Just a quick note: all of my Mundania titles (Shadow Fae, Lord of Wind and Fire Series, Moon/Sun/Star) are 20% off with coupon code SANTA at checkout, if you buy directly from the publisher.

I'm about 5,000 words behind on NaNoWriMo,which meant that I cut the latest chapter of Fire in the Void a bit short. But at least I managed to post something. I'm actually cursing the timing a bit, because the events of this and the next chapter are pretty important in terms of character development, and I don't want to be distracted while trying to get them right. Which is why I should have freaking planned ahead a bit more. Ahem.

Check out Star-Crossed Romance's blog today to read an article I wrote wherein I babble about one of the most important characters in any book: the villain!

I'm also giving way a PDF of any of my back-list, so please comment or send me an email to enter (details can be found on the blog).

Time for a mini-rant...if you aren't interested, please click to something more interesting than my diatribe.

There are a number of authors whose work I enjoy, and a number of artists I enjoy following. Unfortunately, there are a few who make it almost impossible to follow their work.

They're brilliant...but they keep changing their user name, their website, their blog. The first/second/fifteenth thing they try doesn't work two weeks after they start posting, so they redefine themselves. They can't find their audience, so they keep morphing, keep changing, chasing that elusive niche.

Except they don't stand still long enough for the audience to find them. In the world of the internet, it takes time to build an audience, time to find a niche. If you keep re-inventing yourself every few weeks, your audience can't find you, because you haven't been under the same name/site for anyone TO find you.

Please, if you have any respect for yourself, or confidence in your talent...keep the same identity for at least a couple of years. Switching wildly from persona to persona WON'T get you the recognition you crave, because if I'm following X, I won't know to look for you as Y. I know it's hard, and I know that the temptation to generate a new, potentially more popular, persona is great. But I WANT to follow you, and I can't. How many silent others have the same desire.

Please, just stand still. We'll come to you. I promise.

Just got back from Steamcon 2009 which was absolutely fantastic. I was lucky enough to see two performances of Girl Genius Radio Theater, as well as a panel where Phil Foglio and Cheyenne Wright drew their versions of "The Ultimate Steam Monster" according to crowd suggestions. They spent most of the time answering questions about Girl Genius while they drew, which was nice. There was also a Q&A panel with Abney Park, who are a bunch of very funny, very entertaining people.

I'd say over 90% of attendees dressed for the occasion, so I can't even begin to list the mind-blowing costumes I saw. Wow. It was also fun getting to meet several people I know only online, all of whom were extremely nice. I spent too much money in the vendors' room, but it was all worth it.

Here's what I was doing on Saturday night--one of the wildly-flailing arms near center stage belongs to me (I was about 3-4 rows back).



After a couple of hours of jumping up and down I expected to feel like crap on Sunday, and was pleasantly surprised that my legs weren't even sore. I took Sunday off from the con and went on the Seattle Underground with my friends, which was extremely interesting. Monday was a travel day, and today I'm totally wiped and jet-lagged, so if this post is even more meandering and confusing that normal, that's why.

I just heard that author Louise Cooper passed away yesterday from a massive aneurysm. I first read her Time Master Trilogy (the first book of which you can find here, if you are so inclined) in high school, and it left an indelible impression on me. The way that, by the end of the series, it had turned so many fantasy tropes on their heads was an eye-opening revelation to my younger self. I'm very certain that the often-skewed take on fantasy to be found in my own work can be traced directly back to this seminal series. Even though I never met Ms. Cooper, her work had a very personal and profound impact on me, and news of her passing fills me with regret for all the words that she'll never have the opportunity to write. It's said that worlds die with an author, and I regret never having the opportunity discover where she would take us next.

I'm a little sleep-deprived today, which apparently makes me philosophical. Given that's probably a bad combination, maybe the following should be taken with a grain of salt, as the coffee-fueled babbling of a woman who had about five hours of sleep last night.

At any rate, when I was laying in bed at oh-dark-thirty in the morning, I started wondering if the staggering cluelessness and lack of compassion demonstrated by some people comes from the assumption that life is a zero-sum game; i.e. anything one person receives, whether tangible or intangible, comes only at the cost of someone else losing it.

In other words, the thought process (conscious or unconscious) is that if someone else is happy, you "pay" for it be being less  happy, because there's a finite amount of happiness to go around. If I lift my neighbor up, then I by default must be torn down. If the race/ethnic group/gender/sexuality/you name it  gains more rights, then somehow everyone else must be losing rights. You can only build yourself up by keeping someone else down.

Which of course is obviously bullshit. Granting basic human rights to someone else doesn't take them away from me. Wide-spread education lifts up a society and creates better opportunities for growth, than restricting it to the elite few and leaving everyone else in poverty. I don't have to ensure that my neighbor is miserable to keep my own store of happiness. There are actually very few things in life that are zero-sum games; even things like limited resources have often been either expanded or replaced by other resources due to advances in technology, so it's hard to say where a limit is real and where it's only perceived.

Now, there are certainly plenty of people who are just bastards and don't care about anything else, so long as they've got theirs. And obviously, anyone with a vested interest in maintaining the power structure have their own motivations. But I do wonder how often the unconscious assumption of the zero-sum game comes into play with people's prejudices. If nothing else, it certainly explains why certain people are often threatened by the idea of extending rights to non-whites, or women, or LGBT, even when there's no apparent way doing so could logically impact them.

Just something to ponder on this cold and rainy day, while I sip my next cup of java.

I've updated the ebook version of my novella Rain on the Mountain (about a jaguar shaman and a lady cop investigating a series of supernatural homicides). It's now available in multiple formats from Smashwords, so if you hate PDF, you now have several options to choose from. Even better, you can read 50% of the novella before deciding to buy!

Not a country music fan, but I found this to be hilarious. It seems United Airlines damaged a musicians very expensive guitar and then refused to give him any compensation. This is his response.

Why, yes, I am still alive. Also a gigantic slacker, as evidenced by my lack of updates.

My old domain host was taken over by a new host, which changed the ftp protocol, username, and password for my domain. Now I can get it to work with FireFTP, but not with Dreamweaver. In theory alcohol might be to blame, but as I got it to work with FireFTP, and tried several combos with Dreamweaver, I think it's something else.

So I'm ignoring it for now, as I can get FireFTP to do my updates, it just takes an extra step. Instead, I'm watching old episodes of Buffy (Season 2). I wish we'd learned more about Principal Snyder's background. He knew about the Hellmouth, but we never found out how, or why the city council figured he was qualified to deal with it. (Spoiler, he wasn't.)

I feel like I should have something more interesting to say, but it isn't happening tonight. Oh, you should all run out and buy the DVD version of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog just for the singing commentary. It's awesome.

This isn't the first time I've had major issues with Amazon, but this is particularly vicious. Under the pretext of protecting their customers from "adult" offerings, Amazon has removed sales rankings (and thus removed from the best-seller lists, or even a search where results are ranked by best selling) from GLBT books. This includes books that, despite Amazon's claim,  have no sex scenes or are even listed as YA.

I find the entire situation to be reprehensible at best. For more information, please visit these links:

http://markprobst.livejournal.com/15293.html

http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11992.html

I'm guest blogging today over at You Gotta Read, about the subject of "opposites attract" in fiction.

I've just come across this fascinating article about the internet revolution. Although the article focuses on journalism, specifically how the internet has affected newspapers, what he's saying has many wider implications.

Hilarious and awesome rap video about HOX genes. I'll admit, I have a special fondness for them, as I had to give a presentation on HOX genes for my Evo Devo class a few years back. I found the most beautiful and simply elegant experiment I've ever come across, and made it the centerpiece of my report. I'll try to dig up the citation tomorrow for all you science peeps. In the meantime, enjoy.

I'm reposting this, because I think it gotten eaten the first time. If I double-post, my apologies! Anyway, I was just letting everyone know that author Ann Lory has interviewed me on her blog. There's also a contest; anyone who comments will be entered to win an ebook version of any of my backlist.

Chapter 16 of Fire in the Void is now available. After the doom and gloom of the last few chapters, this one has a few laughs, or at least chuckles. You can find it here.

Went to see Coraline over the weekend with David. If you haven't seen it yet--highly recommended. Being me, I wanted to know more about Whyborn, but I think that's more a compliment than a complaint. The creature design was amazing as well. We saw it in regular-old movie version, not 3-D, which was fine with me, as I think 3-D could have ended up a distraction from the content.

Possibly the most moving thing I've ever read about the White Rose Society.

I keep forgetting to post when I update Fire in the Void, because I am a slacker of gargantuan proportions. But I remembered this time, so if you're reading (hey, it's free), then chapter 15 is now available.