Hey everyone–just a quick note; Mindhealer is now available on Amazon (looks like it ships immediately) and on Fictionwise, in many different ebook formats. (Thank you, Brian!) I haven’t been able to find it on B & N or Powell’s yet, but I’ll post the linkies when I do.

There is going to be some radio silence for a little while, since I’m feeling a bit under the weather and have some busy days ahead. No, nothing’s wrong, I just need a rest.

Good Monday, everyone! I am pleased and proud to announce that the Nothing But Red anthology, with my essay Half of Humanity Is Worth Less Than A Chair, is now available!

Nothing But Red, the anthology of literary and visual arts inspired by the impassioned plea of Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon in response to the “honor killing” of 17-year-old Du’a Khalil Aswad, is now available for purchase. Sales of the anthology, which is currently available in multiple formats, will benefit the international human rights organization Equality Now.

The 313-page collection, which can be purchased as a trade paperback for $15.95 or as a pdf-format e-book for $5.95, is being released on the one-year anniversary of the death of Aswad. An Iraqi adherent of the Yazidi religion, Aswad was stoned to death by family members and neighbors; her brutal beating and murder was captured in a graphic video and spread on the Internet. (from the press release)

About the anthology: all proceeds are going to benefit Equality Now, but it will not be sold on Amazon in the foreseeable future due to the recent uncertainty over Amazon’s attempted control of the “long-tail” and small POD publishers. This actually works out to the price being the same but the charity getting a bit more money, so please don’t let that stop you from picking it up.

I’m so excited this is finally available. I look forward to hearing what you think of it.

Edited to add: The contributors’ list can be found here.

I didn’t know you guys would be so interested in body mods. Wow. In response to many questions: the piercing I got on Saturday was a Monroe. (Also known as a Marilyn.) I got it at the Catalyst, which I highly recommend for any person wanting to be pierced in the Portland/Vancouver metro area. It is worth the drive–Shannon is an artist, and I’ve never had a bad piercing there yet. She’s also fanatical about cleanliness, very calm, and she (this is important) tells you what she’s going to do before she does it. Not like some hipster piercers who are too cool to talk to you before they charge you for a halfass hole.

Anyway, the piercing is doing well. I’m following the cleaning and aftercare–lots of saline rinses, lots of mouthwash, brushing teeth after every meal (which I do anyway) and lots of vities and sleep to help the body heal. (My body is very happy about this.)

I wanted a Marilyn because I love how they look, and I feel pretty with it in. Right now there’s a huge honkin’ post and ball there, because right after you get pierced you have to accommodate swelling during the healing process. (And God, am I glad I had the bigger post in yesterday and Monday! Whew!) I get to go in on Saturday to get it checked, and if it’s healed enough the smaller post goes in. Yay!

So far, it’s given me less pain and trouble than an ear-cartilage piercing. I used to work for a place that did piercing, and I let a couple of employees practice their cartilage piercing on my ears. That was terrible–but when one’s the manager, what is one going to do? I took all my ear cartilage rings out afterward; they were too painful and didn’t heal worth a damn.

But the Monroe is doing very well. And I’m amazed that so many people seemed interested. I originally didn’t mention much about it because I thought, damn, who would want to hear it?

On to other things. I have proof pages for the second Jill book, and the YA is clipping along. I’ve got most of the first YA in my head and the second in tentative skeletons. If I manage to knock out 2-4K words on it today, my reward shall be going to see Jim Butcher at the Beaverton Powells! Booyeah! The Teen is a rabid Butcher fan and can’t wait to add to his collection. After being stuck at home for the Seattle Author-A-Thon I need to get down to Btown and visit Saint Peter Honigstock, as well as pick up some goodies on hold for me. This is, of course, dependent on the car not giving out on me and on proper childcare being here by the time I have to leave. *sigh* As is just about everything.

All right, I’m rambling. Time for caffeination. Have a wonderful day, dear Reader. The sun is shining here, and I have it on good authority that the mercury is going to inch over 60 today. Which means I might finally be warm enough. So far the day seems full of win.

I’m hoping that continues…

First, the new Watcher book–Mindhealer–is available for preorder at ImaJinn. (It’s also available as an ebook.) If you prefer to wait for Amazon etc., I’ll let you know when that goes live.

I’ve also done my weekly post on writing. It’s at Fangs, Fur, & Fey or The Midnight Hour, depending on which you prefer. This week I’m thinking about sensitivity–both its benefits and its drawbacks.

This week was a busy one. I’m averaging a lot of work per day on the YA, which is good–but it’s not as fast as I want to be going. Life keeps interfering.

Anyway, I’m ready for the weekend. On that note, here are two bits of hilarity from Cracked.com–the Ten Most Insane Crash Diets in History, and the Ten Weirdest Historical Contraceptives. I don’t think they’re particularly safe for work, as I almost fell out of my papasan with hysterical laughter while reading either. *giggle* Enjoy!

G’morning, all. I’m barely conscious but have managed to make it into work–driving without coffee is an adventure. And turning on the espresso machine once one walks in the door and waiting twenty minutes for the damn thing to wake up was even MORE of an adventure. But I’m not complaining.

I didn’t make the Seattle author-a-thon last night; there was an accident on the I5 bridge that held up the Muffin getting home. It was very sad–I couldn’t just throw the kids in the car and go, since they were going to kendo. I REALLY REALLY WANTED to get my ms. copy of Happy Hour of the Damned signed, and to buy a copy too, since it was one of the funniest books I’d read in a long time. *sad face* I ALSO wanted to kibbitz with Richelle about some Fabulous News. Instead, I got the kids and the Muffin out the door and collapsed on my bed to read some of Kipling’s Kim, which is a slow start but starts rollicking at around Chapter Six. After a while there was a plot bunny, and I wandered back to the YA and wrote down one of my high-school fantasies, which involved me having the power to telekinetically choke people without touching them.

Hey, you can’t say you didn’t feel the same way at least ONCE in high school.

I’m knocking off between 3 and 4K a day on the YA, which is good but a little unsatisfying; I can’t type fast enough and I’m in that stage of creative endeavor where any interruption, no matter how minor, is galling. But I’d rather have THAT problem than a dry well.

So today it’s a half-day of work, heading home (where my sisters will be down for the day to coddle and cuddle the Little Prince, who will of course bask in the attention) and a trip out to cat-sit this evening; in between that, I want to get another few thousand words out of the way and set up a love triangle.

Hey, BTW, does anyone on my f-list know someone who knows Bulgarian? Just checking…

Tonight I’m hoping to make the Seattle Urban Fantasy Author-A-Thon, 7pm-9pm at the Beaverton Powells. Mark Henry and Mario Acevedo will be there, and the audience will hold such luminaries as Richelle Mead and (I think) Caitlin Kittredge. I am certain there will be heckling and much fun. My own attendance is based upon the car not making that knocking noise and the Muffin getting home from work before 6:30. Wish me luck.

Yesterday I (are you ready for this?): knocked off 4K on the young adult book, made bagels from scratch, made homemade pizza, started Mixed-Starter Bread, and cleaned. Of all those things, it was the work on the YA that made my brain feel like it was ironed out flat and squeezed dry.

I’ve been thinking lately of books I feel are sorely neglected, so I decided to list five of them. Your mileage may vary, but I love these little books I’m about to list–and should you try them, I hope you like them too.

* A New England Girlhood, Nancy Hale. I read this when I was about nine, and I loved it. It’s a slice-of-life, a woman who grew up as a New England debutante thinking about her childhood and telling what it was like to live in that world. Some childhood experiences are universal–like losing something precious, or being cruel to a tag-along and only realizing later how bad that is, or wanting to go with your parents so badly you throw a tantrum. Interspersed with this are little stories about living as an adult, and how childhood memories can be misleading or illuminating, sometimes on the same day.

* Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum, Various. This is an anthology I bought once at a library sale that has some of the finest short stories I’ve ever read in it, like The Desrick on Yandro by Manly Wade Wellman, Homecoming by Ray Bradbury, Stephen Vincent Benet’s King of the Cats, and more–like Henry Martindale, Great Dane, or The Man Who Sold Rope To The Gnoles. It’s just one of the finest compilations I’ve ever read, and I’ve read three copies of it to pieces now.

* Jacob Have I Loved, Katherine Paterson. I read this, again, when I was about nine. (That was a good year for formative books.) Sara Louise is born first, and her twin Caroline almost dies at birth. Everyone cossets and pets Caroline, who is a musical prodigy, and Sara is left feeling ignored and unloved (at one point, her bitch of a grandmama quotes the Old Testament to her, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated). So Sara turns to making her own way. The great thing about this book is the setting, an island in Chesapeake Bay fast losing land every time there’s a storm, crab pots, the stultifying suffocation of small-town life when everyone has already decided what you are. The ending leaves a little to be desired–even when I was nine I thought that Sara Louise deserved much more than nursing and marriage–but it has the virtue of being the ending Sara chose for herself and worked toward, so it made sense.

* Psion and Catspaw , Joan Vinge. Every once in a while I get the great urge to reread these two books; nothing else will do. Xenophobia, telepathy, poverty, outsiders, the longing to belong–it’s all in here, and Cat is a hero the way Sam Spade is a hero. He’s trying to do the best he can, measuring himself by a fierce internal standard, at the mercy of forces and people he can’t control, taken advantage of, and just generally mistreated. I think Cat was the first hero I ever really wanted to marry and “take away from all this.” Ironic, no?

* Passion Play, Sean Stewart. I think Stewart’s work doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. In particular, Passion Play, which was one of the major influences for Dante Valentine’s world, is a dystopian work that kind of mixes a less-repressive Handmaid’s Tale with Psion, structured like a medieval morality/passion play, and with a tough female protagonist that could probably arm-wrestle most male protags under the table without breaking a sweat. I like a lot of Stewart’s other work, but Passion Play is a book I wish I’d written. And that, for me, is the sincerest form of flattery. The codification and government use of psionic talents in Dante’s world gets a lot from the structure Stewart built in this one slim little volume.

There you go, five books I’ve enjoyed thoroughly over the years and hope other people will discover.

And now I’m off to knock off more of the YA. I am SO SO hoping I get out to Beaverton tonight! If only to squee with Richelle about some neat stuff that I can’t share with everyone just yet, and to possibly see Scockercrew. *wink*

*crosses fingers*

So yesterday was Easter and William Shatner’s 77th birthday. In honor of Easter (more precisely, in honor of chocolate) the kids got an amazing sugar high yesterday. I suppose childhood isn’t childhood without the Easter and Halloween jolts.

In honor of Shatner, however, here’s a Salute to the Women of Classic Trek, and it’s hilarious. The polls have three choices: yes, you’d hit it; no, you wouldn’t hit it; maybe, for various reasons. I remember at Orycon this last year I was on the mock trial of James T. Kirk, me and the other woman on the panel were representing a lot of angry green girls who had been loved and left. It was awesomely funny. It was marvelously tongue-in-cheek.

Speaking of something not so tongue-in-cheek, last night I went and saw 10,000 B.C. Now, going to see a horrid movie can be fun, if one realizes one is going to see a horrid movie and doesn’t expect too much. I liked the CGI, though I wish the sabertooth had shown more interest in eating someone. What an awesome plot device and CGI device, just wasted.

I rolled my eyes when I realized all the Passive Helper/Magic Dingus or Passive Evil characters were Brown People, and all the Active characters–hero, love interest, comic relief, and Big Bad Guy, were more recognizably Caucasian. And a further eye-rolling was had when it was the Great White Hunter who brought home “the seeds” so his people could start agriculture. *sigh* But the movie is okay if one overlooks glaring inaccuracy and embedded modern attitudes. There was certainly some pretty mantitty and nice spectacle in it, and let’s be honest, I wasn’t going to this movie for verisimilitude OR plot. I just wanted to see the big cat. Although the huge carnivorous emus were a great touch.

In between all that was some housecleaning (a motivated teenager is a great help to have around the house) and 2K on the young-adult book. I have a character who is wanting to make an early entrance, and making him wait is just killing him. He keeps trying to intrude on the narrative. Damn uppity characters.

So today it’s knocking off a serious chunk of the YA and getting to the character who wants to step onstage. It feels good to be creating again. Forward! Mush!

Whatever happened to telegrams? Does anyone even use telegrams anymore?

So I’m in the home stretch for RA revisions. (”Home stretch” meaning “only another two or three days of work”.)

I’m surprised by writers who don’t get that even a very “clean” edit means a lot of work. There is no manuscript so clean that you won’t have to spend days or weeks making it better. Then there’s copyedits, and final proofs–no wonder some typos get through. And considering that one may have to go through two drafts, two revisions, one copyedit, and at least one proof pass, no wonder writers sometimes have a bit of trouble remember exactly what’s in the finished draft. *sigh*

I have really, really good news about a short story or two, but I’m waiting until I can share it. Dancing with impatience, actually. As soon as I can share, I will. Loudly. And happily.

Okay. Back to the salt mines. I will definitely come in under deadline for this one. Thank God.

Five random and not-so-random things:

* I will never eat homemade banana bread right before bed again. The nightmares, dear God. While I do not blame the banana bread for them, I still was so upset I tasted mostly-digested banana bread at about 3AM. That sort of thing will leave a mark on one.

* To: My subconscious. Re: the nightmares. Look, I know you think they help when I’m writing a book like this. I really, really appreciate all your hard work. But please, f!cking stop. If I have a cardiac arrest from that hospital dream, we’ll both be out of luck.

* Kids are so cool. In the past few minutes the Little Prince has treated me to a trolley sound, several Bionic Man sound effects, two car crashes, and one shootout worthy of John Woo. And the Princess is singing the theme from Neverending Story in the kitchen as she gets her breakfast together.

* The soymilk experiment continueth well. The Muffin got a gallon of cowmilk for pancake and biscuit-making this weekend, and was relieved to find out that the soymilk is just a modification, not a hard and fast change. Several of you have warned me of the plant estrogens in soy. I’m being cautious–but I really can’t think it’s any worse for me or the kids than the bovine growth hormone, antibiotics, and assorted other stuff in cowmilk. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

* The last hundred pages of Redemption Alley are where all the huge architectural revisions need to be made. That’s both good and bad–good because it was a clean edit up until now, and bad because that’s going to take me more time than the previous two hundred pages. *sigh*

And a sixth not-so-random thing: Steelflower is now available for preorder as a paper book! Yippee!

Incidentally, if anyone out there has dealt with the process for putting one’s books into Kindle form, can you please drop me a line about that process and your experience with it? I’m thinking of putting smoke and mirror in Kindle form.

Whew. Ever have such intense nightmares the waking world feels like the dream? Yeah. It’s like that, this morning. I feel physically rested but emotionally drained.

So the Selkie inflicted Bertie Higgins on me (don’t ask). My response was tongue-in-cheek–so that’s who Don Johnson was trying to be! Now I get it! I was forced–forced, I tell you–to find a little Chris Isaak as an antidote. Ah, supermodel in granny-panties, sand, and a romance video that just screams “trainwreck”. AWESOME.

I’m feeling better, though still weak-kneed. The fever comes back in spates, and when it hits my body is so busy fighting the rest of me just wants to curl up and stare blankly at a glowing screen playing Looney Tunes. The kids have no problem with this, really.

I seem to have missed some Internet kerfluffle. Over at Richelle Mead’s weblog, she makes a very valid observation–the Web can bring together communities, but it also turns them into high school all over again. She’s right as far as that goes, but it’s long been an observation of mine that most people never outgrow who they were in high school. It also seemed to me that the more “popular” someone was in high school, the less chance they have of being really effective in the real world, because they’re expecting that high-school popularity to carry them.

Now, I advance this as a general rule, not as an inescapable fact. The corollary to it is the people who weren’t “successful” in high school tend to mature better and have a better time of it in the Real World. Geeks and nerds do better, whether because they’re used to buckling down and getting through it or because they don’t expect something like “popularity” to carry them. Or for some other reason entirely.

That, however, wasn’t the kerfluffle. Robin Hobb posted a rant–very funny and lighthearted in some places–against writers blogging on her website.

I disagree.

Blogging is valuable. It teaches you how to speak to an audience–if you don’t have good content reasonably well-assembled, your visitors will trickle away. It also (hopefully) teaches you clarity and boundaries–you have limited space in a blog entry, and you need to use that space well. And boundaries, well, everyone has to learn them on the Web. You can’t spread your personal life around on the Net, and getting burned once when you let something loose in a blog hopefully teaches a LOT of writers to be careful about what they say in public.

Hobb’s problem with blogging seems to be with its addictive nature, and with that addiction taking time away from writing. But come on–if someone is going to use a crutch not to write, it’s going to happen whether it’s blogging, surfing Lolcats, looking through the Victoria’s Secret catalog, alphabetizing one’s bookshelf, going out for coffee, writing in one’s diary, playing with Legos–you get the idea. It is not the form procrastination takes one must be on guard against as a writer. It is the procrastination itself. Getting upset at one form just lets another slip in to take its place.

Blogging is, like most things, okay in moderation. Some people go overboard with it, some people go overboard with anything. Writers procrastinate because writing is hard, and the discipline of writing is hard too, easy to slip away from. That’s why it’s called discipline, because you have to stick to making enough time during the day to write. Blogging is neither better nor worse than other siren-songs keeping one away from the job.

That being said, dear Reader, it’s time for me to get some coffee and settle down with revisions. A galley arrived today too, for me to paw through.

Work, work, work. And here I am blogging. *grin* See you ’round, chickadees.