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December 2009

Monday, December 21, 2009

In which I wish you the happiest of holidays





Ah, dear readers, I confess. I am a wee bit fatigued. I could not figure out why until I did the math and realized that in the last fourteen months I have written--not counting blogs, letters, e-mails, extra content for electronic editions, bios, or interviews--roughly 1500 pages! It has been tremendous fun and I am a very lucky girl to get to do what I do, make no mistake. But je suis needing a rest, my poppets, and as 2010 is shaping up to be VERY busy, I am taking a few days off to spend time with my family and just BE. Ordinarily, I write blog entries ahead of time to load into the queue so there is always content, but this time I have decided to take a proper break. I suspect I will miss you inordinately, and I will still tweet and update facebook periodically. I plan to rejoin you in the New Year, and I hope you have a Merry Christmas, a Happy Solstice, a Joyful Kwanzaa, and for my Jewish friends, I hope your Hanukkah was a lovely and peaceful time. Whatever is good and lovely, I wish it for you all in 2010.

A reminder, should you happen to receive a gift card to a bookstore, the trade edition of Silent in the Grave, the first book in the Lady Julia Grey series, is out January 1. Or you can use those gift cards to pre-order The Dead Travel Fast, which will ship right around February 23!

I also have a holiday treat for you all--the book trailer for The Dead Travel Fast! Just a taste of the Gothic thrills afoot in the new book, and I hope you enjoy. I actually have two cameos in the video--see if you can spot me!

Also, the website will be updated with appearances and contest information, so be sure to check the main pages for details on where I will be signing books and the goodies up for grabs.

Thank you for making 2009 such a memorable year!
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Sunday, December 20, 2009

In which you might be a slacker too

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but it takes him a workshop full of elves and a full complement of flying reindeer as well as some bizarre warping of the space-time continuum to get 'er done. The rest of us mortals might need a little help, particularly in sending out holiday greetings. I offer you the Merry Newsinator, a Mad-Libby-version of the holiday newsletter. Answer a few quick details and let the newsinator do the rest. You can send it out directly via email, twitter, or facebook. It's almost as good as having an elf tucked in your pocket.
Saturday, December 19, 2009

In which it is that time again, dear readers

'Tis the season to contemplate the glory of bad nativities. This has become an annual tradition in our house, like watching "A Christmas Story" or eating roast beef and Yorkshire pudding on Christmas Day. My personal vote for bad nativity is anything with fiber optics or faux marshmallows.

The rest of this post is from a blog entry posted on the original Blog A Go-Go on December 26, 2007. I am reposting it here because it is one of the loveliest travel memories I have, and because I like to think that at this wonderful holiday time of year, angels or fairies or elves might really walk among us.



In which I am blessed...
Not figuratively, although I am aware of the fact that I lead a charmed life. No, I was ACTUALLY blessed on my way home from Houston on Saturday. I had a layover in the Charlotte airport--an airport I actually love. It's small enough to traverse in less than fifteen minutes, even in heels, and they have Cinnabon. I don't eat them, but I could LIVE off of the smell.

Anyway, I went to make a purchase at an airport shop and the clerk who helped me was like something out of a fairy tale. She was tiny--I am less than five foot five and I could see the top of her head. She had white hair neatly spun into a tiny bun, like candy floss, and her eyes were the most beautiful, startling shade of blue. She looked up at me and smiled, her entire face crinkling into laugh lines. "Yes, my darling, can I help you?" Her accent was thick and completely unplaceable, although I think Eastern European would not have been too far afield. Altogether she looked like Mrs. Claus.

I gave her the merchandise and she paused, looking at my face intently. "You are special," she said suddenly. I blinked at her in surprise, but I smiled back. "Thank you." She shook her head. "No, my dear. You are special. I know. Tell me, what do you do?" "I am a writer," I told her. "And what have you written?" (This next part is one of the coolest things I have ever been able to do, seriously.) I pointed to the books stacked on a display to the side. "That book there, Silent in the Grave. I wrote that." She nodded. "And have you written anything else?" "Yes, I have written two more books in the series."

She stared at me a long moment, then rang up my purchase and took my money, counting back my change. When she handed it to me, she stared at me again, looking right through me. "Yes, you are very special. Very special." And she lifted her hand like a priest giving a benediction and said, "God bless you, my darling. And merry Christmas." I wished her a merry Christmas in return and I left then, feeling pleased and slightly bemused, like I had just had an encounter with someone not entirely of this world. I thought for just a moment that if I turned around I might be able to peer behind the counter and see if she had shoes with pointy elfin toes or perhaps she might have disappeared in a poof of fairy dust. But I didn't look back, and because of that, it was a perfect moment.
Friday, December 18, 2009

In which we talk bacon

I'm not a vegetarian, but neither do I eat meat daily and when I do eat meat, I like it to be GOOD. If I had to narrow it down, pork would be my meat of choice, and bacon is its king. Seriously, there are few culinary joys akin to crunching in to a crispy, salty piece of bacon. And it must be crunching. Underdone bacon is an abomination. After years of being presented with plates of limp, greasy ribbons of meat, I have finally learned to request that it be "almost but not quite BURNT" and that has been highly successful. (Bacon should be cooked that thoroughly to render off as much fat as possible. What's left is the perfect essence of bacon.)

Bacon can sometimes be improved upon, although I feel the burn of sacrilege in writing that. Jill Conner Browne is responsible for my love of an outrageous concoction called Pig Candy--brown-sugar covered bacon cooked until caramelized. This must be eaten warm with an ICE cold Dr. Pepper and then all is right with the world. (With apologies to Robert Browning, although if he'd ever eaten pig candy, he'd understand. But then he was English and one of the few points of contention between the British people and myself is what constitutes bacon...)

I manage to keep my adoration of bacon largely in check, but thanks to my friend Jerusha, I feel my control slipping away. Yesterday she shared the link to the ultimate gift for the bacon-lover: the Bacon-of-the-Month Club. Oh, yes.
Thursday, December 17, 2009

In which I ponder Austen heroes

Yesterday was the anniversary of Jane Austen's birth, and when I tweeted about it, inevitably Darcy's name came up. And of course that got me thinking about Austen heroes besides Darcy. We do love Fitzwilliam devotedly, don't we? We talk about him almost to the complete exclusion of all other Austen gentlemen. Sad, really. (Although we really have to blame Jane Austen for creating such a delectable character.) But she fashioned some other rather intriguing men as well. Willoughby and Wickham do have some bad boy glamour, but they are ultimately disappointing, revealing themselves to be feckless and unreliable. (Sad really, that Willoughby is more memorable than either of the actual heroes of Sense and Sensibility, no?) And the less said about Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, the better. Don't mistake me, there is no such thing as BAD Jane Austen. But for the purposes of commanding and virile heroes, these fall a little shy of the mark.

No, I think if we put Darcy aside, we have to turn to Knightley and Wentworth for inspiration. Knightley has an admirably firm hand with Emma--a tremendously attractive quality in smallish doses. And Wentworth, well, any man who can write that letter--you know the one--is deserving of our swoons. So, I wonder, readers, which Austen hero curls your bonnet ribbons? Besides, Darcy, of course...
Wednesday, December 16, 2009

In which I'm curious about organization

I love the idea of being organized--truly. In some ways, I'm pretty good at it. (The key is making sure you understand how YOU think and organize accordingly. It does no good to put everything away in boxes and file folders if you are a terribly visual person because you'll never find it again. And anyone who says there is a single correct way to organize is daft.) I confess, I don't use my iphone the way God and Steve Jobs intended. I use the note function to keep myself VERY organized--lists for bookstore trips, library excursions, gifts to buy. My agent is still staggered that when we visited a yarn store together in NYC, I whipped out my iphone to open a note where I had jotted what sort of yarn I wanted for a particular knitting project. This is why people always think I'm more organized than I really am. I'm also entirely hopeless at things like filofaxes--although I LOVE them--and planner pads. I greatly appreciate the IDEA of these things, but the truth is, I like to write out my thoughts by hand and I need space to do it.

Most of my organizational systems are adequate but tweakable and I do experiment from time to time to see if I can improve them. The area I'm fiddling with now is the daily to-do list. I find I accomplish more if I have one, and when I'm feeling particularly hard against it, I will write down mundane things like "start dishwasher" just so I can cross it off and feel virtuous. But keeping a to-do list on a random piece of paper is unthinkable to me, so I have an enormous spiral notebook--enormous because my handwriting is large. On the front page I have a running to-do list of projects that I want to tackle over the next few months. On days when I need a specific list, I date a page and jot down everything I want to do, crossing things off as they get accomplished.

But recently I've refined the technique a little, and starting using the back sides of the pages for my journal. There are loads of reasons why. First, I hate keeping track of multiple notebooks. I already have them in every room of the house, and adding a dedicated journal to the mix is unnecessary. Second, half of my to-do notebook would be going to waste otherwise. Third, my journal entries are usually a sort of mental housekeeping where I unpack the crowded places, air them out, and put things neatly away again. I don't need a special place to do that. Besides, tying it to what I was doing at the time seems to help me sort out what I was trying to work through at any given time.

And I'm wondering, how do YOU stay organized? And do you keep a journal?
Tuesday, December 15, 2009

In which it is my anniversary

Nineteen years ago today I married the Best Guy in the Universe. (I'm not trademarking that, so if you think you have the Best Guy in the Universe, feel free to call him so. Personally, I think it would be fabulous if everybody thought they had the Best Guy in the Universe.) We were young, stupidly, impossibly young, and I was scared to death. But I knew, as I had really never known anything before, that he was mine. It was as though I recognized him, as if we'd spent some time together in a great cosmic waiting room, just hanging out until we were born. I have always said it wasn't just that I loved him. I would have never married at 22 just for love. It was because he was inevitable. That's the word I always choose when I talk about him. I knew that we were going to end up together and for a very long time.

And nineteen years IS a long time these days. Nineteen is when you ease up just a little because IT has gotten easier. This person you married when you were still a kid is not a stranger anymore. He's grown up and so have you, and the miracle is that somehow you grew in the same direction, wanting the same things. You cheer each other on, and pull up each other's bootstraps, and when the world has decided to show its gray and cheerless side, you have each other to hold onto and say, "This too shall pass. Remember the time..." And when the world is good to you, REALLY good, you have each other to hold onto then as well. And everything wonderful that's happened is a million times better because the person holding your hand is the same person who held it when you were feeling like this particular day would never come for you.

So what I'm trying to say is, happy anniversary, Best Guy in the Universe. Thanks for being inevitable. I love you too.
Monday, December 14, 2009

In which I am flinging links

I'm in the very last stages of revisions, and it's a demanding process--entirely by my own choosing, you understand. I divide the manuscript into 100-page sections and each day I read one section, note the changes I want to make, flag the pages, and input the changes. (I average 85 pages flagged out of 100 because this is when I'm making lots of subtle changes--for example, I might find that I've used a word twice within too short a passage and need to rephrase.) It is the finicky stuff which means I have to be extremely focused and detail-oriented, challenging for me because I tend to skim when I read. BUT, the little pop-up timer on the belly of this book is just about to blow and I am beyond excited to send it off at the end of this week. Unfortunately, it means that bloggery will be a bit hasty.

Today I am simply going to fling some links at you I think you might like. Enjoy!

Whistling Puppy

Dramatic Chipmunk (that is really a prairie dog...)


Joe Boxer Dancing Guy

Christmas Cranberries
Sunday, December 13, 2009

In which I am pondering

As I told you yesterday, I had a power glitch on Friday and lost some work. (Thank heaven it was revision work and not something completely fresh or I would still be howling.) Anyway, as you know, I've been doing some thinking about personal growth issues, being positive, rejecting stress, yada yada. And then I had my minor catastrophe, which I was not at all surprised by. (It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least by me, that as soon as I undertake to refine myself a wee bit, something comes along to say, "Hey, giving serenity a try? Let's see how it's working for you.")

And it was a struggle to get past it. First off, when I lose work, I get completely enraged in ways that only Bruce Banner would understand. The fact that I could have done one or two things to mitigate the losses beforehand and DIDN'T only made me more inclined to throw breakables. I didn't, but oh, how I longed to.

The second most challenging part is that when people know you're working on self-improvement (a phrase I loathe, but it's late and the original turn of phrase eludes me), is that everyone expects you to snap right out of it. Honestly, I felt a lot more like snapping heads off, but I did figure out a plan of action. Here's what I needed:

1. A sympathetic ear. Sometimes you just need to have someone pat your head and say, "Yes, that was the most catastrophic thing EVER to happen to anyone". And then you can rise above it and be noble and say, "Well, not really, but thank you for understanding".

2. A breather. As it happened, I didn't have much time to work on fixing the losses before I had to leave the house for a doctor's appointment. I came thiiiiiiis close to canceling, but unless I am carrying the ebola virus, I just can't bring myself to cancel a doctor's appointment on short notice. So I went, and getting away from the problem for a little while actually helped.

3. Assessment of the situation with a clear head. Once I was able to see through the red mist of rage, I figured out that the schedule I had for finishing the revisions was unrealistic, particularly after I lost half a day. So, I reworked the schedule by eliminating something I did not actually need to do. Et voila, something completely workable and humane.

4. Playtime. I know. It seems counter-intuitive, but before I settled back in to work, I took a few minutes off. I grabbed a novel, brewed a cup of Irish tea the size of my own head, and settled into the couch for a quarter of an hour of guilt-free reading. I put on my most comfortable and ludicrous pajamas to make me smile, and then went back to my study to get to work.

5. A support system. My parents, who really ought to be given medals of some sort, swung into action, and told me not to worry about picking the girlchild up from school or fixing dinner. They fed me and freed me up to finish the recovery of the work I'd lost.

So, was it a perfect day? Not by a long shot. But it ended up being a productive one, in unexpected ways.
Saturday, December 12, 2009

In which I have no blog for you

I am sorry, dear readers. I intended to have a blog for you today, but I always write Saturday blogs on Friday, and it's Friday afternoon right now and I've spent the better part of today clearing up a minor catastrophe that I am still sorting out. The power failed briefly this morning, causing me to lose about 90 minutes' work. Yes, it ought to have been autosaved, but the autosave actually ATE two copies, and I have been trying to replicate the work from scratch. (Do I have a hard copy, I hear you asking? Why, no, no I don't. Do I have a battery-powered backup, you ask? Why, no, I don't have one of those either. Gah.) So, while I soldier on with my beloved book, I do hope you will forgive this otherwise blogless interlude. Back to work!