Rose-Owls and Pumpkin Girls

I usually start these posts with "I am pleased...". I'm not pleased right now. I'm not sure I'll ever be pleased again. Like so many of us, I am sick and scared and sad. I'm wishing I weren't getting so many random apologies from people who found the villain in Feed cartoony and unrealistic, but now find him horrifyingly plausible. I'm wishing a lot of things.

But time passes; the Turtle moves; the work goes on, and my fear and my sadness do not mean I can let y'all miss things you might want to know about. So:

It is my privilege to announce that I (as Mira Grant) am doing another novella with Subterranean Press. Final Girls is a story about virtual reality, psychotherapy, corporate espionage, and figuring out exactly who you are. According to the website...

What if you could fix the worst parts of yourself by confronting your worst fears?

Dr. Jennifer Webb has invented proprietary virtual reality technology that purports to heal psychological wounds by running clients through scenarios straight out of horror movies and nightmares. In a carefully controlled environment, with a medical cocktail running through their veins, sisters might develop a bond they've been missing their whole lives—while running from the bogeyman through a simulated forest. But...can real change come so easily?

Esther Hoffman doubts it. Esther has spent her entire journalism career debunking pseudoscience, after phony regression therapy ruined her father’s life. She's determined to unearth the truth about Dr. Webb’s budding company. Dr. Webb’s willing to let her, of course, for reasons of her own. What better advertisement could she get than that of a convinced skeptic? But Esther's not the only one curious about how this technology works. Enter real-world threats just as frightening as those created in the lab. Dr. Webb and Esther are at odds, but they may also be each other's only hope of survival.

Limited to 1,250 signed, numbered copies, Final Girls is available for pre-order now, and will be shipping in April. This is going to be a gorgeous book. Julie Dillon, who did the cover for Rolling in the Deep, is doing the cover for this one too, and I am so excited. Remember that Rolling in the Deep sold out fast, and is now virtually unattainable unless you're lucky or have a book budget I really envy, and order yours today!

LJ Messenger.

So I've been experiencing a real uptick recently in people using LJ's internal messaging system to reach me. I don't know why? I don't know if this is a societal switch toward "let's use one site for absolutely everything, always, and if you ever have to switch tags, that's bad," or if LJ has started giving out free kittens with every message sent, or what, but I am here to beg you to please not do that.

One of the functions of my OCD is that I feel compelled to answer all comments that are not somehow covered by comment amnesty, such as being second-level (a reply to one of my replies) or on a post that's connected to the RNG. This can take a long time. I have over 1,300 unanswered comments right now. I do not mind this! Comments are very rarely time-sensitive, and when they are, such as with the WG orders, I either get help or I leave myself a post-it. But this means that anything that's not on those entries just gets buried. Your message can wait up to a year for me to notice it.

Please, if you need to reach me privately, use my website contact form. That's what my website contact form is for. I get all that mail. I read all that mail. I answer most of that mail (some things do not require an answer). I do not overlook that mail for a year. Please, do not message me here, or on Tumblr, or on Facebook. Use my contact form. Please.

Slasher Chicks shirts.

I have answered all currently outstanding inquires, and I still have pretty, pretty Slasher Chicks shirts for sale. So pretty! So totally random in terms of color and size! It's an adventure every time I have to look up a size/color combo, and the adventure can be yours.

Old ARCs.

I have two ARCs of Half-Off Ragnarok left over, and I would like to see them go to a good home where they will be turned into art. People periodically need books for art projects, so...anyone out there looking to do some fun papercrafts and need an ARC or two? Please do not ask if you want to keep the ARCs in book form for reading purposes; I'm looking for people who are looking to make things. US addresses only, since postage is expensive and I'd need to ask you to pay it and ARCs aren't worth it (unless you're emulating a friend of mine and making something like a bridal bouquet out of ARCs, because that's a really important and long-term papercraft, and justifies you paying for postage).

Go ahead and comment on this post if you're interested, so other people can see that the ARCs may have been claimed. Again, please, crafters only.

Media stuff.

Surprisingly good: the movie Big Ass Spider.

Also surprisingly good: Girl Meets World.

...and thus do I summarize my entire experience with media in two three-word titles.

More later, but these are the things that mattered right now!

My friend Chris came up yesterday, since we hadn't seen each other in way too long, and we spent most of the day doing what we do best: sitting on the couch, petting the cats, and watching fuck-awful SyFy Channel Original Movies that had been clogging up my DVR waiting for our next watch-a-thon. Movies watched over the course of the party included Shark Week, Boogeyman, Two-Headed Shark Attack, and Haunted High (note that for purposes of "watching," we "watched" it if we stared aghast at the screen for ten minutes before skipping to the next film because OH GOD LIFE IS TOO SHORT FOR THIS CRAP). We finished the night with Notting Hill, because we needed our faith in cinema restored.

I feel good about my life choices.

There's something incredibly pure about a terrible horror movie. When I was in high school, one of my favorite pick-up RPGs was called It Came From the Late, Late, Late Show, in which you played, yes, the lead in a terrible genre movie. I "invented" combat cheerleading (which would show up from my PCs for years to follow) during a session titled "Teenage Zombie High School." I learned about setting tarantulas on fire in "Leeeeeeeegs!!!! The Crawling Terror." And I always had a wonderful time.

Authors have this tendency to write "deconstructive works" about the genres and media that they love. Scalzi's Redshirts, Stephen King's The Dark Half, and so on. I am deeply afraid that one day, I am going to write my deconstructive work, and it's going to be like Night Vale meets the Care Bear Cousins.

That day is coming.

I love the SyFy Channel Saturday night movies. The goofy effects, the giant monsters, the sometimes wooden acting, it's all a delicious cheese sandwich to help me relax into the one night of the week where I don't feel rushed to accomplish ALL THE THINGS before I go to bed. I try to judge them by what they are, and not by what I want them to be: silly, shitty movies that accomplish what they set out to accomplish, no more, and no less. Sometimes they're even pretty good.

This past week, the Saturday night movie was The End of the World. It was about a group of geeks who owned/worked at a video store specializing in disaster movies, the judgmental SO of the geek who actually owned the store, the faintly evil cousin of the geek who actually owned the store, the disapproving parent of one of the geeks who worked at the store, the disaster guru idol of all the geeks, and a bunch of extras. The extras fell into three categories: evil looters who wanted to take stuff from our heroic geeks, assholes at the mental hospital where the disaster guru had been committed, and people at the military base.

Now. Looking only at what I've written above, how many of these characters were female? If you guessed "judgmental SO" and "disapproving parent," then ding ding ding! We have a winner!

None of the geeks were women. The SO even knowing what the Death Star was called was treated as a virtual miracle, and something so hot as to make the alpha geek temporarily forget about saving the planet, because she was speaking Forbidden Knowledge, yo. She was saying things that implied girls could be geeks too, and man, that was so impossible it was like she was demonstrating super powers! The mother figure was literally introduced calling one of the secondary geeks at work and asking him how the job search was going, because it was time for him to get a real job, in the real world, amirite girls? (The SO had a similar speech.) That's how we should interact with geeks! We should drag them kicking and screaming into respectability, because no one can ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever be happy and fulfilled just being a professional fan of things. And women can't even start being fans of things. It's not allowed.

None of the extras were female. None of the secondary characters, apart from the two listed above, were female. One of the female characters was there to nag and be a burden; the other was there to be a prize and to be enlightened about how Geek Things = Man Things and Man Things = Awesome.

And here's the thing. None of these characters—not a single fucking one—had such a gendered role that their character could not have been played by a member of the opposite sex. Testosterone did not unlock the key to saving the world. Estrogen did not cause the cataclysm. You could have literally flipped a fucking coin for every single role, and cast accordingly. "Whoops, female lead, male antagonist, female love interest..." Better yet, make it a d10, and if you roll a ten, roll again for assigned birth gender, and then go from there. "Female lead, male antagonist, ftm love interest..." It would have been the same damn movie.

But they didn't do that. They went with boys and boys and boys, and an exclusionist narrative that had me saying sadly "I like disaster movies. I exist, too."

I wound up stopping the movie halfway through because the lack of female voices had become so alienating to me that I needed to wait a while before I came back and finished watching. It was an okay movie. I won't be watching it again. There's no one for me there.

Men can identify with women, and should. Women can identify with men, and should. But there's a big difference between saying "Seanan, you should have been able to identify with the struggles of the protagonist, regardless of gender," and saying "Seanan, you should have been able to accept a world that cast your gender into the role of harpy and martinet, and not felt objectified or rejected by this setting." I did identify with Owen. I did care about his story.

It was everything around him that lost me. And honestly, I'm still lost, and I've been lost too many times.

Sometimes it would be nice to be found.

I watch a great many horror and monster movies, and have since I was a very small child. This explains a lot. This has also taught me a great many things about what not to have characters do, 'cause it's dumb. I will share some of those things now.

***

10. Do not clone predatory dinosaurs and expect things to go well right out of the gate. Seriously, here. In the movie Raptor, they're trying to clone "dinosaurs with a brain*" to do heavy labor and generally become grunt workers for mankind. Okay, if you're a moron, I guess that's a plan. So they start with...velociraptors. And Tyrannosaurus Rex. Because, y'know, that ten-ton killing machine is totally going to use sentience to go "sure, tiny meat-snack man, I'll work my tail off for you!" If you're going to clone dinosaurs, start with a plant-eater.

(*Meaning "a human level of intelligence and reasoning." Because that's a good idea.)

( 9. While we're on the subject, do not make anything that already likes the taste of people super-intelligent... )

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. )

As a pop-culture junkie who treats monster movies as something barely this side of a religion, it was inevitable that I would wind up falling in love with a certain California blonde girl when she funky chickened her way into my life ("How loose is your goose? My goose is totally loose..."). My love for her impacted my view on life, my video collection, and even my speech patterns—you can tell when I've been watching old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer by changes in my cadence and intonation. It's a little freaky.

So it was also inevitable that when I was invited to be a contributor to Whedonistas: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon by the Women Who Love Them, I would jump at the chance.

This star-studded essay collection is the second in the female-centric essay series from Mad Norwegian Press, and was edited by Lynne Thomas and Deborah Stanish. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but just the list of contributors feels me with geeky glee. I'm in a book with Emma Bull! My fourteen year old self can finally die happy! I mean, except for the part where then, I wouldn't remember why being in a book with Emma Bull is cool, so let's skip that.

One of the other contributors, Teresa Jusino, has written a lovely post explaining the book and why it's awesome at Tor.com. Just to further convince you that the book is made of win, the editors and Tor.com have conspired to let you get an early look at my essay, "The Girls Next Door: Learning to Live with the Living Dead and Never Even Break a Nail." (If you can come up with a more me-esque title, I'm not sure I want to know about it.)

Go forth! Read! Maybe improve your holiday season and chances of surviving when the Hellmouth finally opens by ordering yourself a copy! It's going to be fun for the whole family.

Grr. Argh.

So there's this publisher, Leisure Horror, that prints, well, horror. Lots of it. At least one new paperback release a month (probably substantially more, given the size of their catalog), spanning everything from the classic movie monsters to the modern splatterpunk. I love them. They're my literary popcorn, and I devour them the way my grandmother used to devour category Harlequin romances. It gets me funny looks on the train, since if you run down the line of afternoon commuters-with-books, you'll usually get "woman with romance, woman with romance, man with science fiction with big guns on the cover, me," and Leisure's graphic designers don't believe in being stingy with the arterial spray.

Last weekend at Spocon, in the dealer's hall, I was lucky enough to find a man with an entire box of Leisure Horror that I hadn't read yet. Yes, that's right: a box. I went through it to pick out duplicates, squealing as I did about how unrelentingly, gloriously terrible some of the books looked. Brooke, who was with me, initially thought I was rating them. Then she realized I was buying them, and made the best "Oh God why have you allowed this to happen?" face I've ever seen her make. I got twenty-one brand new horror novels for twenty bucks, and he threw in the box. Total win.

(My total win only increased later in the weekend, when trektone expressed delight over my horror novel haul. Now I have someplace to dump all the ones I don't want to keep! FUCK YEAH, SEAKING!)

I have since devoured three and a half books from the haul. The first one, Snow, was an incredible reminder of why I'm not actually a very good straight horror author. See, these things come out of the snow, and they kill people. They stick their creepy snow-creature arms into peoples' backs, and drive them around like disturbing meat-suit zombies. And then they eat you. Unless you can kill them first, in which case, hey, points to you. That's it. That's all. No science, no justification, no "oh my stars and garters, the Wendigo myth was based on reality"—there are snow monsters, and they want to make you die. I loved this book. If I'd written it, it would have been twice as long, involved a lot more why-porn, and probably lost a few entrails in favor of a) the scene at the top-secret government lab where we learn about the aliens, or b) the scene at the top-secret monster-hunters' library where we learn about the folklore behind the snow-creatures. It always makes me happy when I get a reminder of why I'm not the kind of horror author I sometimes secretly wish I were.

The second book, Dwellers, was the first thing I've ever picked up from Leisure Horror that could actually be adapted into a Disney movie. It would be a sad Disney movie, sure, and it would lose a lot of, again, entrails, but it would work. Dwellers is like Harry and the Hendersons crossed with The Thing. It's sad and poignant and tragic and funny and altogether wonderful, and I really didn't expect it. Again, there's very little "why" in the book. Horror doesn't need "why." Horror needs entrails, and horror gets them, but oh, wow, is this a fabulous book.

The two I've read since then haven't been even remotely as good, which is why I'm not identifying them by name. Altogether, it's been a fantastic reminder of why I read horror, and why I'm not so good at writing it in any format longer than a short story. Why is there a monster in the closet?

Because.

Some days, you think about politics, philosophy, and art. Some days, Pliny and Socrates are the defining stars of your existence. Some days, the question of which came first—the chicken or the egg—is all-consuming, worthy of endless contemplation and consideration. Some days, just the movement of the heavens is enough to take your breath away, leaving you locked in endless awe of the cosmos and all its wonders.

Some days, you're just not that deep.

Guess what kind of day I'm having?

I spend a lot of time locked in intellectual pursuits. Maybe "figuring out strategic survival tactics and social innovations following the zombie apocalypse" and "building a better pandemic" aren't your standard thought experiments, but they're time-consuming and they take a lot of mental processing power. I guess it's only natural that I'd occasionally get exhausted and want to spend a few hours gazing off into space, counting air molecules while Food Network amuses the cats. (Seriously, they love Iron Chef, although Alice has been known to attack the screen when Bobby Flay comes on.) This also accounts for my love of movies like Dinoshark*, one more gem from the SyFy mines.

Tonight, everything will change. Tonight, I have edits to process on two short stories, a battle plan to write for tomorrow's official opening of the San Diego International Comic Convention hotel block, and at least eight pages of The Brightest Fell to get through. Tonight, I need to sit down and seriously outline two potential urban fantasy shorts, one Toby-based, one InCryptid-based. Tonight, I must brush the cat. But all of that is tonight, and right now, it's daylight, and I'm just not that deep.

Thinking is hard. Let's have strawberry ice cream.

(*Over the course of a two-hour movie, Dinoshark eats a kayak, several swimmers, an expedition boat, a crocodile, and a helicopter. Dinoshark is totally metal, yo.)

I sometimes wonder if horror directors go to bed at night dreaming that someday, one of their movies will become a classic; someday, one of their movies will spawn an iconic monster that people will be screaming over for generations to come. Sadly, most of them won't make it. Even the ones who create a truly iconic villain won't necessarily get an iconic monster, because an iconic monster must be somehow generic enough to be used and abused by others, even as the person who first brought it to the screen is generally credited for its creation. The werewolf, the mummy, the vampire, even the mad scientist...they all had to start somewhere. Sure, most iconic horror movie monsters existed before the movies that gave them a terrifying life, but it's the cinematic realities that we remember. At least until the lights go out.

George Romero set out to make a creepy little movie with a social commentary and a shoestring budget. He succeeded in making history.

The concept of the ghoul or walking corpse has existed for centuries—maybe for as long as mankind has been aware that death exists—but it wasn't until Romero that it shambled into the modern age. Night of the Living Dead opened the doors to a new sub-genre of horror, a shambling, biting, hungry sub-genre that wouldn't rest until it had consumed the world. Zombies don't need sleep. They're already dead.

Without Romero, we wouldn't have Night of the Comet, Slither, Night of the Creeps, the Evil Dead trilogy, a large portion of Rob Zombie's musical catalog, or the Zombie Prom episode of Wizards of Waverly Place. We wouldn't have my own Feed, and that would make me a very sad girl indeed. George Romero changed the world. Maybe he did it on purpose, maybe he did it by accident. In the end, it doesn't really matter. He did it.

Here's to you, George Romero. And when you die, we're feeding your corpse into a wood chipper. Just to be sure.