Category: Photos
Categories:
Life Stuff, Photos
Because I have the best friends in the world...
August 22, 2010, 1.02 pm
This arrived in the mail this week:
(You can click on the photo to see the larger version.)
The handmade chocolate truffles are divine. The picture on the champagne label comes straight from my beautiful UK cover, and it reads: A MOST IMPROPER CHAMPAGNE. DRINK ME!
Just like Alice in Wonderland, I followed orders.
I really, really love my friends. :)
Sadly, I have to warn everybody that - believe it or not - in this coming week, I am going to be even WORSE and even MORE slow at replying to emails and other messages than usual (beating even my previous terrible record!), because we've just started a period of 10 days without any childcare at all. (Curse those August holidays!)
I'm fighting hard to find the time and energy for fiction-writing...but personal emails may just not happen at all in the next week or so. :( I feel really guilty every time I look at my inbox and see so many messages I need and want to respond to...but between exhaustion, CFS, and sheer lack of typing time, it's just not happening at the moment.
My hope is that if I can keep on posting here fairly regularly, at least all my friends will know a bit of what I'm up to...and I promise to try to make up for my email lame-ness once life goes back to normal!
In the meantime, though, I'm having lots of awesome adventures with roaring dinosaurs, tigers, horses, and other animals, both inside our house and at our local park. In the evenings, Patrick and I have been watching Season 4 of Gilmore Girls (our joint anniversary present to each other this year - so great to have a long-running show we both completely enjoy!). And every so often, I manage to find time for my dragon novel, which makes me very, very happy. :)
How are you guys doing? And what's the coolest gift you've either gotten or given in recent times?
Comments on this blog | View 17 comments on LiveJournal | Link to this blog entry
Categories:
Events, Hot Chocolate, Photos
Post-Party Giddiness
August 13, 2010, 8.37 pm
Last night was my UK launch party for A Most Improper Magick. I had been soooooo incredibly nervous about this. In fact, I came very close to not having a launch party at all, because I was too nervous about the whole idea. (How does anyone even organize a launch party? What if the bookstore didn't want to have me and I felt stupid for even asking about it? What if - ?)
Even once my wonderful publisher had done all the hard work of paying for and organizing the party, I was filled with panic that I wouldn't make it worth their while. (What if no one came? What if people did come and I made a fool of myself in front of them?) Plus, my editor was taking the train all the way to Abergavenny to celebrate with me, and what if I made a fool of myself in front of her?
I couldn't eat before the party, I was so nervous. The thought of reading out loud from my book at the party suddenly filled me with terror, even though I've done so many readings before at other events.
Then I saw my editor walking down the street toward me (we'd arranged a coffeeshop date before the party), and all that terror just drained away. I LOVE my editor. She's one of those people who exudes confidence and enthusiasm and genuine belief in her authors, and from the moment she arrived, the reality hit - my book had been published! And we were about to have a PARTY to celebrate it! How cool was that???
I drank hot chocolate and we talked about the cover for Book 2. We went to the bookstore. People had come! Girls had come, of just the right age group, and they were excited about Kat. They were excited to be there. One had actually been brought by her mother as a special birthday treat.
I was in awe, and I was humbled. People asked me to sign their books as if I was the one doing them the favor...but that was just SO not the case.
I was nervous when I started reading, but then I genuinely had fun reading it...and I had SO much fun all the rest of the night as I got to talk to so many smart, interesting teenage girls who loved books and fantasy, so many wonderful kids and adults who'd taken time out of their evenings to come and celebrate with me.
I am so, so grateful to every one of them for giving me such an amazing launch party. THANK YOU. I am just in awe that people are really out there reading my book. It means so much to me.
(And I want to say right now that Pete, the events manager at the Abergavenny Waterstones, is SO fabulous to work with. The buffet spread he'd arranged was incredible! And he was just so generous and supportive and on the ball in every way, as was Angela, the store manager. If any authors out there ever want to do a Welsh event, the Abergavenny Waterstones is a wonderful place to do it.)
Sadly, there didn't end up being any photos from the event. We were sad afterward when we realized we'd forgotten to figure out photography - but honestly, I will never forget last night. It truly was one of the best nights of my life.
Today we went out on a day trip with relatives who'd come to Abergavenny for the party, and we took a gorgeous little vintage steam train* into the Brecon Beacons National Park, traveling high up up into the mountains above spectacular views of pine woods and an enormous lake. (OK, officially it's a reservoir - but I'm from Michigan, and I really miss lakes, so I thought of it as a lake!)
It was such a treat just to sit back and watch the incredible views through the windows as the train chugged along, whistling and pumping steam and really thrilling the toddlers in our family group. I was surrounded by beauty, and I was surrounded by people whom I love and admire, who'd come out of their way to celebrate my book launch with me. It was just perfect.
__
*A quick warning - the Brecon Mountain Railway website is worth checking out, but not at work - it has a loud steam-train sound effect that starts automatically when you click on it!
Comments on this blog | View 30 comments on LiveJournal | Link to this blog entry
Hair, life, links
August 11, 2010, 7.12 pm
Here's the great thing about having actual public events lined up: they're the perfect motivation to keep myself from falling into the soooooo tempting stay-at-home-mom-writer pit where I NEVER get my hair cut (or worn-out clothes replaced) because it never seems worth finding the time. Today, shockingly, I had a new haircut just one month after the last one.
It was the first time I'd had two cuts so close together since before MrD was born...and my hairdresser was visibly relieved! After finding out last time that it had been the first cut in five months, I think she had dire concerns about whether or not I was really grown-up enough to maintain the nice haircut she'd given me...and I have to admit, if I didn't have tomorrow's launch party as a spur to make myself presentable, I probably wouldn't have.
I really loved this bit from one of Sarah Dessen's recent blog entries:
I know I've said this before, but for some reason, I keep waiting for things to Calm Down. You know, get manageable again. But it's been three years since I became a mom, almost, and the chaos is clearly here to stay. I also realized recently that I have this habit of just waiting for, you know, that finish line moment, when everything will fall into place and it's smooth sailing from there on it. Like the end of a movie, right?
I loved the whole entry but laughed in particularly rueful recognition at that paragraph. Ohhhh, yeah. After MrD was born, I was SURE things would calm down within a few months...and yeah, they did, but then he became a toddler...and then, and then, and then... Funny, it turns out life is just a lot more full and complicated (as well as rich and often joyful) after you become a parent, and it doesn't ever really go back to the streamlined non-parenting timeline. (Well, except maybe after they leave for school or university? Obviously, we're not there yet.)
I really liked LK Madigan's blog entry Do You Need a Door?, which collects thoughts from a whole bunch of writers about what kind of writing space they need (including some thoughts on how that can change after having children). I am soooooo jealous of Deva Fagan's lovely writing desk, shown in a photo there! Nowadays, I do most of my writing while lying on a couch or a bed, while MrD is at his childminder in the morning or (if I'm lucky and he sleeps deeply) during his afternoon nap. But I still think longingly about coffeeshop writing trips...maybe I will fit one in soon. After all, I spent several months thinking that I couldn't fit in haircuts, and it turns out those really are possible. So who knows?
What would you guys really like to do, if you only had the time?
Comments on this blog | View 18 comments on LiveJournal | Link to this blog entry
Anniversary and romance
August 7, 2010, 10.56 am
Six years ago, on August 7th 2004, Patrick and I got married. We were married in Leeds, where we were living at the time, at the same Unitarian chapel where Joseph Priestley (the discoverer of oxygen) had preached a couple hundred years earlier. We signed our names in the old wedding register there, for people to see two hundred years from now. We wrote the ceremony ourselves, and afterwards we had our wedding reception in the 18th-century schoolroom just across the road from our house.
Friends of ours catered the reception with fabulous Indian curries as their (incredibly generous) wedding present. We ate ice cream (both dairy and vegan) and traditional British wedding fruitcake, vegan-ified, for dessert. Our dog Nika was meant to stay in our house across the street, but she couldn't resist the party - she darted straight through someone's legs, across the (luckily empty) street, and ended up staying and partying with all the rest of us, much to the delight of all the dog-crazy little kids who were in attendance. The music mix alternated between heavy metal (Patrick's pick) and opera/girl-pop (mine).
It was fun and silly and totally awesome. It was quite literally the best day of my life up to that point.
Over the last six years, there have been a lot of ups and some really horrible downs. Our lovely Nika died far too young, of a really cruel genetic disorder; people we loved died; I was diagnosed with CFS, changing both of our lives in ways that we'd never anticipated. There were times that we were absolutely terrified about how we would cope financially, and that was hard - really, grindingly hard.
Through it all, though, what made all the difference was that no matter what came up for either of us, we were each facing it by the side of our very best friend.
I'm always baffled by the people who think that romance is unrealistic, as a genre - that romantic happy endings are simply too good to be true. I don't believe that for an instant.
Yes, life can be very hard. Relationships can be hard work. Quite often, they turn out not to be work-able at all, and divorces are agonizingly painful for everybody concerned, even when they're the right decision.
Quite often, though, our relationships really are the best part of our lives. I grew up surrounded by happy long-term marriages, marriages that brightened and bettered people's lives, despite any hard points that came up along the way. Not everyone finds the partner who fits them, and of course no one needs a loving husband/wife/partner to be happy. But it is one of the biggest strokes of luck in the world when you do find the partner who suits you to the ground.
I am so happy to have married my best friend. Happy anniversary, sweetheart!
And to everybody else: what are your favorite romances, in books or movies? I'm in the mood to hunt some down right now. :)
Comments on this blog | View 58 comments on LiveJournal | Link to this blog entry
Heroine win and a day of decadence
July 14, 2010, 5.58 pm
Random.org has made its selection, and Carol N Wong is the winner of Erin's The Heroine's Bookshelf! Congratulations, Erin! Just send Erin a message with your mailing address, and the ARC will be shipped to you.
And thanks to everybody who entered the competition, for increasing my TBR list! :) (That is actually a good thing, no matter what our groaning bookshelves might think...)
Today was a day of total decadence. This morning, I got my first haircut in (drumroll) FIVE MONTHS, and ohhhh, did I need it. When I admitted to the (new-to-me) hairdresser how long it had been since my last cut, she actually gasped in disbelief and horror. This is the thing about working at home - or rather, the combination of working at home AND having a small child. My focus is divided between childcare, writing, and desperately trying to keep the house from falling apart; somehow doing things for myself like getting haircuts (even when my bangs have grown almost to my chin and I wince every time I see myself in a mirror) never makes it onto the list, because I don't have the external pressure of running into other adults at work every day.
On the other hand, this haircut feels SO good. My head feels so light, and I keep on reaching up to touch my nice short hair, just for the sheer pleasure of it. And since I'm actually going to be doing a bunch of public events in the next few months, I might just remember to make time for another cut even before my bangs start trying to eat my face again.
This afternoon was even more of the same, since MrD and I went into town together and indulged in a shopping frenzy: lots of cool stuff for him and a new pair of jeans that actually fits (shock! horror!) for me, along with a stop in at the printing shop to order up invites to my launch party. (My publisher designed them for me, thank goodness.) We ended up at a great child-friendly café and just had a really nice time together.
I always remember that it's important to work hard and take care of other people. But I don't always remember how good it is to take care of myself, too. Today was a good reminder.
Comments on this blog | View comments on LiveJournal | Link to this blog entry
Categories:
A Most Improper Magick, Family, Giveaways, Photos
Pride, pics, and a giveaway
June 26, 2010, 4.15 pm
First, a piece of news that made me really happy. Remember how I said, a month or so ago, that my brother Ben's short story "Dark Coffee, Bright Light and the Paradoxes of Omnipotence" had been named as a notable story of the year by the StorySouth award? Well, now it's going to be republished in an anthology of the best Jewish SF/fantasy stories of the past decade.
I am really, really proud of my brother.
Second, this morning there was a knock on the door, much, much too early - but for a fabulous reason. The cover proofs for A Most Improper Magick had arrived! And ohhhh, they're beautiful. They're fun to touch, too! The gold-foiled bits are bumpy, and the shiny white bits feel really smooth against the matte cover...I spent way too long just stroking them, as you can probably guess. ;)
Here are the cover proofs hanging out on the lounger in our patio, enjoying the bright sunshine of our insanely hot summer. (Does the weather not realize that we are in Wales? What is it thinking????)
The best part is that my editor sent me three proofs of the cover. I'm going to keep one, probably to frame; I'm going to save another to give away at my launch party; but I want to give away the third one here, to one of you guys.
At first I was going to put all kinds of sensible conditions on the giveaway, like that you must retweet it or post about it or whatever. But then I thought: y'know, a lot of you guys have been reading my blog for a LONG TIME, some of you from all the way back in 2002 when the idea of me publishing a book - much less a trilogy - must have seemed like a crazy fantasy. (At least, it certainly felt like that to me, an awful lot of the time!) And that deserves something nice in return right now, without a lot of marketing-style fanfare.
So here's the thing. If you'd like a signed cover proof, just leave a comment here, telling me that you would like it. Then I'll use a random number generator to pick a winner on Thursday, July 1st, because that's exactly one month before the book will be published in the UK.
I can't wait. And thank you guys so much for hanging out with me along the way!
Note: This giveaway is now closed.
Comments on this blog | View comments on LiveJournal | Link to this blog entry
I R Serious Writer (TM), and a gruesome TV side-effect
March 7, 2010, 4.47 pm
OK, there are some days, ever since I signed my first book contracts, when I can actually pretend to myself that I am a Serious Professional Writer...and then there are days when I just can't.
Here is the most recent evidence, from my Friday night of prewriting play for the Austen-y dragon novel:
Erm, yes. Well. Um... ;)
Of course, as hopelessly silly as it is, playing with the novel also really, truly works. The more playful I am, the more productive I am and the easier the novel flows. My evening of pre-writing play resulted in me finishing Chapter One today and feeling total happiness about it...
...but, well. It's not exactly the kind of thing that looks like an impressive, grown-up job, does it? Oops.
In other breaking news, dark chocolate also helps writing, in a pinch. And vegan hazelnut brownies are full of super-delicious WRITING MAGIC.
Also, I may have been watching just a few too many episodes of "Castle" lately. I keep finding myself imagining all my surroundings, wherever I am, as the setting for one of the gruesome victim-discovery scenes that open every "Castle" episode.
Eep.
Then, of course, I need more chocolate...
Comments on this blog | View comments on LiveJournal | Link to this blog entry
Home again
February 26, 2010, 3.17 pm
Whew! We got back home from London yesterday...and the whole trip was amazing. I’ve only been to London a few times (usually for only a few hours at a time), and I always forget, in-between visits, how amazing that city really is. (And yes, I do know I'm late to the party on this one - people have been raving about how much fun London is for centuries!)
This time, we decided to splurge and have an amazing overnight stay there, so we stayed at the Club Quarters hotel just off Trafalgar Square, which was absolutely wonderful. As we walked on Wednesday night from Trafalgar Square to Covent Garden (where the publishing party was being held), we passed fountains and world-famous museums, cafés and theaters and cinemas and opera houses, lights and crowds...oh, it felt fabulous.
Since MrD was waiting at the hotel with his aunt, we didn’t stay out too late, but on our way back from the party, we kept poking each other in amazement like the country yokels we are: "Look! The coffeeshops are STILL OPEN, even though it’s after eight o'clock!"
So in other words, it’s obviously been too long since we’ve lived in a big city... ;)
I loved, loved, loved the party - it was really and truly one of the best nights of my life - but I’m going to wait to talk about that until I can finally share a piece of publishing news that’s been bursting inside me for about a month now. Very soon, I hope! But even apart from the party, it was just so great to be able to get dressed up and go out with Patrick in an exciting city, and then to spend the next morning being happy tourists with MrD, ogling the lions in Trafalgar Square (his favorite attraction) and spending an hour in the National Gallery before we had to leave to catch our train.
Of course, since the National Gallery is Britain’s national art museum, an hour was only enough to see the tiniest fraction of the paintings there - but it was still absolutely wonderful. It had been way too long since I’d been to an art museum, and although I felt embarrassingly uncultured pointing out stuff to MrD to grab his interest ("Look, sweetheart, there’s a big cow!") at the same time that art students Seriously Studied the paintings beside us...well, uncultured or not, it was still incredibly fun.
Besides that constant click of recognition as we passed Very Famous Paintings, there was the awesome writing inspiration of seeing history come to life in street scenes of eighteenth-century Rome and Venice, portraits of Regency families...and then my absolute favorite painting that I saw yesterday, Joseph Wright’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768), which was extremely disturbing but also incredibly powerful and dramatic in person.
What’s really cool is that the National Gallery has images of ALL of its paintings online, so you can browse the collection on their site - something I will definitely be doing a lot from now on.
Now we’re back in Wales, in our quiet little town surrounded by our beautiful mountains on every side, and I’m happy to be back...but I’m still glowing with the excitement of the last couple of days. And we definitely have to go back to London again soon!
(You can see the rest of our London photos - and a couple from our day out in Hay-on-Wye - on my flickr account.)
Comments on this blog | View comments on LiveJournal | Link to this blog entry
Categories:
A Most Improper Magick, Photos
Because I am a big geek
November 18, 2009, 10.41 pm
When my editor sent me a proof jacket for A Most Improper Magick - that's a full test version of the paper outer cover that will wrap around the book itself - first I screamed out loud, and then...why, yes, then the cameras came out! I couldn't resist.
But I owe Carrie Jones a big apology. I needed to find a hardcover book to test the cover, and it had to be 304 pages, the same page count as mine, so that the cover would fit. Need was the first one that fit the bill! So Carrie, I'm really, really sorry to have stolen the inside of your book for that one photo session...
...oh, who am I trying to fool? Of course my copy of Need is still sitting in my bookcase wearing Kat's jacket, because that way, I can pretend my book is shelved there. I hope Zara doesn't mind too much! She can have her own jacket back this spring, I promise. But look! It looks SO REAL!
Okay. No more photo madness until the real book arrives. Really! Well, probably...unless I totally lose control...
But anyway! In other good news, Patrick, Mr Darcy, and I all just registered for WisCon 2010. YAYYY!!! WisCon is my Favorite Con in the World, and it's been way too long since we've been back there. Now I'm going to go back to stroking the spine of (almost) my book...don't mind me, really... ;)
Comments on this blog | View comments on LiveJournal | Link to this blog entry
Castles and Farewells
November 12, 2009, 10.14 pm
There are a whole bunch of things I've been planning to write about here, but...well, it's 10pm, I'm awfully tired, and I'm already missing my brother Dave, who left this afternoon after a wonderful six-week visit. He helped us move house, he made both me and MrD fabulous omelettes, he watched "The Muppet Movie" with me and cooked so inventively that he actually persuaded me to like eggplant for the first time in my life...
I love both of my brothers so much. It always hurts to say goodbye, even though this time, it's only for six months. So because I'm feeling nostalgic, this is going to be a photo entry, with pictures from our trip to Raglan Castle this past Saturday:
Raglan is the only castle I've been to that actually still has a moat:
I love the face that's been caught in this tower ever since the Middle Ages:
A shot from inside the castle grounds:
And (almost) the whole family:
You can see more photos on my flickr account.
I'm feeling very lucky right now to have such a great family.
Comments on this blog | View comments on LiveJournal | Link to this blog entry
ARC joy!
September 4, 2009, 3.38 pm
Eeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!!
This morning I was woken up in the very best way possible: my ARCs arrived!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Here they are (7 out of the 8, anyway - the 8th had gone on an exciting trip with Patrick and MrD :) ) with my writing tiara and the Jane Austen action figure who stood on my desk the whole time I was drafting the novel:
Here's the title page:
And then I got a little excited with my camera... ;)
Continue reading blog entry...
Comments on this blog | View comments on LiveJournal | Link to this blog entry