And at 76,000 words I'm declaring it a second draft, and returning a full half-day early from my Internet vacation. (Hi!)

It's a muddle, but perhaps less than a muddle than usual for one of my second drafts. Not only the right story, but quite possibly the right first 2/3 of the structure, for all that there are underpinnings and arcings and characters to think about. And I kept my last line between first and second draft, which doesn't normally happen, either.

Now to step back for a few days, look at the big picture, and get a handle on all the things I still need to research.

(Writing happened during my Internet vacation, but I do still owe stories and readings and emails to some of you. Still working on it!)

I have some thoughts on things learned by stepping back from social media, and a bunch of character letters, and some other odds and ends I'll start posting over the next few days.

In the meantime, here's "Raven," by Jen Hajj, a Tucson Folk Festival discovery whose music has been getting much play on the current book's playlist.

How have you all been?

Still Internet-vacationing until the end of May, but popping in long enough to let you know I have a guest post up today as part of Megan Crewe's The Ways We Struggle series, on the challenges of letting things go, the benefits of holding on, and how both these can affect one's (okay, my) professional life. (There's also an lj version of the post here.)

Also (as long as I'm here) I'll be at Phoenix Comicon Memorial Day weekend. Here's my schedule.

ETA: Also also, the folks at Adventures in YA and Children's Literature are giving away a copy of Faerie Winter this week.

I'm still checking email, so if you need to reach me, janni(at)simner(dot)com is the place. Otherwise, see you in June!

Right. Had a few odds and ends to wrap up first, but for the rest of the month, I'm taking an Internet vacation. Combination of needing to focus on the book and just needing to re-ground myself in the outside world. I may pop in to point at a guest blog post or two, but aside from that, won't be hanging in any of my social media haunts.

I'll still be reading email, though, so feel free to drop me a line at janni(at)simner(dot)com if you need (or even want) to get in touch.

See you on the other side of the desert's first dragon's-breath days!

Awwwww! Baby tarantulas! (via lnhammer, of course)

If spiders aren't your thing, here, have this cam of a red-tailed hawk with chicks.

Afghan women risk their lives to write poetry (via megancrewe)

You won’t allow me to go to school.
I won’t become a doctor.
Remember this:
One day you will be sick.

Abi Sutherland at Making Light on playing Minecraft and the our-world challenges of moving away from accumulation-based goals.

Malinda Lo on writing about kissing. Short version: it isn't all about the lips.

Shortpacked on false equivalence and why the power-fantasy depiction of men and the sexual-fantasy depiction of women are not at all the same thing (via stina_leicht)

If I’m gonna get the hots for Batman, he needs to be built for dexterity, not power. Let’s make him more lean. And you know what, seeing his eyes is important. They should be large and intense. Let’s throw in some rosy cheeks and kissable lips.

Phoebe North on Defining Genre: The Problem with Dystopian Romance

... the suggestion that "dystopian" literature be split into "dystopian romance" and "regular" dystopian seems to me overly gendered. Though likely unintentional, it’s difficult for me to read this as separate from a continued effort to diminish the writing and experiences of women and girls through false categorization ... and the privileging of one set of experiences over another.

kateelliott on narratives of women in pain and fear.

Too often when the stories of women in fear and pain are told, we are seeing them in pain, we are being pushed into the perspective not of the woman who is suffering pain but into the perspective of the person inflicting the pain. We’re constantly being asked to identify with inflicting pain on others.

Sure I'll wear a tiara. What weapons does it have?

Girls who play in the dirt grow up healthier.

Love poems for long-distance relationships. So where was this website the four years my spouse and I were in a long distance relationship? What? Waiting for the web to be invented? No excuse.

A boy who lost his home in Japan's tsunami has his football wash ashore in Alaska. Where a couple finds it, identifies him, and returns it. A couple weeks later, they find a girl's soccer ball and do the same.

Mur Lafferty writes a letter to her daughter.

So. The world hates you. You are considered the worst thing to be compared to. Throw like a girl. Talk like a girl. Cry like a girl. God forbid we ever be girls.

matociquala on why when as women we diss ourselves, we also hurt the generations after us.

Robin LaFevers on second chances in one's writing career. Because it's not all about the overnight success story, and because many of us have rebooted our writing careers more than once. (via malindalo)

Bath time for baby sloths. (via, well, you can probably guess)

Shakespearean sonnets. Set to pop music. And then played on period instruments. (via aamcnamara)

Dear Characters,

Seriously? Your plan to save the day requires faking a makeout scene?

I can't imagine that will have any emotional fallout.

But don't let me stop you,

Me

I was a guest blogger today at Snowdrop Dreams of Books, talking about my chaotic writing process. Stop by!

Welcome to Bordertown is a Locus Award finalist!

I'll be at Phoenix Comicon May 25-27 (Memorial Day weekend). Come join me, and a whole bunch of other folks, too!

A few YA books I've been meaning and meaning to talk about, some of which I need to talk about today if I want to actually do so before their release dates. :-)

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Silence, by Michelle Sagara

I've been following Michelle Sagara's (aka Michelle West) Sun Sword series for years--it's one of the few ongoing otherworld adult fantasy series I do follow--so when I heard she was writing YA, I was pretty excited, and pounced on the chance to read this one early. (Disclosure: Michelle is a friend and I had also already read an early draft of this book as well.) Silence takes prose and themes I already enjoy and focuses it into a more self-contained (though not completely self-contained; I believe there will be sequels) YA-shaped story. The results made reader-me pretty happy.

Along the way, this story about a girl who finds she can see the dead has things to say about magic, how it does and doesn't shape who we are, about dealing with loss and how that shapes us as well, about community, and about the ways we can and can't look out for each other.

It also features one of the least threatening dogs in YA fantasy, in spite of the fierce depiction of same on the cover. :-)

This one's due out tomorrow, May 1. ( Publisher's summary )
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A Confusion of Princes, by Garth Nix

I've been trying to figure out just how to say, "this book wasn't quite right for me," and also "it's a terrific book and you should read it," without the first statement undermining the second. Because it is a terrific book, and for the many readers for whom it's the right book, I think it's going to be very much the right book.

A Confusion of Princes takes the inventiveness of Garth Nix's Sabriel books (which have some of my favorite worldbuilding ever), and applies it to a hard science fiction world instead: an empire controlled by a group of ruling princes (both male and female) who are trained to the role from birth. It has the sort of worldbuilding that makes me believe not only in the bits of the Empire that I see, but also in the bits of the Empire I don't see; that convinces me the world of the story is deeper and broader than the pieces of that world we actually see. That world is deeply tech-infused (bitek, psitek, mektek) in ways that are deeply woven into the story, and that also give the world a hard science fiction texture that's grown less common than it once was.

It's the sort of texture and the sort of world and I think the sort of story I hear many readers craving at science fiction cons, when looking for new YA reads for themselves or for teens in their lives. I've been wishing I had more books like this to point them to: something that harkens back to the sort of heavy-on-the-rivets, exploring-the-universe space opera they loved as kids, but that also has a more contemporary and less dated feel, and that both embraces the trope of the competent young man ready to set out and make his fortune and questions it.

If this book wasn't for me, it's only because this sort of story often isn't (I've always favored Star Wars over Star Trek, too). But it's well-written and inventive and the sort of thing so many readers I know do love, and that many of them haven't been finding lately, and I'm looking forward to recommending it.

A Confusion of Princes is out in Australia and due out May 15 in the U.S. ( Publisher's summary )
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Dust Girl, by Sarah Zettel

I have been wanting to burble about this book for ages (more than a year, actually, since I was asked to read it for a blurb), but didn't want to burble too soon, lest all the burbling be forgotten before the book was anywhere close to coming out.

It's a dust-bowl era fairy book, which might initially sound strange, but it works. The magic fits the era and the world so well that I believe in both, in part because while fairies are the focus, it's made clear it's not the only magic at play in the 1930s America, in part simply because it's all rendered so well.

This book made me feel the way I felt back when I first discovered urban fantasy, back when I was devouring books by Emma Bull and Charles de Lint (even though it's like neither a Bull nor a de Lint novel)--like magic is waiting in the world all around us, if only we can manage to see it.

I also love the way the protagonist, Callie, is smart and thinks things through; and the way this book deals with race and makes it part of the larger story instead of ignoring it, because race was huge in the time and the places of this story. (And fairy dance marathons! And the train station! And the way I could just taste the dust ...)

A gorgeous book, one of my favorites of the past couple years, full of texture and voice and shivery magic and so many of the things I go to fantasy for.

This one's due out June 26, so I may burble some more between now and then. ( Publisher's summary )

I've been reading eco-fantasy writer A.M. Dellamonica's journal (planetalyx) for some years, loved her first novel, Indigo Springs, and know from the photos she shares there how much she loves living in Vancouver--so I was delighted when she agreed to write a guest dispatch upon the release of Indigo Springs' sequel, Blue Magic. Here's what she has to say about the city she's made home:

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I am beginning this essay in the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library, a fantastic building inspired by the Roman Colosseo, designed by local architectural wunderkid Bing Thom. It first opened its doors in the summer of 1995, just as I was heading to Seattle to attend Clarion West, and whenever a writer friend comes to town I drag them to the library to marvel and envy.

The building is exceptional, in its way. Vancouver isn't chock-a-block with fantastic architectural gems, like Chicago. We have two art deco structures--the Marine Building and the Burrard Bridge--and they're both wonders to behold. But it wasn't history or buildings or anything man-made that initially brought me here twenty years ago.

It started with the weather, to be honest.

I grew up in Northern Alberta, where the winter snow is deep and the summer air is moist and mosquito-infested. And from an early age, I hated the cold with a passion that bordered on the pathological: I told wild lies to my grade school teachers to get them to let me stay indoors during breaktimes. I forged notes from my parents about why I had to stay in. They couldn't have been credible, but sometimes the teachers took pity on me and let me stay indoors. Other times, I hid in the library and under desks, hoping to avoid the one-hour exile to the deep freeze, striving to stay where it was warm, where I could read Hardy Boys novels and write bad poetry.

Now that I've been gone for twenty plus years, I can see the beauty of the Prairies. I can look at a field of canola or barley and recognize it as the landscape of my childhood, and think fondly of trees covered in inch-thick blades of frost. I miss prairie thunderstorms. I even write novels set in the north, in the winter, and make it sound like my point of view characters quite enjoy it. I can remember how cool it was like to live so far north that the sun didn't quite go down in the height of summer, where the sky dimmed but never blackened.

But as a young adult, I wanted to be gone. I chose the West Coast as my future home before I had any idea what it was like. All I knew it was supposed to have less of two things I wasn't so keen on: subzero temperatures and conservative homophobes. Lunging across the country could have worked out badly. I might not have suited Vancouver, or it me.

I immediately fell in love.

To me, the whole Pacific Northwest has as much magic as anything in my books. It's a better and more balanced form of enchantment than what Astrid Lethewood releases in Indigo Springs and Blue Magic.

First, the turn of the seasons. It pours and blows from November to January, and that's what passes for winter. Winter weather doesn't mean thirty below and driving icicles: it means the sun is hidden behind a cottony gray quilt. But sometimes, just at dusk it sinks below the sheet of clouds, sending gold light in a horizontal sweep across the sky, into the still-falling rain, and we get full-arc rainbows to the east.

Spring? The crocuses and snow-drops start to appear as early as February, and there's a perceptible greening every week afterward, wave after wave of plant life waking up--daffodils, tulips, hyacinth--until the cherry blossoms come out and coat the city in pink confetti. The weather lurches drunkenly from brightness to pouring rain and back again, and in April we have hailstorms. People complain about the transition from winter to spring, the unpredictable torrents of rain, but I am blessed with a flexible schedule. While others pray for bright weekends, I write fiction by a window and watch the water fall. When blue sky breaks the clouds, I go out and chase herons with my camera.

In summer, it's rarely hot for more than a week, and all of the heat is eased by sea breezes. There's none of the steam, none of that sense of breathing cooked syrup. It's bright and breezy and the False Creek seawall fills up with cheerful people roller blading, biking, walking their dogs. Cormorants sun themselves dry on odd-looking sculptures and kingfishers hunt from the evergreens.

Then there's autumn, my favorite. The evening air becomes silky, the maple leaves turn red and fall, and when they get rain-drenched on the sidewalks they leave their ghosts tattooed on the concrete. The orb weavers cover every nook and cranny with spiraling webs, and the night's dew freezes into fleeting morning diamonds. On those first cold mornings, when it's clear, the rooftops steam as the sun spreads across them.

In all seasons, Vancouver's twenty thousand crows commute. At dawn, they wing westward, toward downtown and the harbor, spreading out to forage. At sunset, they fly home to roost between the highways. Looking up at the end of the day means seeing streams of black birds on the wing, cawing as they go.

See? Magic.

So what about the people?

Well, I know now there are assholes in every population; there's nothing so wrong with Alberta. And Canada in the now isn't what Canada was in the Eighties--it's better everywhere, I think. But demographics don't lie: Vancouver's leftier, more liberal, and so much queerer than the middle of the country. The neighborhood I chose, East Vancouver, is even more so. There's a mixed, live and let live community here: it's not remarkable when I hold hands with my wife on the street, or kiss her goodbye at the bus stop. I sometimes forget that's not a gimme for all of us. Man, I'm lucky.

People do say this is a hard city in which to meet people. It's said so often and fervently that I suppose it must be true. I started volunteering at a local rape crisis center the minute my feet hit the ground: one of the women I met there is still one of my best friends. I've sung in two choirs - Out in Harmony and A Vancouver Women's Chorus. I know fans. I know artists. I know activists. A bunch of the people I went to college with moved here.

What's especially pleasing is that I also know so many of my neighbors. After twenty years, I can't walk down the street without bumping into someone I know: people I sing with, other writers, or the folks who are also regulars at my favorite coffee house, Cafe Calabria. There's a guy who's been selling me kibble for twenty years and four cats. A chiropractor who should be sainted. The Vancouver Events guy, Stephen Duncan. The Books on the Radio host, Sean Cranbury. The guy who made the cake for my big legal gay wedding in 2003. Oh, and also my mother, who followed us here in the Nineties. No small thing, that, and she loves it here, too.

I meet people who like the idea of moving to Vancouver but are afraid to locate anywhere but one of its perfectly manicured suburbs. Some do it, only to end up feeling alienated from their next-doors in White Rock or Maple Ridge. They go green with envy when they visit and an amble down the Drive ends up with me chatting with four passers-by within ten blocks. This makes me unbearably smug. I can walk downtown in forty minutes. Live in Tsawwassen and you have a cool but hard-to-spell address and a two-hour commute to work each day.

As a child, I got moved around a lot. So did my wife. We've been in the same apartment for eleven years now, and it's a lifetime record. And sometimes we talk: we've been here twenty-one years, not just the same city but within the same six-block patch of real estate. It's impossible to not get restless. To long for a shift, a change. New landscape, different accents. Could we do an acreage? Would we like the Okanagan?

We try to think of somewhere where we'd be just as happy, anyplace that might fit as well. Even half as well. It's got to be out there, but neither of us has glimpsed it yet.

That's what I call damned good luck.

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A.M. Dellamonica is author of Indigo Springs and its just-released sequel, Blue Magic, both from Tor Books. Indigo Springs won the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. You can read her blog on her website or over at planetalyx, and you can view many more pictures of the city she loves over on her flickr stream.

Here in Tucson I volunteer with the Hopi Foundation's Owl and Panther Project, an expressive writing and arts group for refugee youth and families. (Led by fellow Tucson writer Marge Pellegrino.)

This is a group near to my heart, and for the next few days we have something of an opportunity, because all donations to Owl and Panther will be matched dollar for dollar by the Kellogg Foundation--and donations made Wednesday in particular also go towards possibly qualifying us for a larger, more competitive grant.

If you feel moved to support Owl and Panther's families--and a group that I've seen make a real difference in the lives of those involved in it--you can donate here. (And thanks for listening, regardless!)



"On the seventh day, only the owl and the panther were still awake. Because they did not succumb to sleep, they were given the power to see in the dark." -from a Cherokee Creation Story

Congratulations to Christina B and patty1943, winners of the novel and short story prize packs, respectively!

And thank you, thank you to everyone who entered the Faerie Winter paperback contest! Reading your blog posts, tweets, fb posts, tumblr posts, google+ posts not only helped spread the word about the paperback, but also just made me smile. :-)

Happy reading, and happy spring, to you all!