Dare to Be Stupid

Time when those of you who are fans get to laugh your butts off at absent-minded me.

What is the name of my China equivalent? Zhangzhi, or something like that?

One day, I hope soon, there will be a companion volume, and I'll be able to look this stuff up!

Speaking of companion volumes, do any of you know of any companion volumes or guides to the worlds in book series? Here's what I've seen/have/know of:

LYRA'S OXFORD
the companion to the Septimus Heap books
the companion to the Percy Jackson books
the Tolkein companions
a mess of Harry Potter companion books for all ages
A TOUGH GUIDE TO FANTASYLAND by Diana Wynne Jones (edited to add: this isn't a companion to D.W. Jones' work, but more a companion to high fantasy in general--a very ongue-in-cheek one!)

(edited to add: I need titles, folks! Booksellers' search engines aren't real happy when you give them general descriptive terms--they spit back nonsense! Thanks!)

If you know of other such companions to fantasy books/worlds, please let me know! We start work on a Tortall companion this year, and we'd really like an idea of what other people have done!

And I apologize for neglecting you for so long. I have been following the crisis in Iran since the day after the election, because I got caught up after seeing pictures like this:



I've been blogging about it like crazy elsewhere. Also, Random House wanted me to join Facebook, and Facebook has been trying to devour my life. (Back, Facebook, back! The bad guys have burned the bridge over the swamp and now Beka & Co. have to go around!) (Yes, I've been working on MASTIFF, more than anything else.)

Random House is running a The Fantasy Road Trip Contest this summer, entries to be judged by Libba Bray, Rick Riordan, and, well, me. Click on the link for details!

eta: I'm getting flags from a number of people who are telling me that the first link to the petition to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is broken. Do use that second link, though!

This is one of those times when a story on the big media touches on our everyday lives, however lightly. Amy Goldman Koss is the author of THE GIRLS (which was recorded by Full Cast Audio, the best novel about girl bullying I've ever read), SIDE EFFECTS, POISON IVY, and other books about contemporary life. And you all probably know I'm buddies with Bruce Coville, owner of Full Cast Audio in addition to his writer self. He, the creative director of Full Cast, Dan Bostick (also a friend), and Bruce's daughter Cara (my assistant) all had dinner with the Koss family one night, when they got to meet Amy's husband Mitch, a cameraman who was one of the first journalists who was allowed into North Korea.

That's the background. Here is the mail that is doing the rounds of Amy's friends and anyone who cares about these things:

-----------------------------------------------------------
Please forgive the mass e-mail. As most of you know, our family friend, my husband Mitch's work-partner of many years, Laura Ling, and a co-worker of theirs, Euna Lee have just been sentenced to 12 years in a labor camp in North Korea.

We are all still reeling.

Their families hope to present the petition (link below,) with as many signatures as possible (their goal is 50,000) to the Permanent Representative of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to the United Nations in New York.
The second link is to a new petition to urge President Obama and Hillary Clinton to get negotiations moving for the girls' release.

Will these petitions hasten the girls' release? Who knows? But Laura and Euna's families are desperate to try. So please sign, and pass along, if you will.

Thank you my friends,
yours,
Amy Goldman Koss

to the Permanent Representative of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to the United Nations


to President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Please sign these. Protests like this resulted in the freedom of Iranian-American reporter Roxana Saberi from jail in Iran barely a month ago, so our voices do make a difference!

this is what I did.

What?! It grows back!

There are more Full Cast Audio produced videos on the recording of Kristin Cashore's GRACELING. If you like the book, or if you're curious about how these audio books are made, check them out on YouTube. My bit is only commentary--the FCA gang did the actual work!

When South Carolina's Governor Mark Sanford said he wouldn't take federal stimulus money unless he could only use it to pay down state debt, Lady Knight Casey Edwards looked at her state's crumbling schools and decided to fight. She filed a law suit against the governor to force him to accept the $700 million for schools. The suit was dismissed in its original filing--Sanford had not actually turned down the money at the time--but she filed again with the help of a law student, and with others who had rallied to her cause. This time, the court ruled in her favor. Our knight won funds for schools that she has finished attending (she recently graduated).

Bravo, Casey Edwards, noble and true!

What's this? you ask. I can't believe I haven't babbled about this before, because you know who the other two featured guests are?

Sherwood Smith (the Wren books, the Court and Crown duet, and the Inda books) and Kristin Cashore (GRACELING and FIRE [October 7]).

I squeed like a Jonas Brothers fan when I found out they were coming. I did.

This is not your average conference. For one thing:
all attendees are encouraged to propose presentation topics related to women in fantasy: history, social studies, fan studies, business, specific books and series, fantasy generally, or even Sirens's 2009 focus on warrior characters and the women who write them.
But this you will have to do quickly--the deadline is June 7. (My bad--I'm still recovering from tour and a week-long siege of flu. I've only been able to leave the house for two days.)

If any of you attended the Narrates conferences--The Witching Hour and Terminus are the two I went to--then you know what kind of shindig these wonderful women put on: plenty of food for the brain and plenty of fun, lots of really intelligent attendees sharing ideas, writing, and favorite modes of entertainment, late-night talk sessions with people you wouldn't mind being stuck on a desert island with. All this, and Vail, Colorado in October!

The registration is limited to 500, so you might want to check out the Sirens site. This is the very first conference of what I hope will be many, moving all over the country and covering a variety of topics, if things go well and people show an interest. So please, if you can come, sign up--this isn't a drop-in kind of thing! The setting will be more intimate than the average science fiction convention, and we're hoping some other writers will come to make the mix even richer.

I hope I'll see some of you there!

For the last few years, since e-readers came on the market, I've been hearing a LOT of talk about how they are Teh Doom uv Publishin. Of late, with the growing popularity of the Kindle, the talk has grown louder and more frenzied, and many people are actually convinced that Publishing Iz Teh Toast. And it's true, e-readers have their many uses, particularly when normal people can load material onto them. Editors can load a bunch of manuscripts onto them without developing back and neck problems, as in years past. Readers with an e-reading can board a plane without checking their knapsacks at the side because of all the books they're toting. There are advantages.

But I think the Panicking Publishing Folks have lost their logic buttons. Here's why.

Until e-reader engineers can work out a way to stop screen flicker, as in one screen fades to black as the next screen fades in to white, no one with a seizure disorder or migraines will be able to tolerate an e-reader for long, just as we were unable to tolerate Gameboys, DS2s, color backgrounds on our computer terminals until we could control the screen refresh rate, or music videos or photo scrolls on our iPods. (What? You thought those migraines were coming out of the blue?)

There are literally masses of us who like the aesthetic experience of the book--the weight in our hands, the smell, the practice of turning pages, the satisfaction of placing them on shelves and ordering them on our shelves, cruising bookstores and libraries as we handle this book and that, reading the back and flaps and bits of the inside, finding our favorite parts in our old books because the books fall open to them (oh, I suppose you could bookmark them). My husband, who LIVES on his Kindle, still buys hard- or paperback copies of his favorites, just so he has them.

How in hell are coffee table books going to translate to e-book format, pray? Those big, colorful pages with the unique scent of an art or photo book that is balanced across your lap or spread on the table before you, giving you a hint of what distant vistas or the glory of the great masters are really like. I regularly buy the Spectrum books, the results of the Spectrum science fiction, fantasy, and horror art competition in all its glorious color and variety. E-readers don't even do color yet. I also buy photo books and HUGE books of photos taken all over the world, and I want them precisely because they are big, because they give me a feel for what those people, palaces, and gardens are like in their home places.

How is your lovely moppet going to feel when you place the e-book of GOOD NIGHT, MOON? in front of her? How will you feel when you go looking for your $400 Kindle to find your toddler has taken a hammer to it so she can find THE CAT IN THE HAT? How many future readers and writers do you think will be saying "My first download was . . ."?

edited to add:
Raisedbymoogles reminds us that you can's (or shouldn't) take your e-reader with you into the tub. /edited-to-add

And really, something I would have thought even the precious literati would have figured out by now, the thing that is really beginning to annoy me.

90% of the world lives in poverty.

They can't afford computers. Too many of them don't have the electricity for one, or telephone coverage for the Internet.

HOW IN THE NAME OF ALL THE GODS EVER ENTREATED BY THE IMPORTUNATE HUMAN RACE ARE MOST OF ITS MEMBERS EVER GOING TO AFFORD E-READERS, OR DOWNLOADS, OR REPAIRS? "THE WORLD" DOES NOT BEGIN WITH THE UPPER MIDDLE CLASS AND UPPER MIDDLE CLASS OF THE WESTERN WORLD, AND "THE WORLD" WILL BE READING PRINTED BOOKS.

Most of publishing knows that, in this time of recession, most parents are still buying books for their kids. How is it, then, that they can still wail of the doom posed by e-readers, when they also know that people are tightening their belts who normally spend, if only to point out the exceptions when they do?

1 + 1 = . . . people with less money can't afford e-readers. They do buy books.

Aaah, fooey. Like the doctors Jones, we are pilgrims in an unholy land.

POOR PEOPLE COUNT TOO, DAMMIT!

I was feeding pigeons this morning, and I heard a couple of passersby, apparently with nothing better to do with their lives than pass judgment on someone who wasn't bothering them, matter about "rats with wings." I've had people shout at me, claim pigeons are rats with wings, and tell me pigeons carry disease, all while the pigeons and I were minding our own business.

So here are a few things about rock doves, which we call pigeons.

They clean up more organic garbage off city streets than the average ordinary human being.

In almost 20 years of handling healthy and sick pigeons with bare hands, sometimes as they have vomited and splooted on me (my term for birds releasing dung, usually on my shirt or shoulder), I have never gotten sick from them. Ever. I get the average person's allowance of colds--it's not like I'm superhealthy. The old wheeze about pigeons carrying disease is just that--a wheeze. They get dirty from living in our world, and when they don't scrounge for a living in dumpsters, they're as clean as other birds.

In exchange for their work in cleaning up our streets, we reward them by poisoning them, running through their flocks, and leaving thread, clumps of hair, fishnets, plastic cord, and string out where they can get it tangled around their feet, where the parts under the tangle get infected and, if the bird is lucky (or runs into a nut like me), drop off--anywhere from single toes to an entire legs. (If they run into a nut like me who can get the jump on them after luring them with peanut bits, they end up having the string cut from the tangled foot, or feet.)

Pigeons also learn very quickly. It's why learning and behavioral psychologists often use pigeons in their learning experiments.

I like them. They can be very silly. They can be a little crazed, like the bird on whom I based Slapper. And they have a place of their own in the world.

Here I am in Seattle, having spent the day in part at the Aquarium admiring the giant octopus, conversed with a pigeon guillefoyle (I don't know what we were saying, since I was using my bird noise, but the bird found it interesting) and drew the attention of leopard seals, got some ideas for future stories, came back to my room and read Emma Bull's wonderful FINDER. And I did some writing.

It's been a good tour so far. I met Rebecca Stead, author of the magical FIRST LIGHT, at Books of Wonder in New York, and Cinda Williams Chima, author of the Heir trilogy and this fall's THE DEMON KING, in Cleveland. (I love meeting authors I like!) The booksellers, librarians, and teachers have been wonderfully welcoming. And of course, I have been meeting lots of very cool fans of all ages who have been thrilling me with their comments, questions, and obvious pleasure in my books. I had forgotten just how much I love talking with readers. They tell me when they started reading my books, who introduced them to my books and who they introduced to my books, how my books helped them during rough emotional times and the transitions to new homes and new schools. We talk about their writing problems and my writing problems, and they're always surprised to find out that most of them are the same.

And we laugh at the same jokes. Nowhere else in my life can I get an entire audience to laugh just by saying "Neal." Or, "Tris thinks she can pass as an ordinary mage."

I also had one third of a strawberry shortcake that was as big as my head at the W Hotel in Milwaukee.

I would say, so far, so good!

As of May 3, BLOODHOUND is #1 on the New York Times Children's Bestseller List.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And you folks put it there! Thank you, thank you, thank you! \(^O^)/

Fireworks don't really say it this time, so

Your poem vanished! Why did you delete it--it was wonderful! It made me so happy!

(At least I have a copy in my mail notification, but how can you deny others the fruit of your pre-exam genius?!)

Tammy

I can see I'm not going to be able to answer everyone's comments personally, so I just want to thank all of you on the "BLOODHOUND-Published" thread! Your congratulations and your comments about this and other books of mind do so much good for my spirits, and I really enjoy reading what you have to say. I just don't have time to answer everyone because I'm spending the week on RandomBuzzers, answering questions there, in addition to giving publicity interviews on the phone, and packing for a month of book tour. I leave Saturday, and you may not hear much from me until June, though I'll try to check in from the road!

I also wanted to create this thread for anyone who wanted to mention specific points about BLOODHOUND but didn't want to spoil the book for anyone who hasn't read it yet. That way you can say exactly what appeals or doesn't appeal to you!

I can't send you a private message. Do you want to disable your privacy option for me, or should I post my answer to your message here?

BLOODHOUND is officially published PUBLISHED!!!!!!!!

::doin my little touchdown dance::


edited to add
While I was visiting a local bookstore today, signing copies, I noticed two other really good books I've read in manuscript are out. Patricia Wrede (author of DEALING WITH DRAGONS and the other Enchanted Forest Chronicles, MAIRELON THE MAGICIAN and its sequel, and co-author with Caroline Stevermer of SORCERY AND CECELIA and other well-mannered Regency fantasies) now has THE THIRTEENTH CHILD published. This is set in a very different America which was never settled before the Europeans came. The great creatures are still here--the sabertooths, the mammoths--but so are dragons. And while the seventh son of a seventh son is blessed magically, his twin sister is considered to be cursed. It's what she does with her life once her family moves to the new frontier, trying to settle where the antelope and the sabertooth play and magic isn't too reliable, that makes for a fascinating story. You'll find THE THIRTEENTH CHILD in Young/Middle Readers, but I think it's just as interesting for teens and adults.

Maggie Stiefvater's LAMENT is to be found in teens. It's been out since October, and if those of you who love tales of dark faerie haven't read this one, you should. Deirdre is a musician and a cloverhand, which means she can see faeries. Her ability doesn't warn her that handsome Luke, whose presence helps her to play despite her previously-overwhelming performance anxiety, may be more than he seems, nor does it help her when she is caught at the center of a war among the faerie that has gone on for centuries. She and her friends are battered by a cruel faerie queen, while in the life she once thought as "normal," she makes discoveries that can help to save her life, or end it.

I figure BLOODHOUND will slow some of you down for only a day or two, so here are two more really good reads to keep you from gnawing your knuckles in reader frustration!

I tried to send an answer to your question, but you have your privacy options on--I couldn't send it! Do you mind if I post it here?

Check out my webpage! Thanks to Web Designer Cate Burlington, who provided the basic design, and Tim Liebe, my IT guy and Spouse-Creature, who did the adaptation and development, we have a new look for the first time in . . . well, in a long time! (One note--some areas are still under construction, like the Galleries page. And I need a new bio, and I haven't added the 2008 favorite books list yet . . .) ;-)

Well, I got a helluva good surprise today. For those of you who don't know the labyrinths of publishing, there comes a time for some of us when we are given what's called "strict laydown dates." That means that when the publisher tells you the book will be in stores April 28, sometimes it will be there two weeks ahead of time, or three weeks, or more rarely a week after, but if you're a strict laydown date author, that is the day your book will be placed on the bookshelves. Some of you have already run into this with my books. I used to go to bookstores a couple of days ahead of time to sign books so readers would be able to buy signed copies on the official in-store date, until I was informed of my new change in status. Apparently this was a big deal. I didn't like it, but it was a sign I was moving up in the world.

So. A lot of you know BLOODHOUND has an April 28 laydown date. Well, I just got an e-mail from Random House. It seems that, in order to meet a vacancy with Barnes & Noble's publicity schedules for displays, BLOODHOUND is going to be released on April 14!!!!!!

Yep--you heard it here first--two weeks early!

My body isn't a big ol' splendid structure like Dover Castle, in my current icon. It's getting to be a bit more like parts of Conwy Castle, here:




Which isn't that bad. I could be down only to grass outlines of where my motte and bailey once stood. (No, I'm not going to tell you--you can look it up.) ;-)

What I'm trying to say is, I'm off for one of those little indefinite hiatuses, having a couple of bone spurs ground down in my left shoulder (apparently my whole body is trying to turn into one of those really weird suits of armor, not understanding that the spikes that look really cool coming out of the joints of glossy metal are rather painful when growing out of flesh).

A walk in the park, seriously. Easy-peasy. And if this new voice-activated software Tim just downloaded actually works, I may be back when the pain meds are no longer a factor.

So carry on as usual. Tim's working on a whole new look for the webpage, which should be up soon. The Academy Awards are a week from now for those of us who are silly enough to care about fashion. (I can't help it. The Academys are the only awards show I like for the material, so I can satisfy my fashion lust for luxurious dresses, otherwise covered only in bridal magazines, which I refuse to read!)

Oh--did any of you see Friday night's premiere of Dollhouse? Eliza Dushku and Joss Whedon are back on TV!!!!! Let the games begin!

Brent Hartinger, of THE GEOGRAPHY CLUB, THE LAST CHANCE TEXACO, and THE ORDER OF THE POISON OAK, among other wonderful books, has started up an amazing new website that covers fantasy media. It's called TheTorchOnline, and it has information and reviews about new and old movies and forthcoming movie projects, with more to come on games, books, music, and web material. Its mission is to cover fantasy, which I think is great. So many speculative fiction sites only tend to stress science fiction over time.

Right now it has articles on the new movie "Coraline," based on Neil Gaiman's book; the "Voyage of the Dawn Treader" movie; and Comedy Central's new fantasy TV series, "Krod Mandoon," as well as video clips of Monty Python's "Knights Who Say Nee!" and "The Greatest Adventure" from "The Hobbit."

The look is very professional; it allows for comments, and with Brent writing it, you know the content is going to be fresh, fun, and intelligent.

Go take a look, why doncha, and tell Brent I said hi!

At the Montgomery County Book Festival, someone said something odd to me:

"I think Numair [the Numair books I'm scheduled to write] will be the next Edward Cullen."

What do you think?

edited to add:

Yikers! I believe I should have specified that she meant "in terms of popularity and sales!"

I think I get very different fans from Stephanie Meyer here!