pbray

Feeling overwhelmed, as I often do as the Christmas season approaches. Lots of stuff going on, and like many women I am conditioned to feel bad whenever I have to say No. Even when saying No is key to maintaining mental health.

So here it is. No. With the following explanation: "You have a great crowdfunding project/I love that you're raising money for a charity/I share your outrage about X and want to help. But between bailing out a family member in a financial crisis and supporting charities in my community, I am completely tapped out."

For those of my friends who enjoy clever Regencies, and/or fantasy novels with sophisticated worldbuilding and well-thought out magic systems, this is a book not to be missed.

Regency + magic = win. Sylvia Izzo Hunter's first novel THE MIDNIGHT QUEEN combines two of my favorite things-- the intelligence and witty dialogue of a classic Regency romance woven into a fantasy world where Oxford's colleges are the center of magical studies. I loved all the details that made up this alternate Regency Britain, from the cleverly designed magic system, to the seamless integration of the regional languages and local customs. Sophie and Gray's romance is charming, sharing equal time with their quest to foil the sinister conspiracy they've uncovered. The ending is suitably satisfying, while leaving room for more novels in this universe. Both fantasy readers and romance readers will enjoy this book, highly recommended!

This month was the (nearly) annual bike vacation, and our trip took us to Mount Desert Island, Maine, and Acadia National Park. We had a fabulous time, biking, hiking and even a morning spent kayaking. There's something about a bike trip that disconnects you from your daily life--your focus narrows into the day's mileage and enjoying the sights, rather than the latest horrors in the news, or controversies on social media. I did occasionally log on my tablet, but in our downtime I was much more likely to pick up a book.

I need to figure out how to do this now that I'm back in my daily life. I enjoy being able to connect with friends on social media, and follow interesting people, but at the same time it can be a tremendous time suck and source of negative energy. There has to be a better balance.

For those following along, here's the tally of bike tours so far. And yes, we're already talking about which tour we want to take next year.

2014 Coast of Maine (Acadia), Discovery Bike Tours
2013 *no trip*
2012 Big Sur--Monterey to Santa Barbara, California, Backroads
2011 Santa Fe/Taos, New Mexico, Bicycle Adventures
2010 Outer Banks North Carolina, Carolina Tailwinds
2009 Black Hills South Dakota, Timberline
2008 Northern Shenandoah VA, Carolina Tailwinds
2007 Crater Lake Oregon, Bicycle Adventures
2006 Canadian Rockies Alpiner, Timberline
2005 Historic Quebec, Classic Adventures
2004 Bryce/Zion Alpiner, Timberline
2003 Finger Lakes, Classic Adventures
2002 Blue Ridge NC, Carolina Tailwinds
2001 Nova Scotia, VBT
2000 Mid-coast Maine (Camden, Castine), VBT
1999 Nantucket weekend, Easy Riders
1998 Middlebury VT weekend, VBT

Trips before Stacey became my personal trainer :-)
1996 Kerry Ireland (9 day), Easy Riders
1995 Maryland Eastern Shore, VBT

As an author, it's always difficult to tell which pieces of promotional swag are helpful, and which ones are a waste of money. The strongest reaction I ever received was for the lizard keychains/bottle openers I gave out for THE FIRST BETRAYAL. The lizards were both fun & useful, and were remembered by Elizabeth Bear when it came time for authors to list their favorite book swag in the essay Love It or Leave It.

One lizard to rule them all....

I tweeted the other day that I feel like a badly written timeslice algorithm--there's never enough cycles to go around. Whatever I choose to do, there are multiple other things that aren't getting done, and I never seem to catch up.

Of late my writing has been the thing shortchanged. I don't have a deadline I'm working to, and thus it's easy to focus on the other parts of my life that do come with pressing deadlines.

A while back I was invited to attend a writers retreat, and at first I was enthusiastic. Then the realities of trying to schedule this around the day job started creeping in. But in the end, I realized this was something I needed to do, for myself and for my sanity. With a little schedule juggling, I crossed my fingers and said yes. Then I went ahead and booked the plane tickets, so I'm committed.

So now I have a deadline. Three months from now I'll be hanging out with other writers, discussing our works. So I damn well better have something that I'm enthusiastic about working on and sharing.

And cross my fingers that the day job doesn't get any more insane.

You'd think this would be obvious, but recent evidence suggests not.

First, never assume that your cover letter is going to stay attached to your manuscript. This is especially true for electronic submissions, where your attached file may be downloaded and stored separately from the email. Always include your contact info on page 1 of the submission.

Second, always include page headers with the page number and either your name or the story title, preferably both. I received multiple submissions without page headers of any kind, and it was a freaking pain in the butt when the printer spit pages on the floor and two of those stories got mixed up. Not to mention that later I'll wind up adding page numbers to make it easier to discuss the story with my co-editor, e.g. "The scene that starts on page 4 is..." What makes it even more inexplicable is that these stories were submitted in Microsoft Word where adding page headers is a basic function.

Even stranger was the story where the author had forgotten to put their name anywhere in the manuscript. Just a bare title, no name, no contact info, presumably they assumed that I'd be happy to hunt back thru the emails to figure out who had sent it in.

Finally spell check is your friend. Proofreading is your friend. Take that extra hour for one last pass before you send your story in. And if you know you're terrible at catching your own mistakes, have someone else take a look at your work.

Remember, first impressions count. A poorly formatted story sends the signal that you can't be bothered with the details, and will be difficult to work with. Don't give the editor a reason to be cranky before she reads a single line of your story. Because if it comes down to a choice between two stories that are equally good, the editor is going to pick the one that didn't make her sigh with annoyance. Trust me on this one.

Turns out the Yellowstone supervolcano is 2.5 times larger than previously thought (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25312674). mizkit and I agree this calls for a new Syfy movie, in the tradition of Supervolcano, Super Eruption, etc. All we need is to file the serial numbers off an old script, throw in a handful of sharks a la Sharknado, and we're good to go. We could probably write the whole thing in an afternoon.

This post started as a joke, but now I'm halfway convinced that we could do this, and get Syfy to buy the movie rights.

Chemist Pleads Guilty in Massachusetts Crime Lab Scandal.

Annie Dookhan pursued renown along a path of lies in depth background piece.

Estimates are forty thousand criminal cases were potentially compromised. Over one thousand cases have been dismissed or failed to be prosecuted since August 2012.

Between 2009 and 2010, the time it took Dookhan to conduct a test went down by more than half. At most work places this is the time when your boss would ask you to share your best practices with the team, so everyone could achieve the same rates of efficiency. Instead she remained the lone outlier, over twice as productive as the next best employee. By 2010 she was five times more productive than the average lab employee.

If she had kept her test numbers merely high rather than inflating them astronomically, it's likely she would never have been caught. And we'd be naive to believe she's the only bad apple in the system, and that this is the only crime lab that had inadequate supervision and a complete lack of checks & balances.

This summer I was a guest lecturer at the annual Odyssey Writing Workshop. My talk was on writing a series, spanning everything from why you might want to write a series, the pros and cons of doing so, the various types of series, to plotting techniques for both individual book arcs and series arcs. Along the way I shared bits of wisdom from my own experiences and those of fellow writers on how to (and how not to) write a successful series.

The lecture has now been distilled into a two-part podcast at the Odyssey Podcasts website here. Look for podcast 67 (Part 1) and podcast 68 (Part 2).

And my thanks again to Jeanne Cavelos for inviting me back to Odyssey, and to the students who made it such a great experience.

A friend is working with a new house publicist on their 2014 book release. For obvious reasons I will not name either friend or publisher, but the marketing plan seems to have missed the point that this essay was meant in jest Our Marketing Plan by Ellis Weiner.