Stephanie Burgis - Magical Books for Ages Ten to Fifteen

Literary families

September 7, 2010, 8.49 pm

Today I re-read one of my favorite contemporary fantasy novels for adults, Ilona Andrews's On the Edge. It's a great fantasy adventure, it's also a wonderful romance...but what struck me this time, in combination with that mental list I made last week of the comfort books I'd want to carry with me everywhere, is that it's also a fabulous book about family.

Rose, the heroine, is a young woman who had to become a grown-up very fast when her parents both (in different ways) abandoned her. The family that she does have left - made up of her two younger brothers and her grandmother - is her main focus in life, the thing she'll give everything to protect.

They're all fabulously well-drawn characters, but when I finished the book this time round, I found myself really missing my grandma in California, because Rose's own grandma is such a great character. She's strong, she's smart, she's loving, she never lets Rose get away with lying to her or to herself...and in my favorite scene of the two of them together, she gives Rose heartfelt, perfect advice that is ABSOLUTELY WRONG for her granddaughter. It's such a perfect family moment: two people loving each other, trying to protect each other, and sometimes screwing up anyway for all the right reasons.

Families: strong, believable, flawed (because they're made up of humans, who are never perfect), and fiercely loving. They're my favorite things to read about.

Looking at my list of comfort books made me realize that that's the big constant, for me, in almost all of my favorite books. I looooove reading about families, whether they're bohemian and eccentric, like the family in Hilary McKay's wonderful Casson family novels, or aristocratic and repressed, like the central family in Loretta Chase's Carsington novels...the main point is, I just love reading about how families interact with each other. I find it endlessly fascinating when it's done well.

And it's the one theme that keeps popping up in my own writing, too, which I guess is not surprising. Even in the dragon book, where I physically separated my heroine from her sisters before the book ever began, that same old family theme keeps coming back again, like an irrepressible force. I just can't stop exploring it.

What about you guys? Do you prefer reading books where the heroines/heros are safely isolated from any family influences, free to have adventures without interference from any interfering relatives, or do you prefer the ones where they're pushing and pulling against their families (whether loving or not) throughout the adventure?

And what are your favorite family books?

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Reading hiccups and a giveaway

September 3, 2010, 11.31 am

First, the important news for UK readers: if you live in the UK, check out this giveaway at the BookBabblers! From now until 8pm Monday, 6th September, you can win a copy of A Most Improper Magick just by commenting on the post.

And speaking of books...

Most of the time, being a writer and a reader go together like...well, like birthday cake and ice cream! You can't have the first without the second, right? (Well, OK, some very strong people may be able to eat birthday cake and NOT eat ice cream with it, but...not me.)

Every so often, though, there's a hiccup. And it's weirdly unpredictable which books - or whole genres - turn out to be off-limits during particular writing projects.

When I was writing A Most Improper Magick, you might have thought that the genre I wouldn't feel able to read would be Regency romances. On the contrary! I loved reading them even more than ever and felt no conflict or discomfort whatsoever as I wrote my own Regency-set adventures, which (gently and lovingly) teased some of the biggest literary conventions in Regency romance.

Books about sisters, though? They felt like poison. I COULD NOT read any of them, no matter how good they were. They could be set in pioneer America or 23rd-century space; they could be gritty realism, even. None of that mattered. As soon as I realized that a book centered around the relationship between sisters, my whole body screamed RED ALERT! RED ALERT! DANGER! and I had to stop reading...

Because what I really cared most about in my own novel, it turned out, was the relationship between Kat and her sisters. That was the most important part of the book, for me, and it felt way too vulnerable and raw to let myself get influenced or thrown out by anyone else's literary sisterhoods.

Now I'm writing a dragon book that's yet again set in the Regency (although about 13 years later, after the Napoleonic wars are finally over). Again, I'm happily reading other Regencies. I'm fine reading other books with dragons, too, because for all the million different representations of dragons in literature, I feel perfectly comfortable and secure in my own interpretation. I'm perfectly happy to read about someone else's 2-ton dragon even as I write about my own heroine carrying her small, decorative (and troublesome) dragon on her shoulder. No problem.

But last week I tried picking up the newest novel by one of my favorite Regency authors for adults, Eloisa James. As usual, it's witty and romantic...but this time, it's a retelling of Cinderella.

As I read, I felt discomfort creep slowly but steadily through me. It got worse and worse, to the point where it actually felt painful. After two (really excellent) chapters, I had to give up and admit that I CANNOT read this novel right now.

This is a book I've been eagerly anticipating, because I LOVE the way Eloisa James writes. But guess what? It turns out that, at its essence, my dragon book is a Cinderella story. One of my beta readers pointed this out a couple of months ago, but I didn't take any notice, because that wasn't how I thought of it at all. I never conceived the novel as a fairytale retelling - Cinderella has never even been one of my favorite fairy tales, so why would I? - and I had no plans for any glass slippers to get involved.

But it turns out...well, my beta readers are really, really smart. Because at its essence, yes, for all the differences between my story and the original fairytale, I really am writing a Cinderella story about loss and transformation and romance...and right now, I cannot bear to read anyone else's version.

What about you guys? If you're writers, are there any genres you've had to give up reading while you wrote a book? If you're a reader, what are your favorite fairytale retellings? Or the genres that you could NEVER give up reading, no matter what?

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Aww and Yum...

August 31, 2010, 7.15 pm

This article made me come very close to tearing up - especially the photos near the bottom of the page. A 100-year-old male tortoise in Kenya has adopted an orphaned baby hippo, and the pictures are incredible. This one was my favorite - but really, if you love animals, click through to see the whole series. It's worth it.

And for the yummy portion of the post, here's the teaser that's appearing on several YA author blogs today:

COMING SOON:

It just may be the most delicious contest that’s been run this year. More than a dozen of your favorite YA authors, an obsession with sweets, and a stunning array of prizes. On September 4th, details will be announced here and on Christine Johnson’s blog.

Until then, here’s a hint:

(ETA: Actually, because of international time-zone differences, it will probably get announced here a day later...but you can find out on Christine's blog in the evening of September 4th, if you're in the US!)

***

Why is it that so many kids' authors are obsessed with baked goods? Does it say something about us? Or is it true of everyone? Hmm.

Today I was good and did not buy a baked good at the café, even though the chocolate cheesecake looked INCREDIBLE. Unfortunately, I can't take too much credit, since I was busy melting all over the floor in chocolate bliss - yes, I gave in to temptation and ordered another Hot Chocolate Milano...

And then, in a weird coincidence, the book I found at Waterstones that ended up in my shoulderbag (a book I'd never heard of before, but which looks great) was Cathy Cassidy's Sundae Girl.

There's definitely something edible in the air right now...

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Links and Kindles and Comfort Books

August 30, 2010, 12.10 pm

I have so many links to pass on, I'm going to list them first, before I can forget:

First, Tracy at Tall Tales and Short Stories just interviewed me about the writing/submission process for A Most Improper Magick. You can read the interview (and her review of AMIM) here.

Second, Jocelyn at Book Babblers interviewed me here.

And for anyone with kids who's going to be within driving distance of Newport, Wales on October 27th: you can check out the full programme for Big Read Day online, including the worldbuilding writing workshop I'll be leading for kids aged 10 and up, "How to Write Your World Real". You can also find a booking form here.

Whew! Now on to the real entry. :)

***

A long time back, I posted here asking what people's favorite e-readers were. Over the past year, a toxic combination of exhaustion and CFS has made it almost impossible for me to read long manuscripts on my computer screen...which has struck a fatal blow to my (very important) habit of critiquing novels for close friends and crit partners. Not only does that suck for me (because getting to read great novels before they're published is a huge gift!), it means I'm really letting down everybody who critiques my novels by not helping them out in return.

So, after months of indecision, I am finally breaking down and spending the money on an e-reader. From everything I've read and heard, the iPad seems like by far the best one out there, but...well, sadly, we don't have that much free money! The prices on the new Kindles have finally dropped to a point where we can justify the expense, though, so Patrick and I are going to buy a joint Kindle this month.

This is something I wouldn't be doing if I didn't want to do critiques - I definitely prefer reading books on paper - but I'm getting excited about it already. Last week, as I was re-reading a favorite book for the umpteenth time (a Regency novel for adults, Loretta Chase's Miss Wonderful), I thought about how great it would be to have extra e-copies of all my very favorite comfort books stored on my Kindle so that they were always available, no matter what. I started making a list in my head of all the books I would want to ALWAYS have on me for comfort and fun.

Then, of course, I looked on Amazon...and, curses! Those are almost all books that were published pre-kindle (or just without kindle rights), so of course there aren't any electronic versions available of my favorite comfort books. Wahh!

Still, it was fun making the list in my head. Here's a quick sampling from it (I'm going to save you guys the whole list, because it was LONG!):

• Ilona Andrews, On the Edge (adult rural fantasy)
• Loretta Chase, Miss Wonderful, Mister Impossible, and Lord Perfect (adult Regency romantic comedies)
• Joan Bauer, Squashed (YA comedy)
• Georgette Heyer, The Talisman Ring (18th-century romantic comedy)
• Virginia Euwer Wolff, The Mozart Season (lovely MG novel about family and music)
• Linda Urban, A Crooked Kind of Perfect (quirky MG comedy)
• Lois McMaster Bujold, Paladin of Souls (high fantasy adventure for women, with a great quasi-historical setting)

...aaaand so many more!

What about you guys? If you could stick extra copies of any books in the world onto an e-reader, which books would you carry around with you all the time?

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Pre-Writing, Music, and Weekend

August 15, 2010, 3.40 pm

It's definitely THAT time of year again: the novel-wrestling time, when I've already written the fun, easy opening of my novel and it's time to do the hard work of figuring out how the main story of the book is really going to work. Which direction to go, which points to head for, what it's Really All About...

This is surprisingly frazzling. The first few chapters are always so easy! They're just for fun, I just see what happens...and then we hit this bit, where I need to actually make important decisions. Oops.

So it's good timing to be reading Russell T. Davies's The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter (recommended by Sara Ryan), which is turning out to be the funniest and smartest book on writing that I've read in a long, long time. I keep wishing that I had post-it notes on hand to stick on every page where a moment or observation flies out at me and wants to be saved...sadly, this is a library book, so I'll have to wait until I buy a copy of my own (soon!) before I get to mark it up.

Here's one bit, though, that was most appropriate for the stage I'm in right now with my dragon novel. He's talking about the struggle to come up with the main ideas for a Doctor Who Christmas episode, and all the inevitable "buts" that come flying up in an internal cloud of skepticism whenever a possible new idea first occurs to him:

But why not...? Why would...? Why do...?...But that sort of thing shouldn't stop me. Let it ride. I mustn't bore myself with reasons with reasons why not. There are always a million dull reasons why not. Go for the images, the feel of it, the potential, the dynamic. Details come later.

I read that paragraph and thought, YES. It was exactly what I needed to read. The important thing is to focus first on the FUN of the idea, focus on how it could be the MOST fun, and deal with all the rational logistics of it later.

Because I'm me, the main external work I'm doing right now (while I work out all the big questions inside my head) is collaging the novel and going on a big musical hunt for songs that might work as a playlist. So far, the "dragon playlist" on my computer has a Pink Martini song ("Tuca Tuca"), the movie soundtrack from Pride and Prejudice (I don't really like that adaptation, but the soundtrack is just perfect), and some lovely, haunting Maggie Stiefvater songs that I downloaded from her website. I keep the playlist playing in my ears at least half of every day, helping to focus my mind as I work out the different characters and their arcs.

And the whole time, of course, I feel desperately restless and itchy and irritable, because I want to get down to it and just WRITE! But if I skip this pre-writing stage, I will pay for it, because my subconscious needs the time to simmer. That's a lesson I've learned before, all too painfully. Sigh.

Anyway! That's what my writer-side has been up to this weekend, while the rest of me has been mommying. MrD and I had a lovely café trip yesterday, visited the owls, and stopped in at Waterstones. A perfect Saturday! Today has been much quieter, but Maya and I went to the park, and later I'll be skyping with my family back home in Michigan, so it's a good weekend overall.

What about you guys? How are your weekends going? And if you're a writer, what kind of pre-writing work do you usually need to do?

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Prize pack winners, room stickers, and BODY

August 2, 2010, 10.04 pm

Woot! A few hours later than planned - due to unavoidable childcare issues - here are the winners of the Publication Day Prize Packs! The two runners-up are: theironchocho and @malibu_love

And the grand prize winner is: Shawna Lenore!

Please contact me with your postal addresses and I'll put your packs in the mail tomorrow!

***

Today was no longer Publication Day, but it was a good day nonetheless. Since I'd sent off Kat3 on Friday (which continues to feel weird, after working on it for nearly two years!), today I used my childfree time for...okay, guess the LEAST LIKELY thing you can imagine. Ready?

I cleaned the house (or at least the living room, because, well, that was how much energy I had). Yes. It was THAT rare and unlikely an occurrence! But it was actually a relief to have the time to do it...and it will be even MORE of a relief to go back to writing as soon as the whole house is in reasonably good shape. That's my goal, after the last three months of putting all my spare energy into revision and forcing myself to ignore all the clutter (because why worry about something you can't change?): to FINALLY unpack the leftover boxes from our April move and get the house into a reasonably tidy and well-organized condition.

Better late than never...and at least part of the house-fix-up has actually been fun, since I spent about an hour putting up room stickers of tigers and monkeys and lions in one of the rooms of our house. (Guess whose? No, not mine. If I chose room stickers for my and Patrick's room, they'd either be Regency images or dragons.)

And the very coolest part of the last 24 hours has been the fact that I got the chance to read an ARC of Ying Lee's The Body at the Tower. I loved her first book, A Spy in the House (in fact, I loved it SO much that I actually sent her fanmail, something I'd never done after reading a book before!), but ohhhhhhh....I love Body EVEN MORE. You can read my review on Goodreads for now, and in a month or so, I'll probably give away a copy of the published book, because I loved it THAT much - I feel evangelistic about it! (It stands alone perfectly, btw, so you don't need to read Spy to read Body - but heck, why not?)

Which books do you guys love enough to thrust at everyone you know?

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Today's entry...

August 2, 2010, 10.56 am

...is over at Playing by the Book, my favorite parenting blog, where Zoe Toft blogs about the great books she and her kids have read together and comes up with (often awe-inspiring!) activities and crafts for her kids to accompany the books.

Today I'm blogging there about three of my favorite picture books. Here's an excerpt:

One of my favourite parts of parenting so far has been getting to discover great new books together with my son. Even before he was born, I’d started collecting some of my old favourites from my own childhood, but for this post I wanted to talk about three books we discovered together and both love. The linking theme is independence: all three of these books feature characters going out into the wide world without their parents, dealing with strange adults and facing the unknown, just like every little kid eventually has to do...

You can read the full entry here - and I love the songs and activities Zoe's come up with to accompany the books I wrote about!

And of course today is the last day to enter my prize pack giveaway. It was a really, really awesome Publication Day. Thank you guys so much for celebrating with me! :)

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Today I have landed...

July 30, 2010, 1.06 pm

...on the Un:Bound blog, where I contributed a post to their "Writers Reading" series, talking about my lifelong obsession/addiction/whatever you choose to call it. ;)

Here are two snapshots from my childhood:

One: I'm nine years old, walking back to my cabin at summer camp. As usual, I’m reading as I walk…and this time, I end up completely tangled in a vollebyall net I hadn't even noticed, because I was so absorbed in The Count of Monte Cristo...

You can read the full entry here - and please do leave a comment if anything occurs to you. Have you ever walked into anything while you were reading? Or am I alone in my book-related accidents? Eek. Maybe you shouldn't answer that one after all...

(No, actually I think I'm safe, because I know someone else who biked right into a car door when he was reading while riding a bicycle. Of course, he was a member of my family, so maybe it's just us...)

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Because life is not all about the crazy

July 29, 2010, 4.13 pm

Today I am not going to post about the crazy. (Or at least I'm going to try not to. Sometimes it leaks through.) Today I am going to post about something that made me really happy:

Sherlock: A Study in Pink

This week I watched the first episode of Sherlock, Steven Moffat's modern-day updating of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Steven Moffat is my favorite writer for TV, so I really hoped that it would be good, even though I am a total Sherlock Holmes geek and was seriously disappointed to hear that it would be set in the 21st century. Still, Steven Moffat is awesome, so I was willing to give it a try...

...and, WOW. I was completely blown away. I haven't been this excited about a TV show in...well, let's just say a really, REALLY long time. It honestly was the best Sherlock Holmes adaptation I've ever seen. Despite the changes made for the contemporary setting, this was the first adaptation I've seen that perfectly got across the brilliant and intense weirdness of Sherlock Holmes as a person, managed the fast, fun pace of the original stories (this show was just SO MUCH FUN to watch!), and most of all conveyed the really great dynamic between Holmes and Watson (who is really not supposed to be stupid, as in so many of the film and TV adaptations - he's only stupid compared to Holmes because everybody is, when compared to Holmes). In their friendship, each of them is supplying something that the other really, really needs.

People in the show comment nervously on how much darkness must be in Holmes, to make him so obsessed with murder and crime - but there's something in nice, friendly Watson that draws him to be a part of that, too. Lots of yummy ambiguity done really well, along with sparky, funny dialogue and a great story...just perfect.

Oh, and I LOVED the scene at the end between Holmes and his arch-nemesis. No spoilers, but it made me very happy. :)

The single thing I didn't like about the episode was something that pops up in so many shows nowadays (including Buffy, another show I absolutely loved) and which always upsets me: the use of torture as an easy and reliable way to get instant truth from a bad guy. I really, really hate this plot device on so many levels, I hate that it's used SO MUCH in TV, which helps to normalize it in the broader culture, and I wish Steven Moffat hadn't cheapened an important revelation at the end of the show by getting it out that way. (Just once, how about someone lies under torture? Or genuinely doesn't know the information that's being pursued, but makes something up just to get the hero to stop hurting them - y'know, the way it often happens in real life? Sigh.)

Still, that was a very small moment in the episode, and if I wasn't willing to cope with shows that use that plot device, I'd have to watch almost no action-adventure television at all. And overall, I just loved, loved, loved Sherlock and can't wait for the second episode to come out.

***

Today MrD and I spent the morning in town, and it was good. We dropped off invitations to the book launch (two weeks from today!), we hung out at our favorite café, and we both got new books. (Mine was Jandy Nelson's The Sky is Everywhere, which is really lovely so far.) When we got home, I found a package from my publisher waiting for me: beautiful Kat bookmarks and postcards! I can't wait to start giving them away.

And best of all, all day today I've been hearing from people who'd pre-ordered A Most Improper Magick from The Book Depository, letting me know that copies are being dispatched! It's now officially in stock there (although not yet at any of the other UK booksellers). Eeee! Luckily, today the crazy is at a low enough level that I managed to restrain myself from ordering myself a copy just because I could. But it was bizarrely tempting... ;)

What have you guys done lately just for fun? (And OK, I admit that dropping off invites was not just for fun - but hanging out with MrD in the café, drinking hot chocolate and playing with him while we people-watched together? That was awesome. It made me really happy.)

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Today's entry...

July 27, 2010, 10.08 am

...is over at "I was a teenage book geek", where I'm blogging about one of the books that changed my life forever:

I still remember the moment I opened Elizabeth Peters’s Crocodile on the Sandbank for the first time. I was at Camp Blue Lake, a two-week-long music camp which I was attending - unfortunately - as a piano major. I’d been there for a week so far, which was more than long enough to prove that, although I really did like the piano, playing it for more than two hours a day was enough to make my head spin with boredom…and attending a piano-related concert every single night was enough to make me want to shrivel up and die....

You can read the rest of the entry here, and please do leave a comment there if any occur to you! What were the books that rose up and grabbed you when you were supposed to be focusing on Something Much More Important at the time? ;)

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Heroines and a Giveaway

July 7, 2010, 3.09 pm

I really, really love strong heroines in books. Sometimes they're physically strong - I just finished reading Alyxandra Harvey's Blood Feud and adored the fact that the heroine, who started out as a delicate 18th-century debutante, has turned into a strong, mature woman who is far better at fighting than the book's 21st-century vampire hero (who is mostly described as "pretty", has a penchant for lace cuffs on his pirate shirts, and absolutely adores the fact that the heroine is so tough).

On the other hand, sometimes it's moral or intellectual strength that appeals most to me, like in the case of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, who tends to be the smartest & wittiest person in any room, and who utterly refuses to marry any man she doesn't respect, no matter how rich he might be. Jane Eyre is another example - she might be poor and plain and alone in the world, but she won't let anyone - not even the man she loves - pressure her into doing what she believes is morally wrong.

When I first heard about Erin Blakemore's book The Heroine's Bookshelf: Life Lessons from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder, I was really intrigued. Then I read a draft of it, and fell head over heels in love.

Chapter by chapter, Erin talks about fabulous woman authors and the fictional heroines they created, from Jane Austen to Zora Neale Hurston, Laura Ingalls Wilder to Alice Walker. There are chapters on books I read and loved as a kid, like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Anne of Green Gables, and I loved being reminded so beautifully of those books, and learning so many interesting new things about their authors. There are also chapters on books I've never read but now MUST read after her enticing descriptions of them, like Their Eyes Were Watching God. Each chapter gives tribute to the fabulous heroines Erin loves, and to the authors, flawed and fabulous heroines themselves, many of whom were battling truly horrific circumstances.

This is a book to sink into and LOVE. It's warm and fun and inspiring and also full of fascinating information. At the end of each chapter, Erin suggests times when these particular heroines - fictional or authorial - might be just what you need to get through your own difficult circumstances.

By the time I finished reading the book, I'd already realized that I wanted to buy copies for almost every woman I know. The book isn't out until October...but luckily, I can already start giving it away. Erin's donated one ARC of the book to be given to a reader of this blog. The giveaway is open internationally, and all you have to do is leave a comment telling me your favorite literary heroine. (She can be a fictional character or an author - either works!) I'll use a random number generator to pick a winner one week from today, on Wednesday July 14th.

So: who are your literary heroines? :)

ETA: This giveaway is now closed. Thanks so much to everyone who participated!

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Books, Owls, and Shopping Glee

June 30, 2010, 5.12 pm

Today has been a happy day. Why? Because it's the last day of the month...which means it's the day I let myself order a bundle of books online. Wooooot! Soon, Holly Black's White Cat and Alyxandra Harvey's Blood Feud will be mine, along with a couple of adult romances and the latest (Billie Piper) version of Mansfield Park.

(And yes, I have seen it, so I do know it really isn't all that good...but I just can't help myself. It's a Jane Austen adaptation that isn't absolutely terrible - so I have to have it and watch it, over and over and over again! It's like a sickness...but a fun one, at least.)

Yesterday was a happy day, too, because MrD and I went into town for adventures and made an unexpected and wonderful discovery: there were real, live owls in town! It was an outreach program being run by The Welsh Owl and Wildlife Sanctuary. MrD loves owls but had never seen any in person before, and I hadn't seen any since I was a young kid. We spent a long time just hanging out watching the owls, donated some coins to their collection jar, and will probably be either buying a WOWLS membership or adopting an owl very soon.

We also went through a bunch of charity shops, which is always fun. Charity shops might be my favorite aspect of living in a British town - so many cheap, cheap books and clothes (charity shops are the UK equivalent of thrift shops), and all for such good causes! Yesterday I got to feel virtuous about donating a bit of money to Oxfam and the Marie Curie society, while at the same time picking up incredibly cheap clothes, books and toys for MrD and for me. Shopping glee + virtue = score! ;)

Today has been a quiet day apart from my online book-buying binge. I finally watched the second part of the Doctor Who season finale, and ohhhhhh, I loved it. But I can't believe I have to wait until Christmas for more! I really loved David Tennant as Doctor Who, but the switch to Steven Moffat (my very favorite writer in television) as the show's head writer has been such a good move, and Matt Smith is so good as his own version of the Doctor, that I've coped with the change in cast much better than I'd expected.

What about you guys? What have been the highlights of your weeks so far?

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The good kind of tears, write-a-thon, and links

June 15, 2010, 5.39 pm

This morning I cried for the best possible reason. My UK editor emailed me the brand-new, completely re-vamped British cover for A Most Improper Magick - and it is *perfect*. Not just a great cover, but EXACTLY the perfect cover for the book I wrote and dreamed about for so long. When I saw it, I started to cry because it was so amazing that my book had been so perfectly understood.

I'm sorry to tease by saying this and then not actually showing you guys the cover, but I'm not allowed to share it publicly yet. I really hope I can SOON - but in the meantime, it just would have felt really wrong to write a journal entry today and not mention the new cover, because it made such a difference to my day (and week and month!). It's been many hours since I got that email, but I've still got the PDF of the cover open in another window on my computer, and I haven't gone more than half an hour between ogling sessions ever since I first opened it. ;)

There are some days when writing is easy, some when it's hard, some when it's angst-ridden, interfered with by panic about publishing issues or fear of what people will think of the book or, or, or [insert neurosis here]]...and then there are days like today, when I am just filled with awe that I have been so, so lucky.

(And I wish I could go back in time and show this cover to the self of 7 years ago, who was - at just about exactly this time of year - taking Nika on long walks in the woods and crying the terrible kind of wrenching tears as she walked, because she was so convinced that she would never, ever manage to sell a novel or even a short story, EVER. It really was worth all those years of crazy, stubborn persistence in the face of all the odds, to get here.)

In other news, the 2010 Clarion West write-a-thon is about to begin. I finished the first draft of A Most Improper Magick during the first write-a-thon, and the first draft of A Tangle of Magicks (Kat2) during the 2nd; then last year I set myself super-ambitious goals that turned out to be way too challenging for life with a young baby who would only nap on my lap. This year, I've tried to figure out goals that are both challenging AND honestly do-able. I'm hoping to finish the rewrite of Kat3 and write 40 pages of some other project/s, whether that means the dragon book or a new short story or something completely different.

My write-a-thon page is here. I'll be really grateful if any of you donate in support - going to the Clarion West workshop was the best decision I ever made for my writing career (not to mention my personal life, since I met Patrick there!), and I could never have afforded to attend if I hadn't been given scholarship money. The write-a-thon raises money to give scholarships - and thereby opportunity - to other new writers who couldn't afford the workshop otherwise.

But even if you don't donate, I'll just be really grateful for the moral support as I work toward my writing goals this summer.

And my very last link - today I interviewed Angie Frazier about her wonderful YA debut historical-adventure-fantasy novel, Everlasting (which Heidi Kling called "Part Titanic, Part Raiders of the Lost Ark with a spunky teenager heroine"). You can read the interview here!

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Excuses, favorites, and an ARC giveaway

June 10, 2010, 5.05 pm

Sorry for the radio silence, guys! Things are a bit tough here at the moment in terms of health and energy. Because of my CFS, our usual state of play is for Patrick to do all the housework, dog-care, and at least half the childcare, which leaves me with enough energy to do half the childcare, write fiction, write lots of emails and a couple of journal entries every week, and even do wild and crazy things like going downtown once or twice a week.

Well. Unfortunately, that's not what's happening right now, because Patrick's still not feeling well himself, so all of my energy is being funneled into childcare and housecare, leaving very little energy for writing...and as much as I love blogging and writing emails, they can't take priority over my contracted novels. So I'm guessing that blog entries will continue to be scattered for a while, and I really apologize to everyone I owe emails to.

Have I mentioned how much I really hate CFS? :(

I'm still popping up a bit more often on twitter, because 1-line updates are more do-able than full blog entries - if you're there, you can find me at http://www.twitter.com/stephanieburgis - and otherwise...please know that I miss you guys and can't wait to come back to regular blogging and emailing! In the meantime, though, here's a quick roundup of some of my favorite things from the past couple of weeks:

Nigella Lawson
I have finally become a Nigella convert. I'd seen a couple episodes of her various cooking shows on TV and never been won over, but then I checked out her cookbook Nigella Express last Friday and fell in love. Luscious photos of food that's fast and easy to prepare (and so far, that promise has been upheld in all the recipes I've tried from the cookbook, all of which have been delicious as well as easy to make) - and I love, love LOVE the way she writes about the food. Her long, chatty intros to each recipe are lushly written and make the cookbook fun to read on its own, even if you don't do any cooking. I was completely blissed-out by the end of an afternoon spent reading it on the couch, even before I tried a single recipe. My only sorrow was that there aren't nearly enough vegan-convertible recipes included for my liking...but if that isn't an issue for you, there's really no downside to this cookbook.

Lisa Mantchev's Perchance to Dream book trailer
So dreamy and beautiful! I loved it. And as you guys know, I'm a huge fan of Lisa's books. Check it out:

Marie Brennan's A Star Shall Fall
I was lucky enough to get an ARC for this, and loved it. Eighteenth-century fantasy based around the impending arrival of Halley's Comet, with scenes of faeries debating real eighteenth-century scientific theory...it made my geeky, eighteenth-century-loving heart extremely happy. :) And have I mentioned yet that Halley's Comet is connected to a very, very cool and frightening dragon???? Here's what I wrote about it on Goodreads:

A beautifully written fantasy novel. The magic is perfectly interwoven with 18th-century British history and scientific theory, and the characters and their emotions are wonderfully complex.

I loved Book One in Brennan's Onyx Court series (Midnight Never Come, which was really fun), and I admired Book Two (In Ashes Lie) for how ambitious it was, but A Star Shall Fall is my favorite of Marie Brennan's novels so far, and it stands alone perfectly - you definitely don't need to have read either of the earlier Onyx Court books to enjoy this one.

If you like smart adult historical fantasy (and note, this is adult rather than MG or YA, so while there aren't any explicit sex scenes, there are complex romantic relationships and it is written in a different tone than fantasy for kids), I'm guessing that you might like this a LOT...and although it isn't due to be published until the end of August, you can read a copy sooner than that just by commenting on this entry.

Tell me either (a) your personal favorite historical period, (b) your favorite historical fantasy novel, OR (c) why you want to read it even though you don't have favorite periods OR historical fantasy novels....and you'll be entered to win my ARC from me! (Shameful note: the cover of this ARC is a little beaten-up, because MrD got hold of it. HOWEVER, nothing has been damaged apart from the wrinkled cover.)

I'll pick a winner next Thursday. The giveaway is open internationally!

And now I'm going to rest for a little while before it's my turn to take over childcare again.

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Girls Behaving Badly - a Guest Blog by Saundra Mitchell

June 4, 2010, 9.30 am

Note from Steph: I've been a fan of Saundra's blog for a long time, and I really admire the work she's done helping teens to make their own films as part of Fresh Films and Fresh Writing. Her YA novel, Shadowed Summer (which was nominated for an Edgar Award), is a delicious ghost story set in a small Southern town. It's coming out in paperback on June 8th, and I'm thrilled to be a part of her 30 Days of Summer celebration by hosting her here.

GIRLS BEHAVING BADLY

Saundra Mitchell

In Spring 2011, A Most Improper Magick will be in my hot little hands, and I can't wait. It's exactly the kind of book I would have read ragged when I was a kid (and frankly, I'm gonna read it ragged now that I'm an adult.)

My favorite books growing up were always about girls behaving badly - which generally means, girls actually getting to go on adventures, seeing the world, and having every possibility. No one seems to think a boy is badly-behaved if he wants to sign onto a boat heading off to find fortunes in lands untold- but I digress.

I stuffed myself full of adventurous stories about adventurous girls - Tamora Pierce's Alanna was a favorite. So much so, that I nicknamed myself Alanna, after the princess of Tortall who wanted to be a knight instead of a sorceress. I got giddy on Marion Zimmer Bradley's Cassandra and Morgan le Fay. Stories about Deborah Sampson - who disguised herself as a boy to fight in the Revolutionary war - were favorites, too.

But no need for all firebrand girls to all pretend to be boys. Boudicca sacked London in her own gown: Harriet Tubman led the way on the Underground Railroad in her own dress. Rosa Parks was exactly herself when she refused to give up her seat on the bus, and while Hatshepsut wore the ornamented beard of a Pharaoh, there was no mistaking that she was a woman.

I've always been inspired by stories of girls behaving badly - and making a difference. They're the same kind of stories that my character Iris prefers, in Shadowed Summer. And while she may be stuck in a dying, rural town, Iris can look out at the world and become anything through books - I have no doubt that she'd see herself in Kat Stephenson.

And I'm glad, because as they say, a well-behaved woman never made history.

Shadowed Summer by Saundra Mitchell
In paperback June 8, 2010
www.shadowedsummer.com

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Good shows, good books, a rant and belated birthday wishes

June 2, 2010, 1.04 pm

If only birthdays could last forever! Sadly, the last of the birthday cake ran out two days ago, and life went back to normal...or rather, an awful lot busier than normal, since Patrick hasn't been feeling well, so I've been doing a lot more housework and childcare than usual. I'm seizing this opportunity to blog, though, while Patrick and Maya and MrD are out on a trip to the local park. (I love living just a block away from the park!)

I finished Season 2 of The Gilmore Girls this weekend, and ohhhh, the ending of that season! Sad and wrenching but real, and with all sorts of intriguing new complications implied for the future. I can't wait to find out what happens next. Luckily, one of the best birthday presents I got was a gift certificate to Amazon.co.uk, so along with all the books I ordered, I also ordered the Season 3 boxset. Now I'm just waiting for Patrick to catch up on the last few episodes of Season 2 so we can watch Season 3 together!

One of the other birthday presents I really, really loved was Leah Cypess's Mistwood. It's YA high fantasy in the same vein as Kristin Cashore and Robin McKinley, and mmmm, it was so good - romantic, emotionally intense, and genuinely magical, with complex issues of independence and power interwoven through it. Definitely worth checking out if you love good high fantasy! You can read the first three chapters here.

I also particularly loved the way Mistwood threw into question the whole idea of "rightful", "true" kings. One thing that I don't personally like about a lot of American fantasy novels is how implicitly monarchy-loving so many of them are. I understand why it happens - we all grow up reading fairy tales with princes and princesses as heroes, and before I moved to the UK, I enjoyed that as a fantasy trope without ever thinking twice about it - but now that I'm living in a country with a continuing monarchy, it doesn't feel like such a harmless fantasy to play with anymore.

I don't mind authors using royal characters or setting their books in kingdoms - I hope I never become that cranky and unreasonable! - and a lot of great writers use the idea of rightful kings/queens to write wonderful books which I'd hate to miss out on just because of my own personal hang-ups. But, on a personal, subjective level, I just particularly enjoy reading books that do show some of the complexity and gray areas of real-life monarchies and class systems...because personally, I have a big problem with the idea that one person is better or more important than anyone else just because of the family they happened to be born into.

Rant over now! I promise. ;p But I really can't wait to read more Leah Cypess novels.

And I also wanted to wish a happy belated book birthday to two fabulous books that came out in America this past week: Lisa Mantchev's Perchance to Dream, the second book in her Theatre Illuminata YA fantasy trilogy (you can read the first chapter here); and Sarah Prineas's Magic Thief: Found, the third book in her Magic Thief trilogy. I was lucky enough to read multiple drafts of Perchance to Dream as Lisa was writing it, and it got better and better every time (and I'd loved even the very first draft!) - I can't wait to read the final version when my copy arrives. And I read Magic Thief: Found last week and enjoyed it so much - it gives an incredibly exciting conclusion to the trilogy, and the ending was just perfect, beautiful and right.

What about you guys? Which books or TV shows have you really enjoyed lately?

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Changes (some unexpected, some secret), an auction, and a good book

May 11, 2010, 3.51 pm

Ah, how quickly life changes. Last Sunday morning? This was me: OMG! I only got woken twice! I'm in Heaven!

This morning: OMG. I got woken TWICE. I can't believe it. I feel like I'm going to die...

Yup. This is the unexpected side-effect of having a child who's just started sleeping through the night most of the time. (Four out of the last six nights!) Funny how quickly my body adjusts...in completely the wrong direction! I keep trying to remind myself that a couple of weeks ago, being woken only twice a night would have felt like an impossible dream. Oops. ;p

In the meantime, I am bursting with fascinating stuff that can't yet be shared, and it's driving me crazy.

I have seen my British cover! It is awesome! It even shimmers (no, really)!...but I can't show it to you guys yet. :(

I have found out that Kat will have a different series title and a different Book One title in the US, and as of last night, I even know what they will be...but I can't share them yet, either. :(

Aaaahhhh!

Imagine me hopping with impatience. Or maybe not. Like I said, I'm a bit tired today... ;)

However, if anyone wants a signed copy of the UK edition, in particular - or just wants the chance to read the book months before it's published in America! - you can do a good thing for Nashville at the same time by bidding on the signed UK paperback edition here. It's part of the Do the Write Thing for Nashville auction to support flood relief, which is also offering up a ton of other fabulous items from authors, editors and agents.

I'll sign the paperback copy of A Most Improper Magick and send it to the winner as soon as I receive my author copies, which will be at least five months before the US edition comes out, and quite possibly more (since the US edition may not come out until later in the spring - the exact date is still in flux).

And in the meantime, I wanted to recommend one of my new very favorite books, Jaclyn Moriarty's Feeling Sorry for Celia. I first discovered Jaclyn Moriarty as a writer by reading a guest blog she wrote on Justine Larbalestier's blog. That entry was beautiful and made me want to read more, so I went to check out her own blog, which is wonderful, and I got completely addicted. Finally, I decided to try her first book, hoping to enjoy it since I liked her blog writing so much...

...and oh. Oh. I loved it so, so much. Feeling Sorry for Celia is a story about a girl whose best friend (Celia) is out of control, and it's about friendship and family and change. It's told in letters and notes to and from the teenage heroine. Some of them are real (her mum's fabulous notes, left on the fridge, are among my favorite); some of them are imaginary, from groups like The Association of Teenagers (or, Young Detectives), berating the heroine for her inadequacies; they're all equally wonderful. I love the characters, I love the story, and I love that it was one of the funniest books I've read and yet also included some parts that made me want to cry.

It's the first in her Ashbury High series, and now I can't wait to read all the rest. I already know I'll be re-reading Feeling Sorry for Celia many, many times.

What about you guys? What books have you loved recently?

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Better Days

May 6, 2010, 11.53 am

I'm feeling so much better today than I have in ages. I found myself humming with contentment as I made breakfast this morning, and I was so surprised that I stopped and wondered: what's causing this amazing mood? And then I remembered: MrD slept through the night last night, for the first time EVER!!!!

Sorry for all the exclamation points, but...this is a Big Deal. I don't even know if I can express what a big deal it is without going into brain-numbing details, but...oh, wow. I just had my first night of sleep unbroken by any baby wakeups AT ALL for over 19 months. (And up until a few days ago, those wakeups had been coming every 1-2 hours a night ever since January 2009. So...)

Yup. I could hum all day long, today. :)

Then I checked my email and was reminded immediately of why WisCon is my favorite con in the whole world. One of the organizers had written to me to say he was worried that we had paid for our memberships and weren't going to be able to use them...so would we like a full refund?

Would we? I had just assumed that wouldn't be possible. It isn't possible with most cons. But WisCon is really special, for this among so many other reasons. I love you, WisCon!!!! And I really hope to be back very soon, even though it won't be this year.

After my email check, as I was finishing my breakfast, I read this horrifying essay by Hanif Kureishi's sister, which pretty much expresses exactly how toxic and terrible it can be for a brother and sister to both be writers...which made me feel so, so intensely grateful for my own two writing brothers. According to Yasmin Kureishi,

I remember a few years ago, after my father died, I'd won a competition for a play I wrote, and Hanif told me I should give up writing. I've always felt that he can't stand the thought that I might be any good, might be better than him.

I stared at that line in horror, but also in shock, because I cannot even imagine a world where either of my brothers reacted in such a way. The three of us formed a writing group when we were kids, and since then, we've kept on reading and cheering on each other's work, whether the pieces we're writing are novels, short stories, or screenplays.

And since I am still feeling shaken by that article, I would like to take this opportunity to say how incredibly proud I am of my brother Ben, whose dark, disturbing, and powerful story "Dark Coffee, Bright Light, and the Paradoxes of Omnipotence" was chosen as one of the best online stories of 2009 by the storySouth Million Writers Award. And I am also incredibly proud of my brother Dave, who has written two short stories as Christmas presents for me that were so, so good that Ben and I both tried to talk him into being the third of us to attend Clarion West. (So far, he hasn't wanted to, since he's been focusing on his very cool screenplays instead.)

Finally, today is the perfect day to share a short story that Patrick and I wrote together in 2002 and saw published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine in 2006. "Fire Magic" is an adventure fantasy with swordfighting, banter, and romance, set in an imaginary Eastern European kingdom in an alternate history version of Europe. It was the first and last story we ever wrote together, it's pretty different from anything that either of us has written on our own, and I still like it a lot. Patrick has just put it onto his website, so now you can read it for free. I hope you guys enjoy it!

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Friends, Moondust, and Short Stories

April 12, 2010, 4.02 pm

Oof. MrD has been sick again this past week - a throat infection that started about three days after the chest infection went away, and which requires a whole new round of disgusting antibiotics to be forced down him four times a day - so we’ve all been pretty exhausted. Then, yesterday, I woke up with an ominous, thick-headed feeling, and today I officially have a Cold From Hell.

So in other words, I am very tempted to spend this whole entry whining, because colds always make me feel very, very sorry for myself! But I will take pity on you guys and restrain myself. Instead, I’m going to focus on the good stuff that’s happened in the last few days.

First, our friend Tricia drove four hours roundtrip to help us clean out our old house after we moved out, AND she brought homemade soup for us to eat after she’d gone. That was way beyond the call of friendship, and it made such a huge difference to us. (The soup was delicious, too.) Thank you sooooo much, Trish!

Second, I’m reading a really fascinating book right now: Moon Dust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, by Andrew Smith. It’s about the twelve men who walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972 - still the only twelve men in history to have done it - and how they spent the rest of their lives afterwards.

It’s got elements of a history book to it - I love the intensity and vividness of his descriptions of the actual moon-walking experiences - and elements of biography, too. It’s mostly written like a memoir, though, with the focus on Smith’s own personal experience of meeting with the moonwalkers and finding out their stories. I’ve never been particularly interested in the history of the space program, but I’m finding this book incredibly compelling, and it’s really inspiring me to find out more about the whole subject.

Lastly, I just got an invitation to a very cool-sounding anthology, so this morning I started a brand-new short story. It’s a bit different from any of the stories I’ve written in the last year or so, so it feels like it’s stretching me in really good, creative directions. Working on it reminds me of Ursula LeGuin’s theory that what everyone in life is really looking for, deep down, is work-play - the kind of satisfying, challenging work that feels like playing.

It’s the kind of work I love to do…even when I do have to sniffle and gulp down gallons of tea as I do it.

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Finding our Tribes

April 6, 2010, 12.15 pm

Whew! So we got back from Eastercon last night...and we'll be moving house tomorrow. Eep! I am very glad we decided to move after Eastercon instead of before...but all the same, the move is feeling pretty intimidating right now. Last night I was lying in bed reminding myself that for better or worse, at least it will be over soon. *Gulp.*

Eastercon, though, was FABULOUS. As we drove toward the Heathrow airport hotel where it was being held, I told MrD, "We're going to hang out with our people!" And that's exactly how it felt, how cons almost always feel to me: the chance to hang out with my tribe, smart, passionate people who love books and imagination and creativity just as much as I do. (I've only had the chance to do this so far at SF/fantasy conventions, but I'm betting that YA lit conventions and romance conventions probably have a very similar vibe in that regard.)

It's like getting to breathe out that little bit of tension that usually rests in my shoulders as I move around the world, interacting with people who don't think books are that important (especially fantasy novels), who have different priorities than I do, and with whom I generally hold back a lot of what I really feel, so that I can fit in. That was a lesson I learned as a kid - how to fake "normal" cultural interests in social situations - and it's an important lesson to absorb if you want to have a pleasant day-to-day life. But it is an incredible gift to be able to meet up with your tribe and be surrounded by people who have the same priorities and passions you do, and who don't think there's anything odd about them.

(And can I say for the millionth time how glad I am to be married to a guy just as geeky as I am? This was the first time Patrick and I haven't been able to really hang out as a couple at the con, because we had to take turns chasing after our very active toddler [MrD had a GREAT time at the con]]...but oh, was I glad to be coming home afterward with a guy who understands and shares my world.)

Since we got back, I've been reading testimonials from YA authors all across the internet to what it was like to be bullied as a kid, as part of Carrie Jones's wonderful YA Authors Against Bullying group. They're all intense and heartbreaking. (Here's just one example, from author Saundra Mitchell.) I only ever faced mild bullying as a teen, but I had friends and relatives who suffered horribly.

I wish I could say to every kid: it really will get better. K-12 schooling is, in so many ways, the worst part of many of our lives. It's like Lord of the Flies in a way I've never, ever witnessed since high school graduation. As author Judy Blume has pointed out, if you were ever in an adult work situation where things like that happened, where you were harassed and hurt and frightened on a daily basis, you would eventually quit and LEAVE - but kids aren't allowed that escape. More than that, if someone seriously harassed you or physically hurt you as an adult, you could report them to the police for stalking/physical assault. If you're a kid, though, that's just considered "normal" - a fact of everyday life that you're just expected to live with. No wonder so many kids lose hope.

I hated school. But then I graduated, and the world suddenly got so much bigger. College felt like a revelation - someplace I could meet other people who actually thought like me, people who really liked me for who I was, not just the façade I could put on for social blending. And when I started to meet other writers and to go to cons...oh, wow. I found my tribe in every way.

I want everybody to have the chance to find their tribe in life.

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Book Moods and Stuffed Dinosaurs

March 30, 2010, 4.02 pm

Whew. I sent off my UK copyedits for A Most Improper Magick yesterday morning, which meant...drum-roll...it was time to go back to my dragon novel! Or, well, not quite...because poor MrD was still sick, AND we had a (very cool, beloved, and exciting) houseguest arriving that night, so yesterday was be a mix of doctor's appointments, housecleaning, and cuddling/nose-wiping.

Times like these, there are very specific kinds of books I want to read. Across the sleepless weekend (which was completely consumed by sick baby + copyedits), I re-read Nick Hornby's The Complete Polysyllabic Spree, and it was perfect - a collection of bite-sized columns he wrote about the books he was reading. Each of the columns was funny (I laughed out loud many times and insisted on reading several bits out loud to Patrick), each was very smart, I made notes of several new-to-me books to pick up based on his discussions of them...and best of all, each column was only about 6 pages long. That's ideal for a period when I might only get 10-minute chunks of time to read anything in between trips upstairs to re-settle MrD back into sleep. (Sunday night, I was getting an average of 7 minutes off in between each re-settling, and if I hadn't had the Nick Hornby - if I'd actually been trying to focus on a long, connected storyline - I might have just gone crazy.)

Today, thank goodness, after 24 hours of antibiotics, MrD is finally starting to feel better, so life is gradually resettling itself into normal rhythms. I had a full-length writing session AND a shopping session in town, which would have been even better if it hadn't been in the middle of a rainstorm. Still, on top of all the boring necessities I bought, MrD also got a stuffed triceratops, Maya got a squeaky stuffed lemming, and I got a vegan brownie, so it was all worthwhile. ;)

Now our houseguest is reading Carrie Jones's Need (I love having houseguests and getting to force my book recommendations on them! ;) ), Patrick is working on revising, and MrD is (gasp!) actually napping...so I'm going to pick up a new book to read. And it will be a novel this time, not an essay collection, but it will be one with a happy ending, because I'm still too tired for tragedy.

What kinds of books are you guys in the mood for today?

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Good friends and good books

March 23, 2010, 9.46 pm

This morning was a GREAT morning, because Tricia Sullivan drove down to visit! As well as being an awesome writer, Tricia is also an American living in the UK, which is how we first connected (as well as by having a wonderful mutual friend, Justina Robson, and - more recently - having become agency-mates). We've done lots of emailing and some skyping since we first met online, but it was so fabulous to finally get to hang out in person.

It also made me realize how much I've missed hanging out with other writers since we moved down south. Of course there must be lots of writers living in Wales and the south of England, but we don't actually know many of them personally, so this was the first time in about 6 months that Patrick and I have actually gotten to hang out and talk writing/publishing/etc. with another writer in person. It was so fabulous - especially since we got to talk parenting, too! (The perfect combination of topics for me right now. :) )

I was so thrilled that she was willing to drive the 2 hours to hang out - even though we failed on our organization and didn't have vegan brownies waiting for her after all! Oops. Next time, I promise!

Since we spent a lot of time talking about books, it reminded me that I haven't talked much on this blog about the books I've been reading recently. So here's a quick round-up of my favorites over the last month or so:

Orange, Mint, and Honey by Carleen Brice

Shay Dixon is forced to go home to her alcoholic mother for the first time in years when she has a breakdown in grad school and starts seeing the ghost of Nina Simone. Her mother has gone through AA and changed her life...but is it too late to change their relationship? This book (although adult rather than YA) reminded me of Sarah Dessen's novels in the best possible way. In other words, it was really lovely, full of real emotion, complicated relationships, and wonderful, strong female characters. I loved it! :)

Hearts at Stake, by Alyxandra Harvey (aka, My Love Lies Bleeding in the UK)

This one is packaged in the UK to look dark and angsty and very Twilight-y...which is so, so wrong for the book. I like the American title and cover much better, because they convey the real spirit of the novel, a wonderfully funny and action-filled double-romantic comedy starring two best friends...one of whom happens to be a vampire.

Both of the romances in this book are sweet and cute (I especially loved the Beatrice-and-Benedict-style sparring between snarky human Lucy and vampire Nicholas), but the real foundation of the book is the rock-solid friendship between Lucy and Solange, both of whom are strong and smart and funny. A sparkling romantic comedy-adventure that just happens to include vampires and sword-fighting...oh, yeah. I absolutely loved it, and can't wait to read the next book in the series, starring another of Solange's brothers.

The 10 P.M. Question, by Kate de Goldi

This was one of the ARCs in my goodie bag from Templar Books (my UK publishers), and wow, do I feel lucky for getting to read it early. (Well, relatively early, anyway - it was published in New Zealand and Australia a few years ago.) Frankie Parsons is a 12-year-old in a quirky, lovable, and deeply eccentric family with one big fault line running through it...something that no one ever, ever talks about until a new girl shows up at his school and starts asking questions. This one was really funny, sweet, and sad (it made me cry at one point), and I really, really loved it.

What about you guys? What books have you loved recently?

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Craziness, Chocolate, and a free Kat Sample

March 18, 2010, 9.54 pm

Sigh. Still no news from either our future estate agents (to let us know whether we've been approved for the new house, and exactly what date in April we can move in) or our current landlord (to let us know whether we can stay until then, even though our contract runs out next Sunday).

Thank goodness for chocolate chip cookies. I baked half a batch on Sunday and the other half on Tuesday, and that spread-out chocolatey goodness has been absolutely crucial for maintaining sanity across the week. (I used this recipe for vegan chocolate chip cookies, which was okay - I especially liked the cinnamon in it - but I'm still looking for a better recipe. Which of course requires serious scientific experimentation - but luckily, Patrick and I are both very happy to put our stomachs to work for the cause of Science... ;p )

In better news, the Templar Books website shows the British edition of A Most Improper Magick available online for preorder, hurray! - AND, no matter where in the world you are, you can download the free sample they've posted from the middle of Chapter Two. (Click on "download a sampler" in the top-left corner of the book's page.) Hope you guys enjoy the teaser!*

(And btw, the cover posted on that webpage won't be the final UK cover - it's just a holding cover while they work on the final version. But I do think it's cute!)

Now I'm going offline to close my eyes and listen to more of Carrie Jones's Captivate audiobook. Pixies and valkyries and Valhalla, oh my! So much fun. :)

___

*And of course you can read all of Chapter One on my website

.

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Bad Week, Cheer-Ups

March 11, 2010, 11.15 am

I try to keep this journal upbeat, but the truth is, this has been a very bad week, mostly for health reasons. The CFS has been a real pain all week, and I'm not even sure why. (This is one of the frustrating things with CFS - you learn how to manage it, how to carefully balance activity and rest, and then, suddenly and unexpectedly, it goes haywire anyway. What a cheat!)

So I haven't been doing as much writing as I wanted to do, and I'm way, way behind on emails (even more so than usual). Sorry!!!

On the other hand, here are some things that have cheered me up this week, and I'm really hoping you guys can suggest some more things for me to check out while I wait out this crash.

1. I am incredibly proud of my brother Ben, who is now officially known as Dr. Burgis! (Ten years ago, I didn't know a single Dr. Burgis. Now there are two of them in my immediate family, and within a few years, there will be three. It's pretty incredible. But I rely on my youngest brother to keep me from being the only non-PhD in the family...okay, Dave??? ;p )

Seriously: congratulations!!! I am so proud of my little brother. (Who is now, of course, about a foot taller than me. But whatever!) And here is the great webcomic one of Ben's friends drew to express the terror of an oral PhD defense, which made me laugh a lot.

2. My glittery dragon stickers arrived! I had so much fun arranging them on my moleskine for the new novel. Inspiration + laughter = perfect. :)

3. Before the big crash hit, I managed to get halfway through Chapter 2 of the dragon novel, and it's making me really, really happy. I can't wait to get back to it!

4. Ying Lee's first book, The Agency: A Spy in the House just had its North American debut! I love this book, and burbled about it last year when it debuted in the UK. Ying is the first novelist I ever wrote a fan letter to, because I was so excited when I finished reading her book. Girl spies in Victorian England! Disguises, mystery and intrigue! A perfectly-toned romance! A genuinely unexpected family secret, a whole host of strong, interesting women, and a completely non-stereotypical view of the Chinese community in Victorian England!

So, so cool. You can read an excerpt on Ying's website.

What about you guys? What's been cheering you up this week?

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Life Interruptions and a Call for Help

February 6, 2010, 5.45 pm

Poor MrD has been sick the last few days (nothing dangerous, just the usual kind of baby virus), so life has pretty much ground to a halt...between sheer exhaustion on all our parts, a cranky, sad toddler who needs full-on cuddles and attention, and the usual round of paranoid (and mostly unfounded) parent fears, I've been feeling lucky to manage 600 words a day. So in other words, Kat3 is Still Not Done (I feel like Aragorn: Still not King!)...which is kind of frustrating but also kind of a relief.

It's a weird feeling, coming to the end of a trilogy. On the one hand, part of me feels furiously impatient: I want to FINISH this book, I'm SO CLOSE to the end now! But on the other hand, I genuinely have to fight down tears when I think about how soon I'm going to be done writing this series. I love Kat SO much. I love her sisters and her brother so much. I love writing about them all so, so much - I can't bear the idea of saying goodbye!

So far, the only thing that's worked to cheer me up is thinking about my next book. I don't want to go into too much public detail yet in case it doesn't work out, but I had an idea several months ago that's gotten more and more compelling to me. It's a really scary idea to contemplate, though, because it's set in a time period I don't know much about - 1930s America. (If ONLY it could be set in 1930s Britain - I know so much about that setting! That would be easy! But no, this one insists on being America.) So: major research time!

I don't know how other historical writers work, but for me, the three things that help the most are letters/diaries, biographies, and novels from the time period. Of course, general history books are useful and important, too, but they don't work as well for personal inspiration. So, for the Kat novels, I read a ton of biographies of women from the right time period (especially Jane Austen, since I was basing Kat's own general family situation - her father a clergyman who used to be a Fellow at Oxford and now takes in male students for tutoring; lots of siblings; not much money - on Jane Austen's own upbringing), read Jane Austen's and Fanny Burney's letters voraciously, and of course re-read Austen's novels, especially Northanger Abbey.

As far as the 1930s goes, I grew up obsessed with 30s screwball comedy movies, which are a great start, since I want this to be a screwball comedy of a novel. I've started reading nonfiction books about Hollywood in the 30s and biographies of different film stars from the period. But what about novels from the period? There, I'm drawing a huge blank. All the American 30s novels I can think of - Grapes of Wrath, etc. - are excellent books but massively depressing, which is exactly the wrong mood for my novel.

If I were setting this in England in the 30s, I'd be re-reading Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Stella Gibbons, Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh...so many great options! But I really don't know where to get started with the American 1930s. Can you guys think of any genuinely *fun* American novels from the 30s? Ideally, they'd be funny, but at the very least, they shouldn't be depressing.

I'd be so grateful for any recommendations. Help!

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Serendipity, Turtle Steps, and Modified Success

January 31, 2010, 4.30 pm

Serendipity can be a funny thing. This week I've been re-reading Martha Beck's (wonderful) life/career guidance book, Finding Your Own North Star, for the umpteenth time, and this time, like every other time I've read it, I've come across various bits that are newly helpful for this particular point in my life. But it's never happened with quite such spookily perfect timing, before.

I've been reading it pretty slowly, because it's my book for reading while I settle or re-settle MrD into his naps. Yesterday, when I went upstairs to settle him down into a nap (my main writing time, btw, comes while he sleeps), I was at a point of total writer's block and absolute panic about the whole thing. Kat3 had been progressing so, so well lately...but then, just as I hit the beginning of the final, climactic showdown between Kat and the Big Bad, I froze up completely. Mostly, I think this is just because it really hit me that, OMG, this is the climax to the final book in the trilogy - it has to be REALLY GOOD!

And that has to be the least helpful message to hear screaming in the back of your head as you sit down to write a difficult scene...

So in other words, I was totally stuck, to the point where on Friday I hadn't managed to write at all, and Saturday I was convinced I wouldn't get anything done either (and maybe I just COULDN'T FINISH this novel at all, OMGOMGOMG!!!!!). But then, as I got MrD to sleep, I hit the point in Finding Your Own North Star where Martha Beck talks about how to get yourself to do something you REALLY don't want to do, something that's been looming over you so intimidatingly that you've completely panicked and turned to avoidance instead of even trying. (She used writing her PhD thesis as her example.)

She gave lots of different strategies for getting going, but the two that stood out to me were turtle steps - picking very, very tiny daily goals, SO tiny that they feel manageable even at your most panicked - and Do it badly! - which means, let go of the need to do it perfectly (or even well). Just DO IT, and if you're doing it badly, at least that's better than not doing it at all.

I had been reading fairly casually up until that point. But those points really, really resonated with me. I stopped reading. I started thinking. MrD went to sleep...and I went downstairs, chose a daily writing goal of 300 words (rather than the 1000 I'd been trying for before), and sat down just to write a rough draft, no matter HOW rough that turned out to be, and not to let myself worry about quality, just to get the words down...and I ended up writing 1200 words that actually made me really happy AND set the whole showdown in motion, making the whole rest of the novel so much easier to write.

WHEW.

So. My original goal was to finish Kat3, which I'd expected to be 70,000 words long, by the end of today. I'm pretty sure - well, no, I'm positive - that that is just not going to happen. On the other hand, in today's writing session, I passed the 70,000 word mark, and I liked what I had written. I've got less than 10,000 words to go, and I'm having fun.

So...for once, I don't feel too bad about not hitting one of my own goals. And even if I have to turtle my way through the rest of the book, I think that'll be okay after all.

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Tea, Werewolves, and Social Whirls

January 27, 2010, 7.12 pm

I am LOVING all the food requests at <a href="http://lisamantchev.livejournal.com/340771.html">the online ARC tea party</a>. OK, it's become obvious that I have TOTALLY different taste in desserts than many people - but that's fun, too! And mostly, I just love that so many people are playing along. :)

(And FWIW, I personally believe that traditional cream teas are the most blissful culinary experience EVER. I grew up reading Elizabeth Peters/Barbara Michaels novels where American heroines go to England and get teased by the hero for going SO INSANE over the cream teas...and guess what? They were totally right.) (In both respects, actually. Unlike me, Patrick is not a cream tea fan, possibly because cream is not vegan.)

In other news, remember the urban werewolf anthology I talked about, the one that's going to publish my story "Locked Doors"? The editor, Ekaterina Sedia, has just posted the Table of Contents, and it looks awesome. Now I'm even more excited about it!

And this week we are being astonishingly social, since some wonderful friends have come into town. No, this doesn't mingle well with my plan to finish Kat Book 3 by this Sunday...but it has been really wonderful and fun, especially after our last month of being hermits in our writing cave. I did have one moment where I wondered whether I should stay home and write instead of hanging out...and then I thought, Are you CRAZY, woman?! Because our friends are only here for four days, and this is, after all, a self-imposed deadline. All the same, I'm sneaking in 500 words here and there every day, so the end is getting closer...and closer...

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Poe's birthday, and my first sale

January 19, 2010, 7.15 pm

It's Edgar Allan Poe's birthday today. Hooray! I loooooved Edgar Allan Poe's stories when I was a kid. I can still remember turning off the light in my bedroom, closing the curtains and curling up in the dark with a flashlight to re-read "The Tell-Tale Heart" in the perfect ambience and be deliciously creeped out. I've always been a wimp with a weak stomach for horror (and oh, the embarrassment that caused over the years - I VIVIDLY remember the shame of having to walk out of my class's viewing of "Poltergeist" in 8th grade!) - but Poe always worked for me beautifully.

And I have a special, added fondness for Poe because he was responsible for my first short story sale. When I was 15, my English teacher assigned us to all write short stories in the style of Poe. Well. I LEAPED on that assignment! I had so much fun writing my big, Gothic, Poe-styled story, "La Maison Cherbignac"...and then, incredibly and mind-blowingly, I actually sold it to Merlyn's Pen (a magazine edited by adults but written by teens)! (I also got my first taste of what professional writing really feels like, since the first phone call I got was to ask me for revisions. If I revised well enough, they would buy the story...so that was my first experience of frantic and passionate revision for a sale!)

By the time I was 15, I had dreamed for years of being a professional writer. Making that first sale, when I found out that my revision had actually been accepted...oh, it felt like pure bliss. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me.

Unfortunately, adults running kid-written magazines aren't always ethical, and I've ended up feeling pretty unhappy about the way Merlyn's Pen used the story in later years, especially after they bought the copyright from me (something I should never have sold - if any 15-year-olds read this, please remember that lesson!). But the sheer joy of that sale - that first moment when I thought Maybe my dream will come true, after all - will stay with me forever. And for that, I will always be grateful.

Happy birthday, Edgar Allan Poe!

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Giving thanks

January 12, 2010, 4.50 pm

Today I did something that was new for me. I sat down and wrote an email to an incredibly successful author I've never met, thanking her for the books she's written, and telling her what a difference they've made in my life.

I've written (rarely) to short story authors before to say how much I loved a short story I'd just read; once, I even wrote to another novelist to say how much I enjoyed her wonderful first novel, which had just come out. (It turned out that she's also really fun and nice, as well as a great writer, and we'll probably be doing an event together in Toronto this spring. Wow, am I glad I wrote that letter!)

But I've never written to a big-name author before, someone I've been reading since I was a kid. Somehow I always subconsciously assumed that it would be a presumption to write to someone like that; that it would be pushy or irritating for me to tell them how much their books have meant to me.

Well. This is crazy, as a couple of things recently have made me realize.

First, I got my first piece of fanmail a few months ago, from a smart, sweet twelve-year-old girl, and it made me happier than I can express. Seriously, I don't know how long it took her to write that email, but I have re-read it SO many times, and just thinking back to it makes me feel like dancing. This book I wrote isn't just going out into the aether - it spoke to exactly the kind of reader I'd imagined when I wrote it, and then she wrote to tell me how much she loved it. What magic! And what a huge reassurance!

Then, in an episode of synchronicity, I started seeing reminders everywhere across the internet that - duh - it's not just me: most authors love to hear that their books have made a difference. Yes, it really would be pushy and presumptuous to write to a busy author and ask them to do something for you; but it's a genuinely nice thing to write and thank them for what their books have done for you already.

What about you guys? Have you ever written to your favorite authors to say how much you love your work? Or, if you don't dare do it yet - or if the authors you feel most grateful to aren't alive anymore to hear it - who would you really like to thank?

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Happy Thursday

January 7, 2010, 4.58 pm

It's been a bad last few days for many reasons, foremost among them that MrD has been sick. Nothing dangerous or unusual - just a normal combination of winter illnesses for toddlers - but as I'm rapidly learning, any time my baby is sick, life pretty much grinds to a halt until it's over. I didn't quite give up writing in the past few days, but my wordcount shrank very, very low, and for once, I couldn't make myself regret it. When my baby's sick, looking after him - and decompressing while he sleeps - really does cancel out all my other priorities.

But! Today the whole world is shiny and happy because he's feeling better. Yayyyyy! Everything feels happier and lighter now, and all my goals suddenly sound so much more do-able. So I thought I'd list some of the things that are making me particularly happy today:

1. For the first time since I moved to the UK 8-1/2 years ago, we have what I would call a real winter snowfall. We've got 4 inches in our little Welsh town, and Maya goes mad with joy every time we let her out. She does high bunny-hops through the drifts, bites off snowballs and even throws them for herself! Watching her makes me laugh and laugh and feel pure happiness. (Plus, snow just inherently makes me happy, even here in the UK where it also makes things deeply inconvenient, since there's no real set-up for dealing with it, and therefore the trains stop running, many of the roads don't get salted, etc., etc. I don't care! It's snow, and it feels like magic every single time I step outside.)

2. My friend Aliette's first book is being published in the UK and Australia TODAY, and I can't wait to read it. (I pre-ordered my copy from Amazon, and it still hasn't been dispatched. GRR. But still: book birthday!)

Aliette is a fabulous writer (she was nominated for the Campbell award for best new SF/F writer last year!), and this book sounds absolutely awesome - a smart, dark, historical fantasy/mystery for adults set in the Aztec empire. It won't be published in the US until September, but you can order it from Amazon.co.uk - it's a paperback, so not too expensive to buy internationally. (You can also order it from The Book Depository for free, world-wide shipping as soon as it's back in stock - it seems to have sold out there at the moment.)

You can go congratulate Aliette here, and you can also read the first three chapters of Servant of the Underworld on the blog My Favourite Books. (I probably would have bought the book even without this, because I have faith in Aliette's writing in any genre - but then I read Chapter One and pre-ordered immediately afterwards! :) Yay Aliette! Congratulations!

3. I just made a new short story sale! The story is called "Speaking English", and it's a YA ghost story about Croatian immigrants to America. It sold to an Australian anthology, Belong (an anthology of spec-fic stories about immigration), which is due to come out in April. So now I have even more reasons to look forward to that month!

4. And finally, reading the comments on the interview Ivana Mariç posted with me yesterday made me really, really happy. I can't even begin to express how amazing it feels to hear people I don't even know saying that they're looking forward to my book. That really is magic - there's no other word for it.

What about you guys? What's making you happy this week?

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TV disappointment, present gloating, and free Christmas gifts

December 27, 2009, 6.24 pm

Aaaand life slowly goes back to normal. It was a really lovely Christmas, with lots of great presents, even better company, and yummy food. The one disappointment was - without giving any spoilers - how disappointed I was by the Dr. Who Christmas special. The Christmas specials have never been as good as the regular show, but I thought this one was actually depressingly bad. On the other hand, Patrick didn't dislike it as much as I did, so who knows? It's a subjective thing.

I'm tempted to babble at length about my own presents, because I love them all (I'm just in the middle of reading one of them, M.T. Anderson's Whales on Stilts, which is hilarious, and as I type, I'm listening to another of them, Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone, which is gorgeous)...but after that brief hiccup (oops), I'm going to stop myself, because it just feels like gloating. (Of course, I spent all of Christmas and Boxing Day gloating shamelessly over my stack of presents, stroking them like a dragon would stroke new additions to her hoard of gold, but Boxing Day is over now and it's time to get mature about things.) So instead, I'm going to move on to Christmas presents that other people can share.

So first off: Maureen Johnson is giving away e-books of her awesomely stylish and funny YA novel Suite Scarlett. I own a paper copy of this book and enjoyed it an awful lot, and now I'm planning to download an e-copy so I can carry it around with me on my iTouch. Enjoy (and make sure you download it before January 15th, when the offer ends)!

And secondly, Karen Healey wrote a wonderful, funny, magical Christmas story this year, which you can read on her website: Queen of the Kitchen. I loved it, and I hope you guys do, too! (And if you like it, make sure to look out for her YA fantasy novel, also set in New Zealand, which is coming out this spring: Guardian of the Dead. It's darker than the short story, but equally wonderful, and Karen and I are going to share a launch party at WisCon.)

What about you guys? What were your favorite gifts this Christmas? Or, if you didn't celebrate Christmas, what books or CDs have you been enjoying recently?

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Competition Winners, Good Books, and Good News

December 22, 2009, 12.37 pm

Thanks so much to everyone who entered my ARC giveaway! There were 126 entries, and I really wish I could give an ARC to every single person who entered. Since I couldn't, I used an online random number generator to pick the winner and the two runners up, and this is what it chose:

The two runners up are: @elledisney and Lisa Voisin

and the ARC winner is: Kaylynn of Kay Darling Reviews

Yay Kaylynn, Elle, and Lisa! If you send me your mailing address (using the contact form on my website), I'll put your packages in the mail.

And for everybody else who entered: I've got four more ARCs still waiting in my desk, and I'm planning to give away one a month here on the blog for the next four months. So you will definitely have more chances to win!

***

In other news, I just finished reading Kristin Cashore's Fire, and WOW. It completely blew me away. I'd really, really liked and admired her first book, Graceling, but for me, Fire resonated much more strongly, and I absolutely loved it. It really was one of the best coming-of-age novels I've ever read in any genre, and it immediately became one of my favorite fantasy novels ever (which is saying an awful lot).

I really wish I'd been able to read it as a teen, when I honestly needed a book like that in many ways...but I'm very glad that at least I can read it now. The copy I read belonged to my local library, but I'll definitely be buying my own copy very soon for lots and lots of re-readings. It's one of those books that manages to tackle really difficult, painful subjects, like grief and terrible injustice, and yet still feel like a pure pleasure to read - and that is really impressive.

It's been a good day in lots of ways, actually. In a true Christmas miracle, it actually snowed yesterday (snow! before Christmas! in the UK! is that even allowed?), and even more incredibly, it hasn't melted yet. I'm hoping with all my heart that it will stay for Christmas. Today my computer is being shipped back to me from Apple - knock on wood that it will work this time! And this afternoon I'm off to pick up my new pair of glasses, so I'll actually have a pair that doesn't hang at weird angles off my face. Total decadent luxury! ;)

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Today's journal entry

November 26, 2009, 4.06 pm

...is actually over at SFNovelists.com: A Literary Thanksgiving.

Today I'm talking about the writers who make me want to write. If you have time, I hope you'll stop by (and comment with a few of your own favorites)!

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Traumatic shots and comfort reads

November 25, 2009, 2.49 pm

Oh dear.

29 years ago, when I was 3-1/2 years old, my little brother got his MMR vaccination shots...and I went into flailing hysterics on the floor of the doctor's office, so horrified and upset on my little brother's behalf (because I KNEW how much those needles hurt!) that I just couldn't cope.

So you can imagine how I felt this morning when MrD had his shots. At least I managed to control myself, this time. I didn't cry, and I didn't kick the floor or pound my fists on it as I sobbed. But I really, really wanted to.

***

It's been a glum few days, here in Wales. The endless rain is starting to feel nigh-on apocalyptic, and when you combine that with pure exhaustion (the return of the dreading Teething monster, eating all our nights)...well, glum and grim are both good words to use.

Luckily, last night I found exactly the right book to brighten my mood: Sherwood Smith's Once a Princess (Book I in her Sasharia en Garde! duology). Swordfights! Pirates! Witty banter! Romance! And a truly awesome mother-daughter team. Now I'm midway through the novel and feeling so much better about everything.

I bought this one as an e-book to read on my iTouch for the sake of speed (I needed a comfort read STAT! no time to waste ordering a copy from Amazon!), but I think I might have to buy myself a print copy, too, for easier re-reading in the future. And Book 2 will definitely be a print purchase for me. For some reason, e-books feel like disposable reads to me, maybe because they're so easy to delete, or maybe because they're dependent on computers, and I've lost sooooooo many files to dead computers in the past.

What about you guys? When you love a book, would you rather have it in print for comfort or on an e-reader for the sake of easy portability and having it with you ALL the time?

__

And a quick PS: don't forget, 5 more days to enter my Thanksgiving giveaway! Joan Bauer's Squashed is one of my favorite comfort books ever. Good luck!

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Forests and Books

November 16, 2009, 12.31 pm

I have the coolest husband in the world. Yesterday, Patrick gathered up me and Maya and MrD and drove out of town. He didn't tell me where we were going. We talked happily in the car - I always love going out for day trips, and I was even happier because this one had the buzz of real adventure. And when I'm a passenger, I specifically love car trips into the unknown.

We drove across the English border, then through England for a while. We drove past rivers and down rumbly dirt roads under low-hanging trees. And we finally ended up in the Forest of Dean, a beautiful old forest I'd never visited before with tons of dramatic viewing points over valleys and gorges. I LOVE forests - my second full-length novel (written when I was 16, which is why you'll never see it published!) was even set completely in a forest because I'm so obsessed with them. Just walking under old trees fills me with a sense of peace and happiness.

(You should have seen me when we visited Sherwood Forest a few years ago - it's an old, old forest AND the site of so many childhood fantasies! I could barely talk, I was so blissed out.)

I'm not going to post any photos from the Forest of Dean today, because I know Patrick's planning to post his own entry about it soon. But I will just say again how happy I am that he knows me so well. :) I had a really, really wonderful time.

***

I've been meaning for a long time to talk about two different YA novels I've read recently. They're each VERY different from each other, actually, but both so good that I wanted to point them both out.

Ice, by Sarah Beth Durst: I bought this one based on the excerpt I read on Sarah's website, and oh, I am so glad I did. I devoured the whole book in one evening!

Of course, I've always loved the fairy tale "East of the Sun, West of the Moon" (I even did my own retelling of it a few years ago in my story "By the Light of the Dark"), but that actually made me a little wary of this book before I read it. When I love a fairy tale so much, sometimes it's hard to read other people's versions of it! But this one was just wonderful.

Ice starts out on an Arctic research station, where 18-year-old Cassie has grown up preparing to be a scientist. The shift from gritty Arctic realism to the dazzling magic of the Polar Bear king's palace is just perfectly handled, and oh, I loved Cassie's very modern reactions to the king's fairy tale expectations. Their relationship was perfectly drawn, the developing romance was just right...and the final adventure, as Cassie combines her scientific know-how and intelligence with her growing understanding of how magic really works, was so much fun. I loved how fierce and strong she was, and this book was just a joy to read. Really, really fun and recommended!

The Snowball Effect, by Holly Nicole Hoxter: I was lucky enough to win an ARC of this from Holly (one of my fellow Tenners). Wow, is it different from Ice - but also so, so good. This one reminded me of a darker version of a Sarah Dessen novel, and some parts of it were so painful to read that I had to take time away and read the novel in slow bites...but again, I am so glad I did.

Lainey Pike's family is truly broken. Her dad's out of the picture, her stepdad died recently, and her mother, who always suffered from depression, has just committed suicide in the family's basement, just after Lainey's high school graduation. Now Lainey and her estranged older half-sister are suddenly left to look after their five-year-old adopted brother, who has major emotional and behavioral issues. Lainey's never had a protected childhood, and now she's expected to take on a parent's responsibility for a brother who has never felt truly part of her family anyway...and all while grieving (and raging) over her mother's voluntary death. Lainey has a supportive boyfriend, but she feels suffocated even by him and by the way the rest of her life has been forced onto her.

Lainey and the other characters feel utterly real, and her anger and fear and frustration are palpable and completely understandable. She makes a lot of really questionable decisions as she flails around, trying to find her way, but every single one of them felt true to her character, even when they led her into even worse situations. This was often a hard book for me to read, but it was absolutely emotionally truthful, and it had a hard-won hope to it in the end.

***

What about you guys? What books have really stood out to you lately? I'm always looking for reading suggestions!

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Treats?

November 2, 2009, 6.41 pm

This last week has been full of lots of good things, but it's been an awfully tired week for me, as I've been slammed with post-move exhaustion at the same time as a new phase of teething has hit poor MrD. So even though lots of good things have been going on, I've been feeling kind of bleagh.

Being me, of course, my natural solution to any dilemma, no matter how large or small, is: read a book! ;) Luckily, this time my favorite strategy has actually been working. Right now I'm reading Martha Beck's The Joy Diet: 10 Daily Practices for a Happier Life, and even though I'm a little wary of most self-help books, this one is turning out to be incredibly smart about an awful lot of things. (Her earlier book Finding Your Own North Star is the best career book I've ever read, which is why I gave this book a try.) One of the points that really resonated for me was this:

Our deepest pleasure doesn't come from total lethargy and ease. It comes from experiences that both interest and challenge us. [...] Menu Item #7 shifts your focus from dreading and avoiding difficulty to finding the sort of difficulty you can love, and making sure you don't take it too seriously.

This is so true, at least for me. When I came down with CFS several years ago, I had several well-meaning but clueless people say to me, "Oh, you're so lucky - you can just spend all day doing nothing."

Well...no. Before I had CFS, when I was working a demanding fulltime job and trying to write novels, work on a PhD thesis, and still have some semblance of a family life, I used to think yearningly about doing nothing...but the joy of doing nothing only lasts for so long. After a certain point, it becomes excruciatingly boring. Life begins to feel horribly empty unless you can find a way to fill it with interesting challenges even when you're lying on a couch...which is, of course, one of the many reasons I'm grateful to be a writer, someone who can do their work even while lying down in their own living room.

But she's so right, too, about not letting yourself take your challenges too seriously, because that is absolutely the kiss of death for productive creativity, and something I've been really struggling with ever since I signed the three-book contract. It can be astonishingly hard to remember how much fun something is when you're getting paid to do it! All the neuroses suddenly leap in - Oh, no, I have to take this seriously now... BAD idea.

Anyway, one of the other points in The Joy Diet is that everyone should give themselves several treats a day. Not the kind of generic treats everyone in the world is expected to enjoy (luxurious massages, etc.) but individual treats designed specifically around the kinds of ordinary things that make you smile spontaneously when you're doing or having them.

It's an interesting way of thinking about treats, and when I thought about them that way - what makes me smile? - I came up with a completely different list than I would have otherwise. Here's the list of some of my personal favorite treats, all of which I gave myself yesterday:

• Playing music: not listening to a CD, but actually making music myself, which is one of the biggest joys I know, and one I haven't indulged in for over a year. I pulled out my beautiful alto recorder yesterday afternoon and enjoyed it so, so much. I only played it for about ten minutes, but they were ten minutes that left me feeling loose and happy and wondering why on earth I had ever let that habit disappear from my life.
• Playing with MrD: not just looking after him, but really whole-heartedly throwing myself into a real and protracted play session with him. I can't remember the last time I laughed so much and felt so perfectly happy.
• Writing more of Kat 3. This is one of those things I usually call "work"; in fact, when the CFS arrived in my life and I had to give up my dayjob, it was incredibly important to me to call my fiction writing work, because it meant that I was still doing something productive and important. But after reading Martha Beck's book and thinking about it, I remembered that really, writing fiction is supposed to be play - and last night after MrD went to bed, although I'd seriously planned to take the day off and didn't expect myself to write anything, I surprised myself by having the most joyful and productive writing session in ages, doing it just for fun and enjoying it wholeheartedly. Even after I went to bed, I lay awake beaming into the dark as I thought about the scene I'd written and how much fun I'd had with it.

What about you guys? What would you define as your personal treats?

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A long whine and a brief Hollywood touch

October 13, 2009, 10.39 pm

OK, it was bad this morning when Yahoo! mail ate an email I'd just finished writing to a good friend (after having written it over the course of two days, because I have so little time to write email right now). But when I actually burst into tears at the loss...well, yeah. That was a pretty clear sign, even to me, that I'm feeling a wee bit high-strung at the moment.

Writing, as the parent of a baby, has turned out to be an exercise in ruthless prioritizing. I have a toddler who's bright, active and curious and needs non-stop supervision while he's awake (which is almost always); I have a novel that needs to be written. Because I want to do my best by both of these (very, very wonderful) creatures who need me, I barely ever watch DVDs anymore, or do almost any of the other things I used to do to relax. That's fine; it's completely my choice, and it's more than worth it. Getting ready to move, though, has taken self-discipline to a whole new level.

I haven't just had to give up DVDs and the BBC iPlayer; to get my novel written as well as parenting, getting the crammed-full-of-junk house sorted out, AND getting all the associated errands taken care of (changing our address with various different authorities, etc., etc)...well, in the end, I just feel like there are a thousand things I SHOULD be getting done every day, and no matter how many I actually do, I always, always feel overwhelmed and behind. Which leads to stress and anxiety and bursting into tears when I finally manage to write a long-overdue email to a friend and silly Yahoo eats it. Sigh.

Whine, whine, whine. ;) Aren't you guys looking forward to next Tuesday, when we'll be settled in Wales? I know I sure am. And I'm very grateful to have this sounding-board for my whining. After next Tuesday - knock on wood! - I should have time to start writing real emails again, and my anxiety levels should go way down. In the meantime, though, it's important for me to keep up with this blog, so that at least I can send up smoke signals to my friends: Hey! I'm still here, even though I'm not answering my emails! I still love you guys, really!

In better news, though, I am still reading, albeit slower than usual, and what I'm reading is awfully fun: Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis, by Ed Sikov. It's a really entertaining biography that's making me want to watch Bette Davis's films (as well as making me realize, with some embarrassment, that I've never seen ANY of them); and it's giving me just the right spice of classic Hollywood glamor/cattiness to offset my moving gloom. Take, as an example, the Bette quote on the back of the book:

The laaaaaast movie I made with Joan Crawford was Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? I played Baby Jane, and Joan Crawford played...whatever.

SO much fun.

Kat 3 Wordmeter

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Bullet Points Galore

October 9, 2009, 9.45 pm

I've been saving up points for a blog entry for SO long now, I think bullet points are the only way to handle it! Otherwise I might just explode trying to link them all neatly together. ;)

• This morning several wonderful people emailed me different articles about the most positive and important medical discovery about CFS/ME that's ever been made, to my knowledge. The physical virus that causes the syndrome may have been isolated; if this theory turns out to be correct, even though the syndrome will still be lifelong and incurable, there will actually be *possible treatments* - something that's been completely impossible until now. This is so incredible, it's...well, there really aren't words for how wonderful it would be. But as I read the end of this article, I found myself chanting under my breath, "Oh, please, please, please..."...and really, that sums it all up. Here's the NY Times article about it.
• My awesome friend Jenn Reese (the one who came up with Kat's series title!) has truly awesome news: she's now agented by Joe Monti at the Barry Goldblatt Literary Agency! I am enormously happy to be agency-mates with Jenn, and I can't WAIT for her to sell her wonderful trilogy of girl-powered science fiction adventures! You can congratulate her here.
• I was lucky enough to win a copy of Megan Crewe's YA novel Give Up the Ghost last week. I was expecting it to be fast-paced and fun, but to be honest, based purely on the description, I also expected it not to necessarily have much depth. I was right on 2 out of 3 points. It was fast-paced and fun...but what made it honestly wonderful was the raw emotionalism of the novel. I cared passionately about the heroine, and that was what made the story matter so much, way beyond the snappy pacing and banter.
• We're in the process of getting quotes from moving companies, sorting through masses of old clothes and books, and generally being overwhelmed by moving madness...but all the same, in the best news for a long time (on a completely subjective personal level, that is), I'm actually powering with some speed through Kat3! The big motivator for me (apart from JoNoWriMo, which definitely helped to kick-start me after far too much time off) was my realization last week that it had been a whole year since MrD's birth...and yet, I still wasn't back in a regular writing habit. Ouch. So I made a vow that from now on I absolutely have to average at least 500 words/day until the novel is done - and if I manage to stick with it, I should actually have a draft done by the middle of January at the very latest. WHEW. Just to keep myself honest & accountable, I'd really like to set up a wordmeter at the bottom of my posts from now on, but the old one I used to use at zokotou.co.uk doesn't seem to work any more. Does anyone have any wordmeter recommendations?
• And in not-very-surprising related news, I'm having SO MUCH fun with Kat3 now that I'm actually playing in that world every single day instead of only popping in and out at long intervals (and thinking, What? Who? Was I planning something here...?). Now that I'm absorbed in it all again, it's just a totally different experience. I was actually giggling out loud yesterday with pleasure as I wrote one scene, and one of the moments I wrote today...well, all in all, I just feel really, really lucky to be getting to do something I love so much. Getting paid to write this trilogy, in particular, is just one of the best things that's ever happened to me in my life. And I'm so glad to be finally giving Book 3 the energy and focus it deserves again.

That's it for me! What about you guys? What are your highlights from this week? And can any of you link me to a good wordmeter?

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Today's blog entry

September 29, 2009, 3.34 pm

...is over at Blogfest, where today's question from a teen reader is: “When you’re writing a book and making up characters, do you feel like you become that character, as well as that character becomes a part of you?”

Here's how I answered. What about you guys? Those of you who are writers - have you had similar experiences with your characters? What about from a reader's POV? The first time I read Izzy Willy-Nilly by Cynthia Voight, which is about a girl who's lost one leg in a car accident, I actually forgot that I still had two legs! It was a real shock when my dad called me down to dinner and I saw that both legs were whole, because I'd gotten so absorbed into Izzy's mindset.

So what about you guys? As readers, have you felt that you ever became certain characters as you read about them?

You can leave a comment on the Blogfest entry. Hope to see you over there! :)

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Jumping Off Swings

September 10, 2009, 9.51 pm

Wow. I don't usually post journal entries just to review a single book, but...this is what I just wrote on Goodreads about Jo Knowles's Jumping Off Swings:

I can't remember the last time a book made me sob this hard.

Jumping Off Swings is so beautifully written, so fiercely honest and so compelling. I read it in one intense session, because I Could Not Stop reading it. There are four different POV characters, some of whom hate or avoid each other now for really good, sympathetic reasons, and yet all four were equally compelling and real, and by the end, I cared desperately about all four of them. This is a book that never compromises the emotional truth of the very difficult situation, but it's not a grim read at all - it's just right.

I loved it, and I want to push it on everyone I know. It really is that good.

Jumping Off Swings is a novel about an unplanned teenage pregnancy, and how it changes the lives of four friends. That description makes it sound like an Issues Novel, but it's really not. It's about four very believable kids caught in an awful situation, and it feels real and true and beautiful. If you're a fan of Carrie Jones's books (I am!), I bet you'll be a fan of this book, too. If you love good YA fiction, you'll love this book. If you have a baby of your own, then I have to warn you, it's going to push all sorts of hormonal buttons - like I said, I really SOBBED over this book (while nursing my own baby!). But: it's worth it. Really.

Check it out.

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The Paradox of Baby Time, and a Book Problem

September 3, 2009, 5.10 pm

It's amazing how time changes when you have a baby. Before I was a mom, I used to listen to my mom-friends talk about how suddenly there was no time to get anything done in a day, even though when they looked back on it afterwards, they couldn't see anything productive they had done with all that time. I listened to them talk about how it was just impossible to get out of the house on time for anything anymore. I used to listen with a sympathetic expression, because I was their friend - and then I used to secretly think, Well, I'm sure that it must be manageable, though, really - I would never be that disorganized, would I?

Hahahahahahaha.

Ohhhh, was I wrong. The other day, as Patrick and I were FINALLY setting out on our errand-run, 45 minutes after we'd originally planned to leave, we looked at each other and just laughed. Because you can either laugh or weep, and only one of them is a good idea in front of the baby...

So, looking back on the last few days, I can't see a lot of things I've done, apart from looking after the baby. (Which is a pleasure as well as a job, of course.) Probably the biggest thing we did was - gasp! - we finally stiffened our upper lips and actually donated 6 bursting bags of books to the Oxfam charity shop. Book purge! The little old lady taking donations looked mildly pleased and impressed when Patrick carried in the first two overflowing bags. Then I brought in the third and fourth bags, and she began to look afraid. By the fifth and sixth bags, she was backing away from me and looking downright horrified. "We're moving house," I explained, with an apologetic smile.

Truth? These are the books we'd already set aside to purge a month ago, well before we found a new house. And now, as we start to think about packing up our house, it's time to think about yet another purge. (We still have piles and piles of books sitting on the floor as well as in our 7 bookcases.) But maybe we'll find a different charity shop for that second round - I think if the Oxfam ladies saw us coming, they might lock the door against us!

Sigh. I hate giving up my books, but sometimes, it truly Has To Be Done. And it's not like we won't still have thousands left...especially once this month's Amazon order arrives. ;) I admit that, from some perspectives, I might be seen as having A Book Problem. On the other hand, I am a writer, so it's a professional requirement...right????

Someday we're going to live in a house with walls that are actually lined with bookshelves, floor to ceiling. Then people who don't have This Book Problem will think I am a maniac...but I will feel wonderfully, deliciously At Home. :)

What about you guys? Do you keep your books after you've read them, for comfort and future re-reads, or do you read once and then dispose for the sake of a lovely, uncluttered house?

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Whew!

August 31, 2009, 5.53 pm

We're home at last, after a trip that stretched longer than planned as we desperately, desperately tried to find some house, ANY house to rent before we left...and, knock on wood, we may have finally found one. Of course, it's not in the same neighborhood we were planning...or the same city...or even the same country...but still! ;)

We were planning to rent in southwest England; now we're probably going to rent in Wales, just over the border, for at least 6 months, while we keep on househunting in England. (Houses in the city that we want come up for rent only VERY rarely, and they tend to be snapped up within 24-48 hours. That makes househunting difficult in general but absolutely *impossible* while living up north.) We'll be living in a little Welsh town loomed over by huge hills, and our house will be in walking distance of two coffeeshops for me and Patrick, a playground for MrD, a park for Maya, and best of all, a castle for me. Woooooot!!!! I love castles so much. Ever since I moved to England, I've been hoping to live in a town with a castle one day, and this one, while tiny, is very cute. Plus, it's in easy driving distance of one of my favorite castles anywhere, Raglan Castle, which is GORGEOUS. So all in all, although this wasn't the housing solution we were expecting, it's one that looks really promising. :)

Now MrD and I have just gotten back from a day out, having had lunch with Shana and her partner at a nice Italian restaurant in Leeds and then a wonderful hour-and-a-half-long play session in the baby section of Borders. One of those things I would never have known if I hadn't become a parent - the baby section at Borders is a major social hub! MrD had a great time playing with other babies his age there, and I had a great time with their parents, none of whom I'd ever met before, but all of whom were commiserating/trading tips on all the same issues we've been going through. Then, when we left, the Borders employee at the till generously gave me a 20% discount on all the books I bought even though I'd accidentally left my discount voucher at home. International chain or no, I'm feeling an awful lot of customer loyalty to Borders right at this minute!

But the one book I'm most excited about right now is only being stocked in American shops: Freda Warrington's Elfland. Seriously, if you're a fan of adult fantasy novels, you should run out to buy this book! It's a contemporary fantasy set in England, full of love and magic and betrayal and redemption. It's lushly written, deeply intelligent and full of complex, difficult and true human relationships, as well as beautifully atmospheric magic. I was lucky enough to read an early version of this novel, and I loved it SO much even in that early draft. I can't wait for my copy to arrive from Amazon.co.uk! Freda wrote one of my very favorite historical fantasy novels, The Court of the Midnight King (about Richard III), and I'm so glad her books are finally being published in the US. Yay, Freda!

And now, since for the first time all day, I'm alone with no babycare or dogwalking to do, I'm going to actually do some (gasp!) fiction writing. Wish me luck...

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Zombie Daze

August 15, 2009, 12.19 pm

I've been moving through a zombie-like haze of exhaustion for the last few days, since MrD is teething and therefore none of us are sleeping. Days like these, I don't do much writing or anything else productive beyond survival. I am in AWE of moms who manage to work fulltime jobs when their babies are this age. How do they not fall asleep or space out in the middle of important meetings? Here are five things that have been making me happy, though, even in the midst of my zombie haze:

• Blowing bubbles with MrD: I hadn't blown bubbles for at least twenty years. But one of the other moms I know recommended getting a bottle to entertain the baby...and guess what? MrD likes the bubbles just fine, but the person who really loves them is me! They're beautiful and magical, with all the rainbow of colors swirling around them as they float away from me through the air. There's something incredibly relaxing about sitting outside on the grass in the cool English summer air, blowing iridescent bubbles through the air. We do it every afternoon now...and I have to admit, it's not really for Mr Darcy's sake.
• Y.S. Lee's The Agency: A Spy in the House: I finished reading this book yesterday and absolutely loved it. Girl spies in Victorian England! Disguises, mystery and intrigue! A perfectly-toned romance! A genuinely unexpected family secret, a whole host of strong, interesting women, and a completely non-stereotypical view of the Chinese community in Victorian England! It was just so cool, and I can't wait to read the second book in her trilogy. This is the first time in ages I've actually written a fan letter to an author. You can check out an excerpt here.
• Upcoming ARCs: the ARCs for A Most Improper Magick are due to arrive on my editor's desk next Wednesday, and I'll be getting copies soon after that (making adjustments for the speed of international mail, of course...why yes, I am obsessing! ;) ). I have been literally counting down the days until I might be able to hold one in my hands! I don't know yet how many I'll get, but I'm hoping to use them in a series of giveaways over the next eight months.
• Lara St John's Bach Works for Violin Solo: the awesome sent me this CD, and oh, wow. Listening to it feels kind of like getting my heart ripped out...but in the best possible way! I can't even count how many times I've listened to it over the last week.
• Primeval: this show is so silly. So, so silly. And yet...dinosaurs rampaging through London tube stations! How could I possibly resist? I absolutely love it. I'm nearly finished with Season 1 and planning to start watching Season 2 very soon. On zombie exhaustion days, it's just exactly what the doctor ordered. :)

What about you guys? What's been making you happy lately?

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And some Strange Horizons love

August 12, 2009, 11.27 pm

Karen Meisner, one of the fiction editors at Strange Horizons and also one of the most creative people I know, in the truest sense of the word*, has asked that people think about what Strange Horizons means to them, since we're in the middle of their annual fund drive. (And before I say anything else, I should say: check out the genuinely fabulous prizes they're giving away this year! YA novels & graphic novels, Holly Black's debut story collection, magazine subscriptions, urban fantasy novels...it's a pretty stellar and drool-worthy assortment.)

For me, Strange Horizons has meant different things over the last 8 years. It's been my favorite fantasy magazine, hands down, ever since I first started reading it in 2001. It's consistently published stories I'm interested in and stories I love, and it's the magazine I always go to first, every time I'm in the mood to read a new short story. Because of that, it was also the pro magazine I wanted most desperately to sell to ever since I first started regularly writing & submitting short stories, also in 2001. I submitted to them for three years straight without any luck - and then when I finally sold them a story in 2004 ("Some Girlfriends Can"), it felt like the biggest victory EVER. I found out about the sale in the middle of our honeymoon, and oh, it really was the best wedding gift I could have possibly been given! Better yet, I sold them a second story pretty soon after, and I thought, wow, now I really am a pro...

...and then guess what? I didn't manage to sell them anything else for years. And trust me, that wasn't for lack of trying. On average, I've probably submitted at least 6 stories a year to them since 2001, but I've still sold them only 4 stories in total. So here's another way I think of Strange Horizons: as my personal gold standard, the one I aspire to every time but don't always hit. Every time I do, the news still fills me with the same, disbelieving joy.

When I'm in the mood for good fiction, I often just browse their fiction archives. There's such a huge variety of stuff there, from romantic contemporary fantasy (Deb Coates's Magic in a Certain Slant of Light) to wonderful fables (Jenn Reese's Tales of the Chinese Zodiac, starting with Monkey) to quietly powerful horror (Charles Coleman Finlay's The Moon is Always Full). Those are just a few of my personal favorites - I bet if you read through the archives, you'll come up with your own personal list, because there's such a rich variety to choose from.

If you have a few dollars to spare for the fund drive, that would be absolutely awesome. Strange Horizons pays its authors pro rates, which is part of why the fiction is so consistently good, and yet they give the stories away for free. That means they desperately NEED reader donations - and hey, if you do it now, you can enter the drawing for cool prizes! But even if you can't donate right now, I'd definitely urge you to check out their fiction archives next time you're in the mood for a really good science fiction or fantasy story. They really are worth your time.

Check them out!

__
*Karen's creativity spills in different ways into rich, wonderful fiction-writing, friendship, mix tapes, crafts, and parenting, a combination I really admire.

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