Rose-Owls and Pumpkin Girls

Hello, glorious people!

It is time to tell you of a wondrous thing.

My dearest, most beloved Dr. Mary Crowell, who you have heard on my CDs Wicked Girls and Creature Feature, if not on her own, absolutely transcendent material, is running a Kickstarter right now to fund the production of her new album of amazing, mythological music. Mary is one of the kindest, most utterly generous musicians I know, and her work is well worth your time. Please take a look at her plan, and if you'd like to hear more, well, you know what to do.

But.

For Mary's birthday this year, I wrote her a short story, because sometimes I am less lazy than I am broke, and my friends need things that make them happy. Titled "Scattering Seeds on the Pomegranate Tour," the story is simultaneously our first Rookery piece and our second Rookery piece: an earlier story was written for the PaulandStorminomicon, which has yet to be released, and this story comes before it, chronologically speaking. This is my Secret Urban Fantasy Setting (tm), because the stories about it always seem to be destined for dark and hidden places.

Not this time.

If you back the Kickstarter at any the tiers which include a USB drive, you'll get a copy of the story, along with all of Mary's albums in digital form and all her recordings from the last year of her Patreon. Quoth Mary: "Tiers that include the UBD drive: $70 Digital Plus, $145 The Harold Tier, $350 Almost the Full Tour, $450 The Full Tour, and $1,000 Pas de Deux."

Furthermore, and quoting Mary again: "Only the three highest tiers ($350 Almost the Full Tour, $450 The Full Tour, and $1,000 Pas de Deux) include a chapbook of your story, 'Scattering Seeds on the Pomegranate Tour.' By chapbook, I mean small hard bound book, because Wesley. (These are limited. He will make no more than 29 of these total. You-Seanan and I-Mary each get one, leaving only 27 to be acquired by pledging to this Kickstarter.)" Wesley, Mary's husband, is a craftsman and a scholar, and the pictures she's shared so far of the books in progress are positively gorgeous (you can see pictures as a part of this update). Basically, after I have been eaten by genetically modified banana slugs, this chapbook will be an incredible collector's item.

Kickstarter!

As I get ready to return to the studio and get back to work on Saint of Thorns (probably coming out some time in 2016; the album for 2015 is Creature Feature, and we're laying out the liner notes now), it occurs to me that some of you may not know how awesome and incredible my recording engineer, Kristoph Klover, actually is.

Let's fix that.

I have one copy of Elbows and Antlers, the latest CD by the band Avalon Rising, of which Kristoph is a founding member. Celtic funk, folk rock, call it what you will, it's amazing. And I am giving this disk away to one lucky winner.

To enter...

1. Comment here.
2. If outside the US, indicate that you will pay postage.
3. That's all.

I will choose a winner via RNG on Monday, January 26th. If you're interested in checking out Avalon Rising before then, here's their website: http://www.flowinglass.com/

I highly, highly recommend all three available Avalon Rising albums, especially if you like my stuff, Vixy and Tony's stuff, or Talis's stuff.

I believe we've discussed this before, but: in the filk community, there is a man by the name of Bob Kanefsky. He is also a verb. To "be Kanef'd" is to have one of your songs gripped in the white-hot maw of his evil genius, chewed up, and spat out as something entirely different. If he and Weird Al Yankovic got into gonzo parody battle (probably in an abandoned warehouse somewhere, with lots of exposed beams and weirdly good lighting), Kanef would win with subtlety and horrifyingly accurate internal rhyme.

To be Kanef'd is a rite of passage in the filk community. It is the announcement that yes, you have made it as a songwriter; yes, you have created something good enough to be worth tinkering with.

The first time I was Kanef'd, I like to've died. Literally—I couldn't breathe. And as with most creative people, he's only improved since then. At the Circus on Saturday night, he launched a new parody at me, using Vixy and Tony as his delivery mechanism.

"I get paid to write a fairy tale:
Tinkerbell’s detective daughter,
Fourteen years of unread mail,
Like a fish out of the water..."

Oh, yeah. He went there.

"Deadline: About the Author" is set to the tune of "My Story Is Not Done," and contains spoilers for/references to the Newsflesh trilogy, the Toby Daye books, and Discount Armageddon. And it is hysterical.

Bob Kanefsky, I salute you.

I shall have my revenge.

It's fan art awesomeness time! shadow71689 has designed some incredible Newsflesh banner art, using my casting choices for Shaun and Georgia as her models. Seriously, this is some high-quality photo manipulation, and I am in awe.

Not only that, but she's cooked up a truly awesome soundtrack for Shaun; I've bought all the songs off iTunes, and I'm rocking to it RIGHT NOW. Check out her work, it's mad cool!

I am a happy blonde.

As many of you may or may not be aware, I am a fairly prolific songwriter. And when I say 'prolific', I really mean 'I have released two albums, I'm recording a third right now, and if I had the money, I would be heading straight back into the studio for number four, just to try to get some of my backlog down on CD.'

It's been determined that there's just about nothing I'll refuse to write a song about. I'm not much for bathroom humor or things of that sort, but I've written songs ranging from the sweet and wistful to the cheerfully macabre, and the ratio stays pretty consistent at fifty/fifty 'really pretty'/'totally crazy.'

Last year, after reading a fabulous book called The Return of the Black Death: the World's Greatest Serial Killer, I wrote a song titled, naturally enough, 'The Black Death.' (The lyrics are linked so that you can understand the horror.) Several CDC installations have printouts of this song tacked to their walls, and at least one teacher has decided to use it as part of his lesson plans. I Have Arrived.

Quoth the teacher in question:

"I gave the students lyric sheets and had them listen and list 'reasons why epidemiologists think that the Black Death was NOT Bubonic Plague.' Some of the kids, when I asked the same question on the test, even quoted back song lyrics!"

I WIN AT EVERYTHING.

BayCon 2008 is just around the corner! Are you wondering where I'm going to be? Well, wonder no more, because I've got what can only be termed 'the inside scoop'. Which is really a good thing, since otherwise, I'd be wandering merrily into a major convention with no living clue what I was supposed to be doing.

Saturday at 11:30 AM, you can catch me on the Sex, Lies and Publishing panel. I'm not one hundred percent certain what we're going to be talking about, although I expect it to include a) sex, b) lies, and c) publishing. I just sold a trilogy, I've had sex, and I once told my mother that the frog was put in our bathtub by magical angels from the moon, so hey, I've got something to say about all three elements of the panel! Failing that, there's always zombies. Show up to show your support on my first real 'post selling those Toby books to DAW' panel as a genuine to-be-published genre author.

Also Saturday, at 1:00 PM, I'll be appearing on the Iron Poet I panel, with Kevin Andrew Murphy (and other people, but that's who I can say for sure is always there). I won't be writing poetry, but will, instead, be discussing it, and helping other people write it. For the win! It's a really fun, interactive panel event, and the poetry that our participants write on Saturday will be presented and judged on Sunday at 2:30 PM, when we reconvene for Iron Poet II. This panel has a low chance of zombies, but a high chance of recitations of 'The Tragedy of Lillian Kane, Princess of Neptune'.

Saturday at 4:00 PM it's time for the annual excitement of Evolution of Dr. Who, where we all get together to talk about what everybody's favorite Time Lord has been doing with himself. Past debates have included 'true love or puppy love?', 'Romana or the Rani?', and -- my personal favorite -- 'is Paul McGann canon or not?' (since answered absolutely by 'Family of Blood'). Since we're in the middle of a series, we're about to go into Tennant's year off, and we've just changed executive producers, there's going to be a lot to talk about. And, if all else fails, there's always insulting the special effects to get a good brawl going. Be there!

Of course, for a lot of folks, it's all about the music. That's why you should join me Sunday at 10:00 PM for my BayCon 2009 concert! With Paul Kwinn and Tony Fabris trading off guitar duty, Michelle Dockrey and Maya Bohnhoff on backing vocals, and Beckett Gladney on harmonica, this is promising to be one of the most awesome concerts to date. I'm not willing to post the full set list, but I will tell you that you could hear some of the songs from the upcoming album, as well as at least one pendant-prompt song, one Firefly song, and several songs made of so much pure awesome that they make my heart hurt. Join us! You won't be sorry.

Eric Gerds will have copies of both Pretty Little Dead Girl and Stars Fall Home available throughout the weekend; they will also be available directly from me, if he runs out or the dealer's room is closed. Remember, they make great gifts! Thirteen, by Vixy and Tony, will also be available either from Eric or direct from the source; the album is fabulously well-worth it (and I don't just say that because I got to perform on the title track).

See you this weekend!