Michelle Sagara

I am in the process of slowly answering email. It's dismaying to see how very behind I am, because I've answered about eighty-five, and the queue hasn't noticeably shrunk. To anyone who has sent me email in the last mumble mumble, I offer my grovelling apologies for the absence of any reply.

I am almost finished Cast in Fury, the fourth of the Kaylin novels.

And I've been asked to be the GoH at Conclave in 2008, the weekend of October 3-5th. I've also happily accepted, and while it's a long way away, it's never too early to pencil things into your Calendar. Except, of course, the calendar on my wall still has a chunk of 2007 left...

Well, it's that time of year in Canada -- tax time. So I've been finding out just how much of the tax money actually has to go to the government. I will be pulling out my hair and cursing in all appropriate languages until the end of April. Yes, I could have done my taxes in January, but the incentive of sending the government money early isn't much of an incentive.

I did however get the c-print of Jody's cover painting of House War: The Hidden City, and I adore it beyond all reason. I can't post it because it's the art, and the art, without the titles, etc., isn't a marketing tool. But it's a inverted triangular frame, solid black border, Jewel on the inside with a dagger in her hand; it's not a full body shot, but I really like it. The background -- and that doesn't really do justice to the motif -- is from an element in the book itself, and it takes up the rest of the cover in solid greys with touches of pale gold. When it was described to me, I thought it would be a design element -- but that's not the effect it has. When the cover mock-up is done, and if I can get a copy of it, I'll post it here. It's a very different look, but to me, recognizeably Jody; my husband, however, said he wouldn't have been certain if he hadn't already known.

Cut from email sent to me by my long-suffering DAW editor:

Jody’s painting looks great. Did we send you an image? I can’t remember.

*waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaail*

The perceptive reader will now have guessed what the answer to her question is.

cszego asked me to work today. I don't normally work on Thursdays anymore, but there wasn't any reason not to, and I agreed to cover the store while she and the Store's owner ferried boxes to the World Horror Convention, taking place in the heart of downtown Toronto at the Marriott wedged into a small space beside the Eaton Centre.

( the kind of Thursday it's been )

I emailed in corrections to page-proofs for Cast in Secret today, and I would be feeling slightly virtuous about the fact that they actually got done if I hadn't spent quite so much time catching up on the after-affects of living life under a rock. But Adam Wilson, the long-suffering person to whom the task of levering such things out of me has gone, declared himself satisfied. So that's that book until August 2007.

I like the cover.

In book related news, Luna has bought 2 more novels, set in the same world, with the same characters, as the previous CAST books. The first book is tentatively titled Cast in Fury; I can't actually remember what the second of the two was tentatively titled – but I'm not so great with titles, so maybe that's for the best.

( Small completely unrelated notes about the SFWA election )

While I don't have a pub date for the first HOUSE WAR book yet (and I don't have a title either), I did find out today that Jody Lee is already working on the cover. Happy now :)

I'm watching Samurai 7, 2 episodes at a time, with my two children. I can now do this because the youngest can read the subtitles (he's the only one who complains) now; before, he couldn't, and my older son didn't like the dubs (and I have to admit I loathe them), so I have a bunch of stuff that is this household's variant of child friendly that we can watch together.

( Read more... )

I read -- and adored In the Night Garden -- but will probably review that for F&SF.

Or is this common practice in an industry I admit I don't know as much about as I'd like?

I admit up front that I know pretty much nothing about what's standard for the Romance genre in our industry, and maybe offers like this are common. The reason I got this at all is because in order to show up for someone's chat in the Luna forums, I had to sign-up, and signing up apparently meant I wanted the eHarlequin newsletter. Either that or, as I was running late, I didn't actually read much beyond the "we own all your words and can quote them whenever we feel like without paying you" part, which meant that I was reluctant to participate freely in those forums, i.e. there could have been an opt-out that I missed, but I was also in the process of missing the reason I was signing up in the first place.

And the small post on accessibility has kind of turned into a state of the genre thing, and is a thousand words long, with digressions and rambling, which I'm not at all certain is pointful because the state of the industry now is actually a year or two old (the consequence of lead-times, among other things).

ETA: I can't think of an sf/f genre publisher or agent who could offer these services, and not be pilloried. I won't go into a long rant about why I think it's not a good idea to submit 400 pages of manuscript this way, unless anyone thinks it's not self-evident. Oddly enough, I probably wouldn't feel as squeamish if an individual were offering the same services -- but submitting to someone specific doesn't carry the weight of a large and well-known publisher behind it. And I think the PiTA factor of offering these services would outweight the dollar per hour value of actually doing the work, on an individual basis.

So the pernicious idea that all publishers are now pursuing a model in which "bestseller or bust" is the anthem (I want goose-stepping, too) must come from somewhere.

( One minor digression )

I think that the notion of "bestseller or bust" comes partly from writers and agents and the stories that arise from midlist sales.

( Reasons for the persistence of this myth, which aren't even bad reasons )

( Another digression, about momentum )

I can't believe it's been almost two years since I've posted anything on LJ.

Sadly, while I seem incapable of this belief, the reality of the date of my last post is staring me in the face, and I must concede that the absence that feels slightly cobwebby and distant has been a long one.

In this time, I have done not perhaps as much of note as I would like; I survived book trauma and turned in the first volume (act surprised) of HOUSE WAR; I am almost finished the third volume of the series I am writing for Luna; I spoke to Stephe Pagel and apparently he still wants to publish the short story collection which was mentioned here so very long ago.

I am busy going through email which was also sadly neglected, and have once again polished my grovelling skills to a burnished, lovely hue. But I've been playing catch-up in a big way, and even in two years, everything about publishing seems to have shifted some. I've been musing on that.

My hermit-like existence is about to end in Austin, TX, although for lack of hotel space on Thursday, I'll be arriving Friday afternoon.

Oh, and I cannot remember how to make any LJ tags at all >.<. Tanya? Thomas gave me minor heck for failing to mention that the filming of the blood books is underway. I -did- point out that he could easily have read this for himself, but on the whole, think the blame for the lack of information probably resides on my shoulders.

And now, I'm off for a glut of LJ reading...

ETA: I love you guys -- thank you for the warm homecoming.