With the Selkie yesterday. A bigger post is forthcoming, but you can find a short one at the Midnight Hour. We even visited a shipwreck.

In short, a grand time was had by all. And that’s all until Monday,when I get back to work.

I forgot to mention that I went to the Kim Harrison signing out at the Beaverton Powell’s Tuesday night. Kim was a scream, as usual–she’s always so funny and so kind. I took some pictures for her (sorry if they didn’t turn out well, but I always tried to snap at least two on the theory that one of them might be decent.) Afterward we got a chance to go out for dinner/dessert before poor Kim turned into a pumpkin and had to be taken home to bed. She was on East Coast time and a signing schedule to boot, and if that doesn’t exhaust you NOTHING will. There are few things as all-out draining as signings.

Today it’s sunny and my brain is still oatmeal. There’s some kind of book sale I’m due to go to with the Selkie, I think. I’m sure I’ll find something loverly, I always do at book sales. Right now I am drinking coffee and trying to make my cortex function.

It just ain’t happening. I think I need a little more time for the rubber-band snap after yesterday’s massive expenditure of energy. Not only did the Sullen One have a test, but the Princess was having trouble with math and the Little Prince was just plain having trouble with boundaries. (BTW, Martian Moon Crab, your gift of books was laid on the Princess’s altar. Her Royal Highness accepted the offering with many distinctly un-royal squeals of delight. Sometimes my darling is almost catlike.) The DHM was incommunicado most of the day, so I had to deliver the news that I had finished another mitosis (read: book) late in the evening after he came back from bashing-heads-in-skirts (aka: kendo.) He applauded, and grinned, because he knows it won’t be long before another one yanks itself free of my wrinkly little brain.

So. Book 5, rough draft, done. Sunshiney day outside. Head feels like a steam-cleaned peach pit. Body recovering due to massive amounts of mineral water and judicious applications of caffeine. Why does it physically hurt so much to finish a book? Is it the tension I hold while I’m racing for the finish line? Is it that I just don’t take care of myself when the writing gets hot? Is it something else–the physical body mirroring a big psychic effort?

Am I just whining and complaining? That’s most likely.

So I will devote today to pouring stuff back into my head so we reach my accustomed level of pressure to drive this machine. I think I can afford one little day off. I’ve been a good girl. Finished the rough draft and haven’t collapsed into the flu. Something must be working right.

Uh. I can’t even write a decent blog entry. Going to go refill my head.

See you later, alligator.

Now don’t get excited, because it’s nowhere near the end. But the mountain has been climbed, the Great River has been forded, we are past the point of no return and on the downhill slope.

In other words, the rough draft, senor, she is feeneeshed. 92K+ of Valentine deliciousness, the wrap-up to the five-book series, and the rough draft is done.

Last lines:

…all Hell will break loose.
That’s a promise I’ll have no trouble keeping.

There’s one more scene to Frankenstein in and it needs some serious clarity and continuity editin’, but it’s done. The baby is born and the corpus is out. It’s time to slap it, swaddle it, feed it until it gets big enough to walk on its own, and send the damn thing to the editor.

On a slightly-weird note, we’re watching the 1991 Dark Shadows revival and one of the characters was just playing with a Thoth tarot deck. The only thing weirder than seeing it was immediately placing it from the design on the back of the cards.

And the triple-plus weird is this: the kids LOVE Dark Shadows. They can’t get enough of the black and white series. It’s just their speed, between the overacting and the spooky music.

I am feeling rather like a vegetable at the moment. Staring at a show done in 80’s hangover fashion and hairstyle sounds like a fab idea. Along with poking at the latest Economist and maybe prodding at that Orhan Pamuk I just bought. Tomorrow I’ll get back to work.

Tonight I’m going to be a veggie, and if I wasn’t so bloody tired I would take a serious crack at that bottle of wine my agent sent for celebration. It isn’t every day one finishes a five-book series and breaks down crying at the thought of saying goodbye to those characters one’s been breathing with all this time.

I feel drained but clean. This long road is over. I did it. I’m not sure if it’s any good, mind you, but it’s done. I did it.

Tis a far, far finer thing to have done, no matter how well or ill one has done it, than never to have attempted doing at all.

Someone said that, I think. I dunno. My brain hath been turned to oatmeal.

In a good way.

I am so close to the end of this book. So close. And things keep happening–no, not in the book, only the things that are supposed to happen, happen in there. Out here in the Writer’s World (notice how I avoid the word real) things keep happening to keep me away from the laptop.

Yesterday I was in a state by 5PM. Cranky, tapping at the keyboard, one thing after another, I was finally crowbar’d out of the house and went for sushi and pasta salad at Nature’s up the road. As soon as some brown rice and seaweed hit my stomach my blood sugar started to go up, and I realized I hadn’t eaten in forever. No wonder I was cranky.

After dinner, my mood rising by the second, I popped over into Borders. Yes, I know. I work in a small indie bookstore. I reserve the right to go into Borders if I feel like it, and right then I felt like the smell of paper and dust.

I have since discovered Orhan Pamuk. Cute, in a Nabokovian intellectual type of way; I picked up Snow and started paging through it in the coffee shop there. (Kiwi. Quiet. I am still faithful, I don’t drink the coffee there.) I finally ended up bringing it home and ordering more from the library. I’m going on a Pamuk jag. I can’t help myself.

Sometimes I wish I wrote more lit fic instead of urban fantasy/paranormal romance. No matter how often I defend my genre (or the genre I most often write in, if we’re being precise) I still sometimes have little tickles of wishing I could write something more…well, literary. It was John D. MacDonald or Stephen King (I think MacDonald writing the foreword to some Stephen King short stories) who said writers read anything with two feelings: grinning contempt or grinding envy. I’m not quite there yet, but I do sink into a good book, where I am dissuaded from “looking under the hood” by the sheer story or good craft, nary a hitch to impede my enjoyment…

…and I think, oh, you bastard, at the author. Affectionately, of course.

It’s been a year for good books. (And it’s only March.) There was Clare Clark’s The Nature of Monsters (the ending was a bit of a copout, but I didn’t mind) and a lovely translation of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, A Farewell to Arms (depressing), and Vive le Revolution.

But I am sinking away from my point. Sometimes I wish I wrote more serious, “literary” stuff. I feel a little bit like an intellectual plebeian, eating my Cheetos and wiping my fingers on my nose. It’s hard not to feel like that when the publishing world kind of treats urban fantasy or romance like an embarrassing nouveau riche cousin–yes, she’s got all the money, but does she have to be so gauche? Readers and writers alike are slightly patronized. Yes, urban fantasy’s hot and romance is a billion-dollar biz. But it’s not, you know, literary.

Or so society tries to tell us. Society says it goes like this: If it’s High Art, it’s important. If it’s Low Art, it makes money. Really good High Art made by minorities or women is labeled Low Art and given the additional stigma of being “not serious.” Low Art made by dead (or almost-dead) white guys turns into High Art. (Just look at Andy Warhol. He’s the boss, applesauce.) And Low Art, of course, only makes money about fifteen percent of the time. If it’s Low Art and makes money, it’s a sellout.

*sigh* Now that I’ve completely depressed myself and made some hideously simplistic (and thus arguable) statements, I’m going to bow out. I have writing to do. The kids are watching FLCL, courtesy of Crab Caution, and if I really buckle down and sit here, I think I just might finish this book today and get back to sanity sometime soon.

Wish me luck.

But apparently not since the 60s.

Ugh. Now I feel all dirty. Do you suppose a fanatically right-wing cross-dresser was behind this one too?

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition, as my Nana used to say. There are four, count them four chapters left in the book. Conversation with Lucas, the arrival and meeting/big twist/prestige, the showdown, and the mop-up-wrap-up. I wrote about it on my regular Friday post at the Midnight Hour.

So. Off I go into the blue. Wish me luck, for Japhrimel has that glint in his eye and poor Danny’s halfway to insane and trigger-happy to boot.

Seriously. I do love this job.

It took a while, dear Readers, but I finally got my act together and put the winner of the Japhrimel Slogan Contest (voted for by you) on a coffee mug. There’s a large mug and a smaller one, available through Japhrimel’s Corner at CafePress. Congratulations to my fabulous Reader Jane Hong, who submitted the winning entry! Jane, your mug is in the mail.

This contest got such a large response that I’ve decided to run it again, with one important difference. This time, dear Readers, you and you alone will decide on a slogan for a coffee cup dedicated to our favorite Necromance. That’s right–what do you think Dante Valentine would have on her coffee mug?

Please send your short, witty slogans here, with “Valentine Slogan Contest” in the subject line. On April 6 the contest will close, and I’ll send out another survey where loyal Dark Siders can vote on their favorite saying. (Sorry, but you will need to be signed up for my newsletter in order to vote. Them’s da rules, buttercup.) The winner gets a free coffee mug with their saying blazoned on it, and credit for the slogan. Isn’t that cool?

It’s a lovely sunny day, and it’s been hard to sit myself down to actual work rather than taking a blanket out into the back yard and lying in the sunshine. But I persevere, you know. Have to earn all those cookies I’ve been eyeing atop the fridge…

I got out about 10K words on Valentine 5 yesterday. Notwithstanding the fact that some of them were stripped out from other drafts and Frankensteined in, my brain still hurts. (Mrs. Shelley is rolling in her grave over my verbing of her character’s name.)

Thought for the morning: my kids love watching Barney on OPB in the morning. All I can think of while it’s playing is how those child actors must be under so much pressure, and the hideous effects that pressure will have on them in ten-fifteen years. The plastic smiles. The smarmy songs. The lines straight out of Dick & Jane. What parent would let their child get involved with something like this? It’s the same problem I have with any other children’s show except Sesame Street. Maybe I’m just old and crotchety.

It’s sunny, and I have coffee, and I’m going to see just what new trouble I can get my favorite Necromance in. I am playing the Cure at high volume in my headphones, mixed with very old Carlos-Gardel-type tango.

Life is good. But children’s television scares me deeply.

Is it so wrong of me to want a subscription? Because, you know, I don’t read enough about books. *boggle*

Am I the only person who thinks Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading is a perfect parable about life in a fascist state? Yes, I know dear Vladimir would be the last person to call it such, and would probably consign me to the deepest depths of reader hell for it. But I keep reading the book, over and over (it’s one of the few I read compulsively, usually right before bed) and I can’t help but see M. Pierre as the Great Leader (a Stalinesque figure) and the jailer etc. as different functions of the totalitarian state. Marthe is the poisoning of human relationships in such a state, and Cincinnatus C? He’s the artist, struggling to break free and see the true world under a fabric of lies.

I’ll probably have another analysis for the book as I grow older–that is, after all, the point of a good book, to grow older with it and discover new meanings and complexities, like a good friend. But for right now the book as parable of the hideous state that even wants to control its members’ dreams is foremost in my mind. Reading Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad only brings the comparison home more deeply when I read about the NKVD shooting troops that fled from battle, or Stalin’s son sent to the gulag.

*thinks for a moment*

I keep compulsively checking bookstores for Nabokovs I haven’t read yet. My favorite would have to be Invitation to a Beheading, followed closely by Ada. I’m also very fond of The Defense. But any Nabokov is a good thing. I am reserving his translation of Eugene Onegin for a special occasion, like a truffle carefully wrapped up and gloated over at night before it is finally eaten. The sensuous anticipation of a book is precious, and should be luxuriated in.

*grin* What a nerdy hedonist am I. Prose makes me quiver in delight, and few things match the pleasure of opening a new book I am sure of enjoying or even intrigued by the premise of. And I almost forgot I have a copy of Pnin I haven’t read yet.

What bliss.

I am writing this post from my papasan, on my laptop. Yes, friends and neighbors, I bought a wireless router–ostensibly for the Sullen Teen, but so far I’ve been the one to use it the most. I am listening to my Pandora radio stations while typing, and so far it has been lovely. I can flip back and forth between email and actual writing, and if I need to send something I can do it right from my laptop instead of a jump drive physically carried to my PC.

Ah, laziness. Thy name is Lili.

Special thanks goes out to Crab Caution, who came and checked the setup after I went officially on the rampage and informed every person I lived with that I was unhappy, that I was going out to dinner, and that I fully expected every single one of them to tidy up while I was gone. I didn’t care what they tidied, as long as they tidied something, and when I returned I would be in a better mood.

That was Saturday evening–the same Saturday we brought the Sullen One’s old black cat home to live with us. He is declawed and a very mellow beastie, and has integrated into the household with a minimum of fuss. So that’s good, but it was stressful.

And Saturday night, after I got home from an absolutely lovely dinner, was a St. Patty’s Day Blowout. (Note to the Martian Moon Crab: your kitten card was an absolute scream. I laughed myself hoarse.) A Romanian friend of the DHM’s had brought him something like Romanian apple brandy, I believe.

I am here to tell you, friends and Readers, Romanian liquor is nothing to fool around with. It could literally crawl out of the bottle and sock you silly. What I did not realize upon commencing my drinking (we had friends over to watch a Certain Movie which shall remain nameless since it was so very…well, the less said the better) is that the bottle, deceptively skinny and small, held liquor that was literally 100-proof.

Yes, read that again. That statement has been verified by the DHM. It was 50% alcohol.

I am surprised I am not blind. But the real kicker was the sake I drank beforehand, I think. I did not pass out but I did not sleep well, and Sunday morning was…interestingly painful. I am too old for that ever again.

The funniest part of this happened Sunday afternoon, when I stopped at the local health-food place on my way out to visit some friends. Day after St. Patrick’s, and I decide in a fit of remorse to go check on the milk thistle and detox section again. I figure after the night I’d just spent, my liver would want some help.

What to my wondering eyes should appear but a completely pillaged detox section. Apparently liver guilt was widespread this weekend. Hee.

Well, back to work. We are writing right along, footloose and fancy free. Further bulletins as events warrant…