Rose-Owls and Pumpkin Girls

I have some traits in common with a vending machine.

Lee Harris, the commissioning editor of Every Heart a Doorway, purchased three novellas from me at the same time, which was delightful, and very much appreciated (still is). The first one, which I pitched to him, was EHaD. He liked it quite a lot, which was also very much appreciated. After it was done, we were out to tea, talking about what he wanted for the second.

"I write better from a prompt," I said. He laughed and replied that he would like to see a coming-of-age American road trip ghost story.

So I wrote him one. He was quite surprised.

Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day is the story of Jenna, dwelling in New York, working at a suicide hotline, and waiting for the afterlife to catch up with her and end her time in this world. It's the story of ghosts in glass, of corn-witches and Kentucky, of the shadows that lurk around the edges of our lives, waiting to be seen. I am very proud of it.

It will be released January 10th, 2017, which means you can buy it for my birthday, and you can see the cover here.

It's a story!

You may remember that back in December, I ran a poll to determine the level of interest in Sparrow Hill Road shirts printed and sold by Unicorn Empire. The end result was a definite level of interest: enough that we decided to go ahead and open up the pre-sale! Woo hoo!

Now, this a pre-sale, not a sale. Why does this matter? Because before I give you the link for the shirts, I'm going to give you the link for how Unicorn Empire pre-sales work. Please, take a moment to read it. Amber, who runs Unicorn Empire, is a fan running a business for fans, out of her garage. She has help, but she's not a huge operation, and her timelines are thus longer than they would be for, say, Hot Topic. She's being awesome doing this for us, and I don't want to cause her any trouble.

Without further ado...

The Pre-Sale Is Now Live!

Based on your votes, we made both one and two-color versions of the design, available on T-shirts and tank tops. There is no extra charge for plus sizes, because Unicorn Empire is awesome that way. The pre-sale is only open until February 9th, so get your orders in soon! (We know international shipping is expensive, so if you wanted to coordinate a group order for Australia or whatnot, this would be a great place to do it!)

I'm so excited!

The random number generator has spoken, and the winner of a signed, personalized copy of Sparrow Hill Road is...

dragonsflame71

Please contact me via my website contact form within the next twenty-four hours to provide your mailing information. All information must be received via my website to be considered valid. If I do not hear from you within twenty-four hours, you will no longer be eligible to receive your prize.

Ten more drawings to go!

One week from today, Sparrow Hill Road will be on bookstore shelves everywhere, and you will finally be able to learn the tale of Rose Marshall as she always intended it to be told.

According to my file dates, "Pretty Little Dead Girl," the song that introduced most people to Rose, was written on December 17th, 2004. The first story appeared in The Edge of Propinquity in January of 2010. Six years to get from song to story, and that wasn't the end of it. Those original stories have been rewritten and revised and ripped up and ripped away until their bones showed through, and now, on May 6th, 2014, you finally get to see the actual shape of things. It only took a little under ten years.

According to Publishers Weekly, which got a few of the facts of Rose's complicated origin wrong, but got the feeling right...

"McGuire (the InCryptid series) brings empathy, complexity, and a shivering excitement to this well-developed campfire tale. Many stories have been told about a hitchhiker, a young woman—sometimes dressed in a prom dress or jeans and a T-shirt—who roams the highways in search of a ride. Rose Marshall is that hitcher, also known as the Ghost of Sparrow Hill Road. Rose has two purposes: one is helping the newly dead make the transition between states, and the other is hunting down Bobby Cross, the man who killed her in order to gain immortality. This is the story of her death, and her life. This mesmerizing tale had its beginnings in the short story The Edge of Propinquity; McGuire has smoothly turned it into a powerful blend of ghost story, love story, and murder mystery, wrapped in a perfectly neat package."

One week.

Rose is finally almost home.

Let me tell you about Rose Marshall—
Might be the last thing you’ll ever see.
They say some stories will never die,
Well, she died back in fifty-three,
Kept her prom night date with the cemetery.

—"Pretty Little Dead Girl."

"Have you ever heard the story of the woman at the diner?"

—Rose Marshall, "Good Girls Go to Heaven."

Sparrow Hill Road is finished now. Twelve stories, twelve stops along a single stretch of highway. We didn't blow a tire or take any unexpected detours along the way, and that's good. And now here we are, and it's time to get out and stretch our legs, at least for a little while. The first part of the story's done.

I knew when I agreed to do Sparrow Hill that it was going to be a one-year commitment. Not only was I not sure how much of the story I'd be able to get through in a year—there was a very real chance that I'd finish the setting completely, leaving nothing untold—but I knew that 2011 would be extremely busy, which would make agreeing to a two-year tenure suicidal for me, and dangerous for Jennifer. A year looked just about perfect. That didn't stop it from being nerve-wracking at times. A few of the stories were turned in just as the ragged edge of my deadline was approaching, and the schedule I was on didn't really give me time to say "you know what? This story needs to be benched, let's do something else." But I never missed a deadline, and I never turned in a story I thought was bad. I can look back on the year with a sort of smug pride. I did that. I turned in one complete narrative a month, every month, for a year. And now I'm finished.

If you know me through filk, you may have met Rose as far back as 2004, when I wrote the song "Pretty Little Dead Girl," although most people didn't "meet" her until I was the OVFF Toastmistress in 2005, and did the song, along with my Rosettes, in a bright pink prom dress on the convention's main stage. I went on to write a bunch of songs about Rose, showing different sides of her story. I always knew I wanted to write the "what really happened" version, eventually, but it seemed too complex for lyrics.

Then Jennifer asked if I wanted to be one of the 2010 Universe Authors, and everything started falling together.

Sparrow Hill Road was challenging, exciting, and complicated in a way that neither novels nor short stories tend to be complicated. It was, essentially, my Green Mile: a serial novel told in strange installments. And like The Green Mile, I'm planning to revise it, turn it into a coherent whole, and see about finding a publisher. But that's going to need to wait a little while.

My big, big thanks go to Jennifer, for being the best editor I could have had on this crazy project; Amber, for taking amazing pictures; Torrey, for being Rose Marshall (and doing a bang-up job of it); Vixy, Amy, Brooke, Kate, Rebecca, and others, for editorial, copy-edits, and letting me talk things through with them; and Phil, always Phil, without whom none of this would have happened.

It was a good ride. It's over now, and there were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys I sent away, but it was a good ride.

Thank you for taking it with me.

So Mary and I have found this poem:

Spos'n the witches began to witch,
And you didn't know which witch was witch?
Well, spos'n?

Spos'n a h'ant appeared to you,
An' an old black rooster up and crew?
Well, spos'n?

Spos'n a pump-kin pumped hot flames,
From a place, you know, what nobody names?
Well, spos'n?

Spos'n a great big bug-a-boo
Reached out his long sharp claws for you?
Well, spos'n?

We both believe that we've seen it before, and that it is thus probably traditional, or a very close variant on something that is traditional. Lo, I beg of thee: can you find the source of this poem? We've sought. We've searched. We've...mostly told bad jokes and eaten candy corn.

Help!