After the longest Thursday in history (it lasted something like 33 hours, thanks to the time change), we arrived safely in Fairbanks, where one inhalation of the brisk winter air reminded us why it is we don’t ever want to live here again. Not even a deep inhalation, you understand, because the dry cold air makes you start coughing before you can pull in enough for a *deep* inhalation. :)

I’m awfully glad to be here, though. Today was clear and (cold, obviously) utterly gorgeous. I had forgotten, kind of, how far apart things are here. We dropped Ted’s mom off for her haircut at a hairdresser several miles from where they live, which is just not at all something the Irish would generally do. We’ve gotten really used to living within a completely walkable distance of things, and I was bemused at the distances we were travelling today.

Driving on the correct side of the road hasn’t been bothering me, but I keep trying to find light switches for the bathrooms outside the bathrooms themselves. I have been changed. :)

Vague plans for Christmas shopping tomorrow. Definite plans for Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner on Sunday, which, due to a fluke of circumstances, it appears Ted will be largely responsible for. Fortunately, we are all quite certain he can handle the pressure. :)

miles to Minas Tirith: 68.5

clothes are packed. toiletries are packed. netbook is packed. kitchen is clean. laundry is done. sheets are changed. reservation sheets are printed. passports are packed. stack of books is increasing. camera is packed. shopping list for parents is written.

*thinks*

arright, well, we have the passports and the reservation stuff, anything beyond that can be replaced. hidey ho!

miles to Minas Tirith: 64.6

I once more point people at my environmentalism temper tantrum, mostly because it’s faster than typing it all out again. Triggered this time by

- the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas failing to have the balls to do what needs doing, ie, a total ban on tuna fishing for years to come. Yes, I get the impact of that on ordinary fishermen, I am from a fishing community myself, and frankly it’s not Joe Bob with his single boat that’s the problem, it’s huge conglomeration fleets and giant ships sponsored by corporations, but none of that matters, because the goddamned end result is the same. Furthermore, I recognize that a significant part of the problem is also a lack of ability/desire/follow-through on policing the fisheries to ensure the sanctioned catch isn’t being disregarded, but none of that diminishes the fact that that the ICCAT lacks the balls to do its job

- Sean goddamned Parnell, the new governor of Alaska, vowing to get polar bears removed from the endangered species poster child list because he can’t let a few dumb animals stand in the way of the state’s prosperity

- the unshocking news that gosh, there’s almost certainly not going to be anything binding coming out of the upcoming climate change summit–because hey, why not lower expectations plenty early, especially when countries are already being handed concessions on the topic while on a national scale in the US, Republicans just flat out walked out of a climate bill discussion because THAT’S HOW WILLING THEY ARE TO FIX THE PROBLEM.

God, maybe you guys are right. Maybe I should write a book. Except I don’t know that I could sell it on proposal (Big Idea Environmental Fiction is not my gig) and I don’t think I could afford to write it on spec with my other contracted books.

*headdesk, anyway*

Catie is on vacation. If you need to contact her, please leave a message at the tone.

*BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP*

TRUTHSEEKER revisions are done and delivered. “Cairn Dancer” revisions are done and delivered. “Perchance to Dream” revisions are not done, but are so minor I won’t count them against my vacation. I am now officially On Vacation until the 7th of December. Yay!

Also yay: I got paid yesterday, and am once more extremely grateful for all my readers. In honor of you, Ted and I had a real life Date Night where we went to a movie in the evening and then went out to dinner. (Movie: 2012. As advertised, the special effects were pretty awesome. We enjoyed it. We want the DVD extras.) So thank you all for my movie and dinner. And rent. And kitty kibbles, and everything else. :)

I will now stagger to bed and sleep the sleep of the just, or at least the sleep of the “so full of Indian food I cannot stay awake any longer”. :)

miles to Minas Tirith: 51.4
ytd wordcount: 251,500

I have been unable to arrange a book signing in Anchorage.

Instead, Ted and I decided that rather than try to make a dozen different meet-up arrangements, we would plonk ourselves down at the Kaladi Brothers coffee shop next to Title Wave Books on Northern Lights Blvd, and hope that people come to us. We’ll be there from about 1:30pm on Tuesday, December 1st up until the point where we decide to go somewhere else to eat dinner.

Our movements will be trackable via this blog, Twitter, and Facebook, and should be fairly up-to-the-minute, since I’ll be carrying my netbook with me on this trip. Hopefully we will see you there!

…by a reliable source (twitter) that several of the Walker Papers are at half price at Audible.com.

I went and got a flu shot today, because we’ll be spending 30+ hours in a metal tube with dry recycled air over the next few weeks. The nurse said, as they’re inclined to, “This will feel like a sharp pinch.” I dunno. I’ve pretty much always thought it didn’t feel anything like a pinch, but that it feels a lot like somebody sticking a needle into your arm. :)

I was beginning to think today was going to be another “you spent four hours working and are still 95 pages from the end of the book” day, but I seem to have finished the major revisions. I have to revise at least two scenes still (& go back and put something in that got cut in the last revision round, I’m pretty sure), but it’s not all new material, so it will go much much more quickly. And now I only have 82 pages to go to the end of the book!

And I finally reached 250K for the year today.

miles to Minas Tirith: 44.6
ytd wordcount: 250,500

I have had for dinner seared pork steak with an apple stuffing and gravy, applesauce and peas, followed by dark chocolate strawberry cordials for dessert.

We did not go out for dinner. This is what Ted made.

I have the best husband *ever*.

This morning I started out with 90 pages of revisions to go. I wrote 2800 words today. Now I have 95 pages of revisions to go. *weeps*

So last Thursday Ted and I went into Dublin to meet GRRM, or at least to get him to sign books for us. This mostly involved standing in a very long line with increasingly achy feet, but involved some chatting with friends, which was great. When we got up to the man himself, the guy in front of us, with whom we’d spoken some, took out what must have been a first edition hardback version of A GAME OF THRONES, with a cover I’d never seen.

“Ah!” said Mr. Martin, “don’t get mugged on your way out of here, this one’s worth about a thousand dollars.”

I happened to be carrying a copy of the SONGS OF THE DYING EARTH anthology, which is a great big thick hardback book, as well as my paperback CLASH OF KINGS, so I put the paperback down on the signing table, said, “Excuse me,” to GRRM, and made as if to whack the guy in front of me over the head with SONGS so I could steal his thousand dollar copy of GoT. There may be photographic evidence of my utter lack of propriety, but my coat, which I was carrying over one arm, flew up in front of my face, so possibly there’s photographic evidence of *someone* but not *necessarily* me trying to mug a guy at the GRRM signing. :)

Ted and GRRM were both wearing flat caps, and GRRM clearly recognized Ted later at the after-signing meet-up, which I suspect was in part because of the cap. :) We didn’t stay at the meet-up very long, but it was all around a very nice evening.

We also swung down to Dawson Street, where the … Harris & Tweed, or something like that (Hodges Figgis, apparently), bookstore is. We had been told my books were being carried there, and lo, they were! So I signed the ones they had, then went and introduced myself to their SF/F guy, who looked at me in vague bewilderment, mostly because he had a hand-written list beside him of books he was ordering, and my name was on it for the TAKE A CHANCE* graphic novel, and it struck him as exceedingly unlikely that one of the authors on the list he’d just written out had walked up to introduce herself. :) Anyway, apparently my books sell quite well there, and though they didn’t offer to do a signing, they did offer to order in 20 or so copies of DEMON HUNTS when it comes out, and to do a face-out display thing and get me to sign the books and all, so we felt it was *well* worth having gone by. Also, they have a really good SF/F selection (for Ireland), and we may have accidentally bought a handful of books. So it was goot!

*He wanted to know what TAKE A CHANCE was, and I explained it was a graphic novel, which he seemed quite pleased about, as they have a pretty good GN section there. But he was confused because he hadn’t been able to bring it up in the system, and was somewhat dismayed to hear that was because the graphic novel has been delayed indefinitely.

(also, randomly, I think this mood icon is a particularly *terrible* choice for a mood of ‘fine’, because in this frame Gambit has been stabbed through the chest with a GIANT SWORD and Rogue is telling him “While I live, you don’t die.” That’s really not ‘fine’, I don’t think… (except I see that it's not the option on LJ, so this bit makes no sense, does it.))

miles to Minas Tirith: 38.05
ytd wordcount: 248,600

For the record, I’m not going on a signing tour in a couple weeks. I’m going home to Alaska to visit family and friends, and am stuffing a couple of book signings in on the way through.

But since I’ve been talking about the signings, many of you have hopefully suggested you would very much like me to come to your location and sign books. I, too, would like to go to your location and sign books. I think it would be tremendously awesome. I would, however, have to sell about 300% more books than I do in order to make it even vaguely feasible. It’s not a lack of promotion on the publisher’s part, or a writer having to do all the publicity leg work herself. It’s pure finances.

As a rule, when you buy one of my books new, I get about a dollar from that sale. That’s the money I live on, day to day. That’s what I pay bills and rent and student loans with. So in order to fly to New York on your average economy ticket, I’d have be certain of selling, oh, say, an additional 600 books at a signing in order to break even. And that’s not including food or hotel, so throw those in and even if you’re being very cautious with money you’re looking at needing to sell an additional thousand or twelve hundred books to not lose money on the prospect. And really, most people at book signings bring the books they’ve already bought to get them signed, so even if by some incredibly unlikely stroke of luck I had 1200 people show up to a signing (and I’m much more in the realm of “if 40 people show up it’s an unqualified success”), the odds of selling 1200 books would be infinitesimally small. So although I have a good solid readership (for which I am *extremely* grateful), there just simply aren’t enough dollars coming in to support a self-financed book tour.

Ah! you say, so get your publisher to send you on a tour!

Well, the finances for the publisher are basically the same. My sales numbers–which, like my readership, are good solid numbers–are not nearly that good. I’m not a bestseller in terms of moving a large enough quantity of any given novel in the first month of publication. Over my career thus far my books have had what the industry refers to as “legs”–in other words, I’m still selling a lot of copies of URBAN SHAMAN, even 4.5 years after it came out. Now, if I could get everybody who’s bought a copy of URBAN SHAMAN to buy my next book the month it came out, yeah, I’d probably all of a sudden get to have shiny words like “USA Today Bestseller” or possibly “New York Times Bestseller” in front of my name. And there’s a degree of self-perpetuation to that, so once you start reaching that status it may become worth it to the publisher to (probably) lose money on financing a tour themselves, in hopes of making it up in sales down the road.

I’d greatly love to reach that status, or be in a position where it’s financially feasible to take myself on a signing tour and go all over the place to meet people. But for the moment, I’m really only ever going to be able to manage signings at places that I’m going to anyway, and sadly there just aren’t that many of those places to begin with. :)

I asked people on Facebook to ask random questions for me to answer. Q&As behind the cut. :)

(x-posted from the essential kit)

I will be attending the Fairbanks booksigning on November 27th:

I will be attending the Seattle booksigning on December 2nd:

I'm likely to:

If I'm buying books, I hope:

I am glad there's a ticky box option even if I'm not going to either of the signings:

There will be a book signing event in Fairbanks, Alaska!

Where: The Fairbanks Barnes & Noble

When: 1-4pm on Friday, November 27th, 2009

What: I will definitely be signing, and my books will be for sale. I may do a reading or two, since I’ll be there a while.

Further details: The Fairbanks B&N is leaning toward mostly bringing in copies of WALKING DEAD to sell. I’m also encouraging them to stock up on first books in all of my series, but if you’re in the Fairbanks/North Pole/Nenana/etc region and would like books other than URBAN SHAMAN, WALKING DEAD, HEART OF STONE and THE QUEEN’S BASTARD, let me strongly encourage you to call then (907-452-6400) sooner rather than later to put an order in for the books you want. It’ll encourage them to have copies on hand, and they’ll be ordering books for the signing next week, so you’ll want to move briskly!

There will be a book signing event in Seattle!

Where: The University Book Store on University Way in Seattle, Washington

Where, in greater detail: This will be a Fireside Event, taking place downstairs on the far side of the cafe, rather than in the usual event area.

When: 7-8pm on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

What: I will definitely be signing, and my books will be for sale (cash registers close at 8, we may be permitted to hang out a bit longer afterward to finish signings & things).

I may do a reading. I may do a reading of the first chapter of DEMON HUNTS, book five of the Walker Papers, due out in June 2010. Let me suggest you turn up on time if you want to hear that. :)

Further details: Me doing a signing in Seattle means there will be, at least for a time, signed books available for ordering within the continental US. If you can’t make it to Seattle but would like me to sign books and have them sent to you, order the books through the University Book Store website, and make certain to put in the Comment Box that you would like signed books, and exactly how you want them signed.

The theory of the thing was to have TRUTHSEEKER revisions done by Sunday last. To this I say AHAHAHAHAHA. At this point I think my goal is to have them done by Sunday next, or Monday at the latest. We’re going into Dublin for the GRRM signing tomorrow, so they won’t get done before then. There’re only a hundred pages left, but it hasn’t been easy to sit down and do them.

After that, pre-holiday, I must do the following:

- tiddly revisions on “Perchance to Dream”
- tiddly revisions on “Cairn Dancer”

Then I can roll over and expose my tender underbelly to the sky and loll about for three or four weeks before returning to what had better be an explosion of focused writing, since I have two books and two sets of proposals due by May.

I am not even pretending to participate in NNWM this year. I see other people gearing up and a tiny part of my brain goes “I could do that!”, but I must crush it ruthlessly. I’ll be on vacation the second half of November, and there’s no way I’d keep it up even with the best of intentions. So my best intentions must be not to do it at all. I just have to turn those short stories in and finish revisions on TRUTHSEEKER and take the month off. Those are my ambitions. Yes. *nods firmly*

On Friday Ted and I went to the movies, despite the constant downpour. Sadly, when we got there, it turned out the movie I wanted to see wasn’t playing anymore, so Ted went to his movie and I headed back out to get cat food and do some other errands.

About half a block from the movie theatre I turned down the road to get to the crosswalk, and walked into torrential, monsoon-style rains. The sort of rain that makes you shriek because there’s suddenly SO MUCH of it, in this case accompanied by enthusiastic wind that buffeted both me and the rain. My shoes actually filled up with water in about fifteen seconds. An African man came tearing across the street against the light, but then didn’t go forward because he was heading directly into the rain and it was so extraordinary that it all but held him in place. So we stood there, he and I, hiding behind our umbrellas and alternately shrieking and laughing at the rain.

Finally the light changed and I–well, I didn’t scurry, because there was no point, by then. Despite my umbrella and my trench coat, I was soaked through to the thigh, and figured I couldn’t really get much wetter. So off I went, and off the African man went, and I headed for the store. On the way I met three teenager girls who were ducking from eve to eve, trying to avoid the rain. Two of them ducked forward ahead of me. The third looked at them, looked at me, fell in step with me beneath my umbrella, and said, *very* brightly, “Hi!”

I laughed out loud and said, “Hi! You’re quite a bit more clever than your friends, aren’t you?” Right about then, her friends turned to see what had happened to her, shrieked with dismay/glee/astonishment at her boldness, and rushed back to join us under my umbrella.

Sadly for them, I was only going two doors down because I wanted to stop and make a hair appointment, so I cruelly abandoned them to the rain and went into the salon, where I was met with cries of horror at my soddenness. “Stay until it’s stopped!” pled the woman who works there, but I said there wasn’t much point, I couldn’t get much wetter anyway, so I made my appointment and went on to do my shopping. And on the way home I stopped for an ice cream, because I hadn’t gotten to go to my movie and I was soaked through and I By God deserved a treat. :)

miles to Minas Tirith: 16.8

The end of this book remains an aggravating hundred pages away. And it was supposed to be this cute little quick and easy 360 page thing which has now grown to 420 pages and probably isn’t quite done there. And the changes made so far mean adding a scene and setting a written one somewhere else and then probably revising another one to a chase scene or something.

It all sounds like a lot of work. Sigh. I suspect it will overflow into November by a couple days to finish it, which was not my plan. OTOH, since we don’t get home from our American travels until Dec. 5th, it’s not like I’ll be starting work on the 1st of December, so I guess I’ll still get my full month off. But btltltht anyway. OT3rdH, all these bloody revisions should mean that everything’s really solidly set up for the second book, which will then hopefully be quick and easy to write, if not 360 pages long. @.@

And ah, crap, I need to turn those short stories in. Must do that tomorrow.

I would just like to say I have love in my heart for the preview function on WordPress themes which allows me to rebuild a website in preview instead of live or with the bother of setting up a second instance to make sure it all works. Yay WordPress!

(um, soapturtle, you want to upgrade my WP installations for me sometime…? O.O)

This weekend a fellow writer and friend emailed to say she’d gotten her first comic-writing contract, and did I have any thoughts/suggestions/advice/epiphanies, having written my own comic series. Indeed I did, and I’ve been vaguely meaning for ages to write those thoughts up, so she provided me with an opportunity to do so. So here’s what I learned about writing comics:

* turning the page is often a sign of a scene change. Not always, but it’s a good rule of thumb, and if you’re *going* to change scenes, it’s better to do it at a page turn than mid-page unless you can be very clever with your frames to show some kind of continuity leading into the new scene.

* Wally Woods 22 Panels That Always Work is probably something every goddamned comic writer, nevermind artist, should be given right away.

* Alan Moore is reputed to work within a 210 words per page format. More than that and the reader starts going “too many words” on a subconscious level. I have observed this in TAKE A CHANCE, where a couple pages were too dialog heavy and I went and counted and yeah, was like around 250 or something. More detail on that here.

* I go to a fair amount of trouble to describe panel layouts and angles and details. This is a technique I picked up from reading how Neil Gaiman wrote comics (and he apparently got it from Alan Moore). The important bit, really, is to end (or begin) the script with, “But if you have a better idea, go for it; you’re the artist, after all.”

* Story beats: I think this was maybe the most critical thing I realized while writing Chance. I was using 22 page scripts there, so basically you’re looking at, say, 11 scenes. Each scene became a story beat, to some degree, and I *really* had to get those figured out ahead of time before I started writing, because otherwise it got sloppy and out of control almost immediately. It’s like a mini-synopsis. “Page one: Intro. Page 2-3: Heroine in action on the streets. She meets a “helpful” powered hero who is embarrassed when he realizes she’s “one of them”–but she’s “NOT LIKE YOU.” Page 3-4: cut to Chance at her day job; use the words “NOT LIKE YOU” as her introductory phrase to keep continuity, so we know who the unmasked woman is. Backstory: Nila arrives with information about the man who killed Chance’s son.” And so on and so forth. Without the story beats I’d have lost my mind right off.

* Keep it simple. I did too many complicated things–too many frames per page (4-6 is good, up to 9 sometimes) a lot. I think it’s the novelist in me. That and the Bendis fan.

* Remember that the action in comics takes place between the frames. We’re just seeing still shots. Apparently it annoys the crap out of artists when a writer has an action and a reaction in the same frame. :)

* ALL CAPS usually emphasizes words in dialog bubbles or text boxes. On the finished page, those words end up slightly bolder.

* Don’t forget color, light and time notes for the colorist. Separate them out, because a colorist won’t necessarily notice them in the body of a description. So a page might say “COLORIST’S NOTES: this scene takes place during sunset” at the head, or “Grey rainy day” or “night shot” or whatever. I forgot those a lot.

* If you have ideas on where the text/word balloons should go, put those into the header: TEXT BOX (upper right): sorts of things. It may help the artist laying out the page. (or he might ignore you entirely. Nevermind that detail. :))

* I found it helpful to write most of a page’s dialog before I started trying to script the images. It gave me a flow chart for the page, by telling me kind of how much information was going to get dumped, and then I could work with that in how many panels I needed and things. I’d often get halfway through a page of dialog and then find myself going back and starting to write in the images, but it got me started. And it helped me not forget clever lines. :)

So there you go. Those are helpful things I learned while writing Chance.

miles to Morannon: 138 (completed!)
miles to Minas Tirith: 5.8
ytd wordcount: 245,800

Earlier this year, or possibly late last year, Ted encountered a singer called Imelda May on the Late Late Show. She’s got a great image–a 50’s burlesque kind of look–and did a couple of terrific rockabilly numbers. We promptly went forth to try to find her album.

So, it appeared, did everyone else in Ireland, because we ended up having to order it from Amazon, being utterly unable to locate it in any stores here. The album, “Love Tattoo”, is pretty fantastic, and we spent most of the past year managing to just miss her in concert. This summer we saw she was performing at the Sligo Live Music Festival, so we got tickets, and yesterday we popped up to Sligo to watch her.

It was a very good concert, with somewhere in the range of 750-1000 attendees, I’d say. I’d have probably rated it as terrific if we’d remembered the ear plugs, but we didn’t, and I was about seven feet from one of the sound system speakers, so I spent the entire evening with a finger in my ear in order to reduce the pain of consonants and the trumpet. They played for an hour and a half, with a bunch of songs off “Love Tattoo”, a bunch of songs from the new album which we didn’t get because we didn’t have enough cash on us, and several songs which must be from an upcoming album, as they were introduced as new. A good solid concert all around, and if you like rockabilly/bluesy/torch kind of music, you’d probably like Imelda May.

(x-posted from the essential kit)

A handful of not-particularly-themed photos behind the cut…(really, I’m working hard, not procrastinating.)

(x-posted from the essential kit)