Rose-Owls and Pumpkin Girls

I don't think it's any secret around here that I've been running at warp speed basically since a month before WorldCon, last year. This has resulted in a general decrease in available content here at my journal, because slowing down enough to type an entry hasn't always been an option. So here are some things I've meant to blog about, and haven't:

1. I went to Disney World for a week, with Vixy and Amy and Brooke and Patty. My mother and sister were there, too, but we sort of had parallel-but-rarely intersecting vacations. This was ideal, as my idea of "fun at Disney" involves pin trading and shows and ice cream and frogs, while theirs involves luaus and smoking and ludicrous plush and more smoking. Our only real point of overlap is roller coasters, and we already had a full car.

2. Also I went to Disneyland for a weekend, with Vixy, my mom, and my sister. See above for the basics.

3. I watched a lot of television, in an extremely non-critical manner. I don't believe that you should shut off your brain completely while consuming entertainment, but sometimes I really just want to be all "you know what? I like what I like," and not be all analytical and thoughtful about it. This stops when somebody blows up a blonde girl.

4. I went to New York for a week and a half, where I saw the Counting Crows (with my agent), Ludo (with a large group of friends, my former editor, and my agent; I have a very full-service agent), and The Devil's Carnival (with several friends, including Tu, who I didn't even realize was on the East Coast until I found her in line).

5. Also there is a permanent haunted house called Times Scare in New York, open 365-days a year. If I lived there, I would wind up asking about a Frequent Dier's card or something, because I would be in there at least once a week, being chased by a man with a chainsaw and giggling unnervingly.

6. I wrote some book club articles for SFX Magazine. The second, which is about The Midwich Cuckoos, is out now. I need to think more about the responses some of the readers have had to the book (not to my article), because they're fascinating to me. But basically? I got paid for my Wyndham and telepaths obsession. Life is good.

7. I went to Maine! I stayed with Cat and Dmitri! I want to move to Maine! I won't, because I'm moving to Washington, but seriously, in another timeline, I have already bought a house on Peaks Island, and I am not sorry. I sort of envy that version of me.

8. An old friend from high school literally showed up on my doorstep. Randomly.

9. I ate six pounds of cherries and I'm not sorry about that either.

10. I am currently behind on word count in several areas, which is why comments are going unanswered for what feels like, to me, an unreasonably long time. But I'm catching up. Slowly. I think.

And those are some of the things I've been too frazzled to blog about.

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. )

Monday dawned bright and (very, very) early, since DongWon had asked that I be at Orbit at nine a.m. to do some recording. Now, Orbit is located near Grand Central Station, which is very much Properly In Manhattan. I was staying in Jersey City, which is very much not Properly In Manhattan. It is, in fact, in a different state. As a California girl, this causes me a certain amount of existential confusion every time I need to go from one to the other very quickly, since I know, deep down in my soul, that it takes at least eight hours to go from one state to another. Such is the eternal divide between the East and West Coasts.

Since I needed to get to Orbit by nine, I got up at seven. This means that, on some level, I got up at four. There is a reason I occasionally demand love and caffeine from my editors. I am comfortable enough with Manhattan at this point that I was able to get myself to the office with a minimum of trouble (barring a brief "walking the wrong way up 6th Avenue" incident, and really, that could have happened to anyone), which is good, since I was carrying my laptop. Yes, the big orange one. Yes, the one that weighs as much as one of the cats. Why?

Because I was having dinner with The Agent and a few more of her clients that evening, which meant there was no way I was getting back to Jersey City. And if I was going to be at Orbit all day, I was damn well going to get some serious work done.

I beat DongWon to the office by almost twenty minutes, and was detained by security until he arrived. I am never letting him forget this. Never ever ever never. But! He did eventually show up, and we were able to get into the office, finally, where there were greetings and huggings, and presentations of really fancy chocolate (from me to the office, not from the office to me). I had time to inhale one doughnut and drink a bottle of Diet Dr Pepper, and then it was off to the recording studio, where a very nice engineer explained how a recording booth worked. Thanks, nice engineer! Nobody had bothered to tell him that I have three studio albums out. Sorry, nice engineer.

My first task: recording the audio book edition of "Apocalypse Scenario." Super-fun! I managed not to get too into it, but wow was I glad to have done voice work before. It was nice and smooth and lovely. I followed it with two different podcast recordings, all done in the same wee room. Everything was professional and well-orchestrated, and before I knew it, it was all over, and I was being settled at the only open desk in the office.

Cue working. Type type type. Type type type. I was supposed to have lunch with some friends who were also in New York for BEA; when they didn't answer their phones, I had lunch with DongWon and Devi (another Orbit editor) instead. We went to a seafood restaurant, where I ate mussels and potatoes and hot fudge sundae, om nom. DongWon had to run before we finished eating, leaving Davi and I to talk about him behind his back. Ha ha, DongWon. Ha, ha.

Back to the office; more working; more whining at my computer. I actually had to borrow copies of Feed and Deadline to use as reference material, since otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to verify the continuity of what I was writing. This is why it's good to write at your publisher's. They'll always have copies of the books you need on hand.

Eventually, the day ended. Poof. And I, being the sensible girl that I am, loaded up my tote bag with my laptop and all the books I had managed to collect over the course of the day and went hieing off to downtown to meet up with The Agent for dinner. She had directed me to a library, in an alley, in an unfamiliar part of the city. I assume this is because she wants to see whether I will survive being eaten by a Grue. I found the library, and felt very smug about it, right until I went inside, went down to the floor where the YA author event I was meeting her at was being held, and discovered that I had, in fact, descended to a very unpleasant and specialized CIRCLE OF HELL.

Seriously. What seemed like several hundred people (and may have been just fifty, I don't know, it was a CIRCLE OF HELL) were crammed into an itty-bitty space, creating an immense amount of heat and noise. And somewhere in all that chaos was my agent. I sought. I strove. I gave up.

Spotting a woman with a Diet Dr Pepper, I begged to know where it had come from, and damn near wept when informed that she had brought it with her. Then I discovered, much to my surprise, that she was actually a book blogger I know through her reviews. And then she took me to the secret cluster of book bloggers hiding from the heat near the elevators. Yay! Much joy and chatter and hugging followed, lasting until The Agent appeared, her new client Claire in tow, to whisk me away to a less hellish locale.

Did I attack the first gas station we passed like it was the Promised Land, coming away with a sack of Diet Dr Pepper? Yes. Yes, I did.

We had dinner at a lovely place near Waverly Place (still no wizards), where we ate bread and cheese and I had fish and eventually went downstairs and was horribly sick due to a fish bone sticking in my throat. Since I had not retained dinner, The Agent bought me a cupcake. Happy times. Claire was awesome, but I was tired, and BEA was the next morning, so I returned to New Jersey and slept. FOREVER.

Next: BEA and DAW. It's acronym day!

I am asked, with reasonable frequency these days, "Which do you recommend getting first, an agent or a book contract?" Because I, like everyone else, speak only from a place of my own experiences, I always answer, "An agent. They'll know what the hell they're doing."

Every aspiring author I've ever met has wanted an agent like a little girl wants a pony (in my case, like a little girl wants a bat-winged vampire pony that can fly and also devour the kids who liked to beat me up on the playground). Having an agent is like having a Loch Ness Monster of your very own, one that you can saddle up and use to shock and amaze your enemies as you ride it into glorious battle against Godzilla and the Easter Bunny. Having an agent will transform your life from an abyss of despair into a happy cartoon wonderland full of sunshine and zombie puppies. And sure, we understand that might not be quite true, but we all just know that the right agent will make everything okay, forever.

For a long time, I thought that the right agent for me didn't exist. That getting an agent would be sort of like getting a job: necessary, important, even pleasant at times, but still going to require me to swear less, brush my hair more, and wear uncomfortable shoes. I was willing to do these things, if I had to, but in my heart, I still wanted a bat-winged vampire pony to negotiate my contracts and strike down my enemies in my name. Because I am a simple soul.

Almost four years ago now, a friend of mine decided to introduce me a friend of hers, one who happened to be a working literary agent, looking for clients. The Agent and I exchanged some emails, going slow, navigating the wilds of acquaintance and understanding long before we reached the point where representation would become an option. It was a courtship, rather than a barroom hookup, and I am incredibly grateful for that, because anybody who's met me knows that my full attention can be an exhausting thing. She gets my full attention a lot.

Three years ago today, she asked if I wanted her to represent me. If I'd said "Yes!" any faster, I would have violated temporal causality.

The past three years have been amazing. They have been filled with firsts, seconds, thirds, and hundreds of wonderful, confusing, incredible things, and The Agent has been there every step along the way to explain, encourage, and assist. I call her my personal superhero for a reason—that's exactly what she is. Books on writing will tell you that the best thing a working writer can have is a good agent, and they're right, but what they won't tell you is that it's even better to have a good agent who understand you, understands the way you work, and is willing to see what you can do together.

So here's a happy, happy anniversary to my personal superhero, to the woman who helps me understand the business side of my chosen career, and to the only person ever to respond to my description of The Worst Book I've Ever Read by asking me to send it to them. Happy anniversary. Let's have ten more of these.

Welcome to the second, and hopefully final, portion of my not-a-con-report for Arisia. I really did have a wonderful time in Boston, snow and all, and I'm definitely going to be going back. Eventually. After I've had the opportunity to take a nice nap, and maybe watch a whole lot of really, really dumb television. Anyway, here are the summarized highlights (and lowlights), for your amusement and edification.

My candy corn hat! The Agent knows me too, too well, it seems, and when the time came to give me the last piece of my holiday gift, she led me to the dealer's hall and purchased me a felt candy corn hat from one of the local vendors. Yes. I now have a hat that looks like a piece of candy corn. TREMBLE WITH FEAR, MERE MORTALS. I wore this hat to almost every serious panel I had during the weekend, and proclaimed proudly that wearing it provided that I was a professional. I never said what kind of professional.

The Mad Science song circle! I didn't make it to very many filk events this year, sadly, because I was busy with other programming and also wound up spending most of Sunday vilely ill (more on this in a moment). But the Mad Science circle was awesome, and Ben Newman sprung a positively wicked new science parody on me. It was a very cool circle, and I'm so very glad I got to go.

Alice and Josh! My life is better when it contains large quantities of Alice, and since I had to leave my beloved Maine Coon in California, I supplemented diet of Alice with a local fan and acquaintance of mine from this blog. She and her husband took me to dinner, where I ate, unsurprisingly, shepherd's pie, and then she and I sat and talked for like an hour and a half while he ran off to a panel. It was a really nice, relaxing way to spend an evening, and I had a wonderful time. Since they didn't run screaming, I assume they did, too.

Meeting Toni! My friend Toni lives near Boston, and was able to come out to the convention on Saturday, transforming herself from "my Internet-only friend Toni" to "my friend Toni, whom I have met in real life." She brought her husband, who was witty and fun to talk to, and I brought Diana, who was witty and fun to talk to and bought me chicken fingers. There were exchanges of books and hugs, and life was very good. It's nice to have people transform from words on a screen into actual humans. It makes me happy.

The Guest Breakfast! Arisia had a special breakfast event on Sunday, where people could buy tickets to have a special, intimate breakfast with the Guests of Honor and Special Guests. Each of us had a table of our very own. Sadly for me, someone at the next table over was wearing a mango-based perfume, and the breakfast went rapidly from "yum yum, free fruit" to "quietly excusing myself, walking to the bathroom, vomiting copiously, and walking back to my table to resume being entertaining." I would become progressively sicker for most of the day. It was so much fun. My poor roommates had to deal with my basically being a creepy dead girl from a horror movie. How I try their patience.

Cat and Seanan strike back! Cat and I are getting pretty good at our urban fantasy girl version of "An Evening With Kevin Smith." Every time it happens, the crowd gets a little bigger, the questions get a little smoother, and our comfort levels get a little higher, which leads to, you know, more swearing, more craziness, and more references to Lord Byron's penis. It's a victory for everybody! This installment of the Cat-and-Seanan Show was pure hammered awesome, and we only had to decline one question, which is possibly a record. More impressively, I wasn't even able to walk without throwing up an hour before the panel. So this is what I do for love.

Better Off Ted! Diana and Cat introduced me to this show, and Cat's Netflicks account allowed us to wallow in it each night before bed. I now require the box sets. And maybe a meat blob.

Post-antibiotic science fiction gone wild! My final panel was on Monday morning, and was all about post-antibiotic science fiction. It turned into "Seanan defends her thesis on causative agents for the Black Death" for about twenty minutes, which seemed to be fun for everyone, if a little more mentally rigorous than I had wanted to be that early in the morning on the last day of a convention. I recommended not licking things as a way to avoid infection. You're welcome.

Flying home! Actually, the flight was pretty lousy. But my cats made up for it.

See you next time!

Last year, kodykeplinger declared December 11th to be Agent Appreciation Day, a holiday devoted to the adoration of every writer's personal superhero. Since December 11th fell on a Saturday this year, I've bumped my observation of this holiest of days to today, when there's a little more chance of my sitting still long enough to say "thank you."

It remains true that every day is Agent Appreciation Day at my house, except maybe for the days where I want to have a Doctor Who marathon instead of making my deadlines, and only the fear of The Agent's wrath keeps me at my keyboard. It's still nice to have an excuse to say, in public, "I appreciate this woman, and everything that she does for me." So today, I appreciate The Agent. Great Pumpkin knows, she deserves a little appreciation every once in a while.

Why are writers so protective of their agents? Because we are. Even when we're mad at them for not answering our phone calls/not thinking that a paranormal romance about steampunk space pirates with a super-evolved pod person as the heroine will sell/not understanding why it's so important that we spend a weekend dressed as Emma Frost and falling off our shoes, instead of making our deadlines, we're protective.

There are a couple of reasons for this. For one, we're frequently protecting them from total strangers going "will you introduce me to your agent?" (My answer, by the way, is generally not positive, and on the rare occasions where I offer to introduce someone to The Agent, she gets an email from me warning of the pending introduction. So emailing her cold, saying I sent you, doesn't actually work.) We're not trying to be nasty, and we're not trying to say "no, you can't join our special club." But we're also not going to sneak people we don't know through the back door, past the rest of the pending submissions. We are not magical doors to representation, and because our agents will often feel obligated to look at any real referrals, we try very hard not to be too extravagant with who we send their way.

Two, our agents are the people who take care of us. I mean, as protective as most authors are of their agents, our agents are ten times moreso. They're the ones who understand the weird little clauses in our contracts, tell us when interesting opportunities open up, and keep us from being eaten alive by our editors. When there's a problem, the agent fixes it. (That goes for problems on both sides. If I get behind on my word count, The Agent will probably be poking me about my deadline before either The Editor or The Other Editor. Because that's her job.) Since our agents take care of us, we feel a little obligated to do the same for them, at least to the best of our abilities.

Does this mean we don't want to share our agents? Hell, no. I want The Agent to sign twenty people who become New York Times best-selling authors and get six figure contracts and can afford their own diamond-plated ponies, because then she'd be able to eventually afford an island, and she'd probably let me genetically engineer dinosaurs as long as I kept meeting my deadlines. An agent is only as successful as their client list, and the more really successful clients an agent has, the more not-so-successful but-oh-so-wonderful clients they can afford to keep working with. It turns into a delicate balancing act that I'm really glad I don't have to perform.

I once heard somebody say that we don't work for our agents, they work for us, and so the submissions process shouldn't seem so much like a job interview. I view it as more like the relationship between a householder and their butler. A good butler is for life, and that's not a contract to be entered into lightly. If the butler can't like you, then they can't work for you, and you wouldn't want them to. My agent works for me. I also work for my agent, just like most people would agree that Bruce Wayne works for Alfred as much as Alfred works for Bruce Wayne. And because they have that relationship, he gets to go out every night and be Batman.

Why do I appreciate my personal superhero?

Because she lets me be a superhero, too.

Last night was all about me and Cat Valente and the SoHo Gallery for Digital Art, home of the New York Science Fiction Review series of readings. Because, you know, when you import yourself a couple of fairy tale girls, the only thing to do is stick them in front of a large crowd and wait for the fun to begin.

But the fun has to begin at the beginning...

My flight got in right on time, which was a small blessing, since I wasn't really sleeping very well. Mind you, the fact that I was able to sleep at all made me a lucky girl. I had actually upgraded my ticket to Main Cabin Select, as that was the only way to get out of being crammed into a middle seat for five hours in the air. I turned out to be the only person in my row, and was able to pull the "belt yourself into the middle seat, curl up like a pillbug, and sleep" trick. Blessed empty seats, how I adore thee. But there were screaming babies on the plane, and there was turbulence, and it was not a restful night.

Jon and Merav collected me from the airport, and—after dropping Merav at work—Jon drove me home...where Kate was already waiting on the front stoop. Whoops. We went inside. I plugged in my laptop to make sure nothing was on fire, and the phone calls began, making it quite clear that a nap was not in my future. Well, fine, be that way, universe. After showering and changing my clothes, we were off, to meet The Agent in lovely downtown Manhattan, and eat lunch. Because without sleep and without food, I was going to murder someone.

(Incidentally, this was the first time The Agent got to meet Kate. They got along. So when they destroy your puny planet, don't worry. I'm sure they'll make you a nicer new one before long.)

Lunch was challah French toast and mussels, at least for me. Om nom. From there, we went to a lovely tea house The Agent knew about, where she and Kate drank lovely tea, and I passed out on a love seat. Eventually, The Agent went off to do something else, and Kate stole my headphones, while I...passed out on the love seat again. But then! A Cat Valente came and joined our party! Hooray! Kate and Cat sat and chatted while I achieved that nebulous state known as "wakefulness," and we set out for the venue. With one of those "only in New York" stops along the way, to buy hand-crafted artisan popsicles. No, seriously. I mean it.

We ate our popsicles, giggled a lot, and walked onward, to the SoHo Gallery of Digital Art...and into our very own fairy tale. The walls were covered in our books, our faces, our everything, and it was incredible. It was like a dream. I squeaked. We stared in awe. And then, because we needed our fairy tale faces in this fairy tale place, we ran off to change our clothes, Cat into a mad awesome tailored suit, me into a bright orange skirt and green top. And then the flood began.

We were both a little worried, in that abstract author way, that no one would show up. It turns out that what we should have been worried about was violating fire code, as the room wound up so packed that we ran out of chairs, then ran out of wall, and finally, ran out of places to stand. Wow. Everyone from DAW came—I got to meet Saladin!—and so did most of my New York friends, along with people like K. Tempest Bradford and Ellen Kushner and Teri Windling OH MY GOD I MET TERI WINDLING.

Ahem.

Cat read an absolutely gorgeous piece from The Habitation of the Blessed. I read "Laughter at the Academy: Field Studies in the Development of Schizotypal Creative Genius Personality Disorder." Everyone sighed and swooned at Cat's reading; everyone laughed in the appropriate places at mine. I got to shout "IGNITE THE BIOSPHERE!" in a room full of people who'd actually come to hear me do just that. It was magical.

In the Q&A afterward, someone asked us if we'd ever considered doing a photo shoot as Snow White and Rose Red.

And Cat and I laughed.

Two years ago today, I got out of bed (way too early), put on clothes (because nudity is frowned upon on public transit), and went to work. I don't usually remember what I was wearing on any given day, but this one, I do: jeans, bright yellow tank top, pink-and-yellow Chimera Fancies pendant that reads "fairy changeling this is all a dream." It was an ordinary start to what seemed likely to be an ordinary day.

Two years ago today, The Agent was shopping the Toby Daye books, trying to find just the right house for my debut series. I mean, really, we knew what Just The Right House was: DAW Books. It was the very first publisher we'd been in contact with, after being referred there by one of their existing authors. They had exactly the right sort of atmosphere, and they'd published a lot of books I've really loved. I wanted to work with these people. All I could do was hope that they wanted to work with me.

Two years ago today, my phone rang. Caller ID said that it was The Agent—that's actually what her number is saved as in my phone book, because I am sometimes a little bit bizarre about such things—so I excused myself to take the call.

The Agent said three words to me. "We got DAW."

This was followed by a lot of other information about contracts and money and publishing schedules and blah blah blah fishcakes, because I had really checked out completely. Out of the conversation, out of body, out to lunch, buh-bye. I made all the appropriate noises of assent, and managed to sound like I wasn't crying, because years of fake-it-til-you-make-it has made me really, really good at that sort of thing. (Severe back injury plus chronic pain issues plus "suck it up" equals I can sound perky and happy about my situation while being consumed from the toes up by a giant snake. It's awesome. Also sort of bad, because my automatic response to trauma is frequently "gosh, what fun.")

Eventually, the call ended. I went outside. I called Vixy. I made horrible shrieky bat-noises, causing dogs all around San Francisco to bark themselves hoarse, run in circles, and slam into trees. Pigeons lost the ability to fly and splattered down on the pavement like really disturbing rain. Vixy, upon determining that I was shrieky with joy, not distress, made suitable noises until I calmed down enough to tell her what was going on. Then she started shrieking, too. It was a shrieky day.

Two years ago today, I sold the first three Toby books. Today, I have three framed cover illustrations on my living room walls, and five framed covers hanging scattered through the rest of my house. I have books on the shelf with my name on them, and published reviews in places like Locus and the Onion A.V. Club. I have a contract for two more Toby books after those first three, and my fingers crossed for more after that.

Two years ago today.

Wow.

1. My beloved personal superhero, dianafox, is giving away a copy of A Local Habitation. Read her post for details (and don't ask me about them, since it's not my giveaway). Here's your opportunity to make my agent give you stuff! A chance like this doesn't come along every day, not even for me!

2. You still have four hours in which to enter my random drawing to win a copy of Feed. I'll be picking a name at noon California time, and all you have to do is leave a comment. You now how to leave a comment, don't you? Just type some things into your browser and click.

3. The fantastic talkstowolves has gone to the trouble of working up a linked list to all the free fiction on the Locus recommended reading list! These are the stories that professional reviewers selected as the best of 2009, and they're totally free for you to read. So if you get bored, you should do that.

4. There is no number four. Move along, citizens, move along.

I love Thanksgiving. I love the excuse to gather people in a teeming locust-mass, turning life into a potluck adventure of giant birds and pumpkin pies. I love the way the house smells once the first bird gets underway, and the sound of chopping, and the random things folks do to innocent asparagus. Most of all, I love the fact that it's a day where people are expected to stop, look at their lives, and really see what they're thankful for. Not what they're supposed to be thankful for; what they are.

Two years ago today, I was still struggling to finish the book that would become Feed, and still wondering if I was being silly in my refusal to abandon my dreams of being a novelist. Now I have one book on the shelves and five more coming out. All four of the covers that I've seen so far have just been amazing. I have an agent I love (and who puts up with my crazy like a real trooper). I have two editors who make me better than I could ever be on my own. I have two publishers who support me. I have anthologies with my name on the table of contents. I am so thankful for all these things that there are barely words.

I am thankful to the unpaid coal miners who labor on the tropical island where my private reality show is filmed. They scold me when I'm heavy-handed, cut out my sloppy adjectives and wishy-washy modifiers, and generally make me strive to become a better writer. These are the people who sometimes get asked to flip around revisions on a short story six times in sixteen hours. I love them so.

I am thankful for the health and happiness of my cats. Losing Nyssa was even harder on Lilly than it was on me, because Lilly just didn't understand. The fact that she has been able to bond with Alice the way she has is just such a huge relief. Alice herself is a revelation every day, as she grows into all her puffy glory, and Lilly remains the cat I've been praying to have since I was seven years old. I'm so lucky to have them.

I am thankful for the reception that Rosemary and Rue has gotten out there in the big wide world. I had faith in my book, I loved my book, but there's nothing like getting that first positive review and realizing that your faith was at least a little justified. Thank you, thank you, to everyone who's read it, who's liked it, who's encouraged me, and who's said they're excited about the next one. It means everything to me.

Finally, I'm thankful for all of you. I don't know many of you very well, if at all, but that doesn't matter; knowing you exist, participate, read, and care? That makes all the effort worthwhile.

Thank you.