people, but I do ask them to play nicely. Because I have a full-time day job, sometimes I can't clean up the comments as quickly as I want to. Please don't take a comment appearing as a sign of authorial approval. If it's inappropriate, rude, or over the line, I'll speak up as soon as I get the chance.

5. Cumulatively, my three cats weigh as much as a small golden retriever, and none of them are overweight. Jim Hines once said that I took my cats very seriously. This is because they can eat me. This is also why I tend to respond to "I just bought your book" with "thank you for feeding my cats." I do not wish to be eaten.

Again, welcome. You are all welcome to stay, and while I hope you will, I will not be hurt if you choose to go. It's a big internet, and we'd all explode if we tried to pay attention to absolutely everything.

Happy Monday!

Hello, everybody, and welcome to my journal. I'm pretty sure you know who I am, my name being in the URL and all, but just in case, I'm Seanan McGuire (also known as Mira Grant), and you're probably not on Candid Camera. This post exists to answer a few of the questions I get asked on a semi-hemi-demi-regular basis. It may look familiar; that's because it gets updated and re-posted roughly every two months, to let folks who've just wandered in know how things work around here. Also, sometimes I change the questions. Because I can.

If you've read this before, feel free to skip, although there may be interesting new things to discover and know beyond the cut.

Anyway, here you go:

( This way lies a lot of information you may or may not need about the person whose LJ you may or may not be reading right at this moment. Also, I may or may not be the King of Rain, which may or may not explain why it's drizzling right now. Essentially, this is Schrodinger's cut-tag. )

Hello, everybody, and welcome to my journal. I'm pretty sure you know who I am, my name being in the URL and all, but just in case, I'm Seanan McGuire (also known as Mira Grant), and you're probably not on Candid Camera. This post exists to answer a few of the questions I get asked on a semi-hemi-demi-regular basis. It may look familiar; that's because it gets updated and re-posted roughly every two months, to let folks who've just wandered in know how things work around here. Also, sometimes I change the questions. Because I can.

If you've read this before, feel free to skip, although there may be interesting new things to discover and know beyond the cut.

Anyway, here you go:

( This way lies a lot of information you may or may not need about the person whose LJ you may or may not be reading right at this moment. Also, I may or may not be the King of Rain, which may or may not explain why it's drizzling right now. Essentially, this is Schrodinger's cut-tag. )

So a few days ago, I posted a relative rarity—a song about a Toby book—and stated that I don't write or post many of these, on account of the inevitability of spoilers. A lot of people commented on how much they enjoyed the lyrics, which was lovely. Several of them then told me either a) that the song wasn't what they would consider a spoiler, b) that the statute of limitations was up, or c) that they liked spoilers. These are all absolutely valid perspectives, and I was glad to hear them.

And yet, as is always the danger, they got me thinking.

My position on spoilers for my own work is that, as the author, I have to be scrupulously careful, both because it's not fair of me to take the experience of reading something for the first time away from someone, and because sometimes, I can spoil things which haven't happened yet, which means that sometimes, my spoilers can change. Merav was one of my first Machete Squad members. She and I have talked through at least three different iterations of the timeline, including characters who wound up never existing, and excluding characters who wound up being very important. So there are times when she'll say "but you can't do _____, it contradicts _____," and _____ is something that not only hasn't happened yet, it's never going to happen. I didn't mean to confuse her, it just happened.

There's also the question of authorial deceit. A few years ago, people in the fandom of a TV show I watched—and I honestly don't remember which show it was, that's sort of beside the point—were furious because, at the end of the season, what happened didn't match the spoilers they'd received from the showrunner at the start of the season. He had lied to them. He had intentionally deceived them. And oh, were they pissed. But as a writer, I can see where maybe he didn't lie. Stories twist and change. Characters I thought would be totally essential disappear, and new characters wander onto the scene. When I told Jennifer how Sparrow Hill Road was going to play out, I wasn't lying, even though things didn't end that way. The story changed in my hands. I don't ever want my readers to feel like I lied to them because of spoilers. I try to play fair, and that's important to me.

Some people find that spoilers enhance their enjoyment of the work. I know that sometimes, when I'm really excited about something, or really anxious about it, I'll seek out spoilers just to brace myself better. I'm currently looking for anything that can confirm certain upcoming X-Men storylines. There's a key phrase there: "seek out spoilers."

When I get accidentally spoiled for something, I am pissed, and depending on the magnitude of the spoiler, I may cross the work off my list of things to do. I've never seen The Sixth Sense because of a careless spoiler. I decided not to see Serenity when every major event and plot twist of the movie was spoiled by enthusiastic fans. I think you should absolutely have the freedom to choose to be spoiled, but I don't think I should be spoiling people without warning them, or without their consent.

Sometimes knowing a thing is coming really does enhance the story, or at least change it. Writing stories about Jonathan and Frances Healy is oddly bittersweet for me, because I know how they both die—and that isn't a spoiler, since they're Verity's great-grandparents, and cryptozoology isn't a career that comes with a guarantee of a long life. It's not a spoiler to say that Alice and Thomas will eventually get married, that Rose dies alone by the side of the road, or that science accidentally makes zombies. These are background statements, and even if I later go back and write stories set before those things happened, they don't turn into spoilers.

I wish I loved John and Fran a little less. It would make what's coming a lot less hard.

I guess what it comes down to is that I don't want to spoil the experience of the person who doesn't like spoilers, and that means maintaining a strict policy of self-censorship outside of venues where I've posted thorough spoiler warnings. It also means that occasionally, if something is very new or the spoiler is very large, I may screen or remove comments containing spoilers from posts that aren't marked "spoilers here." That way, everyone gets a little closer to what they want, and life is good.

Make sense?

Hello, everybody, and welcome to my journal. I'm pretty sure you know who I am, my name being in the URL and all, but just in case, I'm Seanan McGuire (also known as Mira Grant), and you're probably not on Candid Camera. This post exists to answer a few of the questions I get asked on a semi-hemi-demi-regular basis. It may look familiar; that's because it gets updated and re-posted roughly every two months, to let folks who've just wandered in know how things work around here. Also, sometimes I change the questions. Because I can.

If you've read this before, feel free to skip, although there may be interesting new things to discover and know beyond the cut.

Anyway, here you go:

( This way lies a lot of information you may or may not need about the person whose LJ you may or may not be reading right at this moment. Also, I may or may not be the King of Rain, which may or may not explain why it's drizzling right now. Essentially, this is Schrodinger's cut-tag. )

And now, ladies and gentlemen...Late Eclipses [Amazon]|[Mysterious Galaxy] is officially six days from release. That's less than a week! How am I supposed to get all my freaking out finished in less than a week? Since flailing around screaming that the sky is falling doesn't help with my countdown, here are six things you may not know about me.

6. I love snakes and spiders, have no fear of sharks, and tend to giggle hysterically when I'm on a plane and it hits a patch of turbulence that makes it feel like we're going to fall out of the sky. I am, however, morbidly terrified of pudding. This translates into a fear of any type of slug that isn't so ludicrously colored as to seem like a special effect.

5. I will not go into brackish water, because of the potential for leeches. Even if I am assured that there are no leeches in the entire country, I will not go into brackish water, because of the potential for leeches. Leeches are just not okay. Thank you, Stand By Me. In an attempt to conquer my fear, I kept a jar of leeches in my kitchen for a whole year. Those leeches were okay, because they were behind glass.

4. My collection of My Little Ponies is epic and vast, and contains almost all of the larger buildings from the original 1980s run of the toy line. Yes, including the Paradise Estate, which is roughly the size of a large card table. In that misty, far-off future where I actually have an office of my very own, it's going to wind up evenly divided between research material and plastic horses. Because that's just how I roll.

3. I grew up really, really, really poor, and I read really, really, really fast. These things combined mean that I grew up a dedicated re-reader, and will read books that I enjoy five, ten, or even twenty times. My count on The Stand is somewhere in the mid-fifties. The weirdest thing about my current bounty of available reading material is the lack of re-reading. I haven't read any of my favorites in over a year, and it's making me twitchy.

2. I have these long, elaborate, lucid dreams that seem entirely real when they're going on, even down to my needing to eat and use the bathroom in my sleep. They always end when someone tells me that I'm dreaming, and while they tend to be very realistic and grounded, they also tend to involve elements of "in a perfect world," like, you know, being published. Part of me spends every day afraid someone's going to tell me I'm dreaming.

1. My childhood idols were Vincent Price, Marilyn Munster, and Doctor Who. Considering that, and considering the way my life has turned out, I don't think I'm doing so bad. And I think they'd be proud of me.

It's my birthday! Today, I am thirty-three years old. In fun math facts, thirty-three is the atomic number of arsenic, the recorded number of miracles performed by Jesus Christ (I wonder if that includes exploding the snakes?), and the largest positive integer that cannot be expressed as a sum of different triangular numbers. It's also the number of vertebrae in the human spine. So it's creepy, miraculous, and poisonously delicious. What a great number!

I've always liked my birthday in terms of time of year (winter) and numbers involved (1/5/78). I have always disliked my birthday in terms of where it falls on the modern calendar, since being born right after Christmas is a really good way to wind up annually rooked for parties and presents. This was a big issue for me when I was a kid. All the other kids got to bring in cupcakes and goody bags! I got to bring...the end of Winter Vacation. Um. Sorry about that, guys. I didn't mean to be the school year's personal seasonal monarch.

As I've gotten older, this has mattered less, largely because I am no longer forced to look longingly at the cupcake heaps of others. Now, I can buy my own damn cupcakes, and I don't have to share them with the rest of the class. I usually wind up sharing them anyway, because who needs to eat that many cupcakes, but still.

Today, I'm going to finish packing for GaFilk (I fly to Georgia tomorrow), do my normal Wednesday errands, go out for Indian food with my mother, my sister, and Kate, and attempt to reassure my cats that I'm coming back, honest, really, I swear. At some point, I may find a way to obtain some cupcakes.

Happy birthday, me! I've survived another trip 'round the sun.

Bring on the next one.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to my journal. I'm pretty sure you know who I am, my name being in the URL and all, but just in case, I'm Seanan McGuire (also known as Mira Grant), and you're probably not on Candid Camera. This post exists to answer a few of the questions I get asked on a semi-hemi-demi-regular basis. It may look familiar; that's because it gets updated and re-posted roughly every two months, to let folks who've just wandered in know how things work around here. Also, sometimes I change the questions. Because I can.

If you've read this before, feel free to skip, although there may be interesting new things to discover and know beyond the cut.

Anyway, here you go:

( This way lies a lot of information you may or may not need about the person whose LJ you may or may not be reading right at this moment. Also, I may or may not be the King of Rain, which may or may not explain why it's drizzling right now. Essentially, this is Schrodinger's cut-tag. )