matociquala has posted the map of the Iskryne we figured out a couple years back.

And, for those of you who, like me, think the Edda of Burdens is the shiniest thing since chrome, she's also posted her map of Eiledon.

matociquala and I have sold two sequels to A Companion to Wolves--tentatively titled A Reckoning of Men and An Apprentice to Elves--to Tor Books (i.e., in this case, casacorona), via my wicked and yet excellent step-agent arcaedia.

I'm closing the polls on this round of Q&A. Fear not! I shall do another, probably sometime after Corambis comes out.

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A reminder: if you do not have a LiveJournal account, please sign your comments. I like to know who I'm talking to.

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Not a Q, but I'm saying it anyway because, well, because dammit.

If your religious beliefs lead you to conclude that marriage between two consenting adults of the same sex/gender is wrong, then that is a reason to refuse to preside as a minister at their wedding. Or to refuse to attend their wedding should you be invited. It is not a reason to write/campaign for/vote for/pass legislation on the subject. Getting married is not a democratic process. We should not be able to vote on whether somebody else's marriage is real or not. Proposition 8 and all its kind make a travesty of marriage, and as a woman who has been married for ten years to a man whom I love deeply, I object with all the strength I have.

I'll say it again: people who love each other choosing to get married is not a threat. It is not an insult. It is not a desecration. It is an act of love. Trying, through and because of hatred and fear, to prevent people who love each other from having that choice? Threat. Insult. Desecration.

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And now on with the show.

Q: ( spoilers for The Virtu )

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Q: ( more spoilers for The Virtu, also for the end of Melusine )

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Q: This is a silly question but why did you give Midmay a scar? I am curious. Wasit just a random thought...oh lets create this character with a a scar down his face? :)

A: ( if you haven't read Melusine, this is a spoiler )

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And finally, a bunch of questions about A Companion to Wolves, which I have also prevailed upon the lovely, talented, and recently tattooed matociquala to answer.
( cut for possible spoilers and certain length )

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Thanks to everyone who asked questions. You all made this a lot of fun.

The Lone Star Stories Reader will be out soon. (Features my story, "A Night in Electric Squidland.")

So will Fast Ships, Black Sails. (Features the story I co-wrote with the fabulous and talented Elizabeth Bear, "Boojum." Think Lovecraft as written by Tiptree.)

The September-October issue of The Willows features a new Kyle Murchison Booth story, "The Replacement."

Speaking of Booth, here's a story by story review of The Bone Key. I think Ryan Harvey thinks I think a little too well of myself (didja follow that?), which is totally his prerogative. I would like to confess, however, that I have never read Algernon Blackwood--aside from failing to get through "The Willows" (oh the cruel irony! the shame! I weep!)--so the presence of Blackwood that Harvey detects "echo[ing] as strongly" as Lovecraft and James through The Bone Key is illusory. I'm really sorry.

And speaking of Bear, two reviews of A Companion to Wolves, here and here.

On a lighter and less whiny note, petronelle has written a Companion to Wolves/Due South crossover.

No, really.

What's the coolest place you've ever been?

Acrocorinth, which is the crusader castle on the enormous hill overlooking ancient Corinth.

I had to think about that question for approximately 0.05 seconds. *g*

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What are you looking forward to reading, now that the book is done?

Oh the stacks and stacks of unread books that lurk and mutter about the house. I've got several on Nazi Germany; a couple on witch hunts; I found Bernard de Voto's 1846: The Year of Decision; the list goes on and on and on. *g*

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Who is your favorite ghost story author?

M. R. James.

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What is your favorite first line of a novel (not your own)?

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

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And, because it is another very frequently asked question, Are there plans for any more stories set in the universe of A Companion to Wolves?

The answer there is a resounding and definite maybe.

matociquala and I wrote A Companion to Wolves for fun, and we agree that we don't want to write more of these books unless they'll be equally fun. Misery loves company is not an axiom that applies to collaborative writing projects, let me tell you. So it could happen, but the Magic 8-Ball just says ?

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[To ask your question, go here.]

1. Having just finished The Wee Free Men, I point everyone to Match It For Pratchett.

2. Fourth Street Fantasy Convention is June 20-22. matociquala is the Guest of Honor, and I'm going as her date.

3. The last print issue of Subterranean Magazine has a story of mine in it.

4. As does the current issue of Weird Tales.

5. David Berberick is trying to answer the question, Why do people love Tolkien? If you want to help, take his survey.

6. If you've read A Companion to Wolves and noticed a typo, you could do matociquala and me a tremendous favor by commenting either on this post or on her post asking for the same favor.

7. L. Timmel Duchamp reviews The Bone Key for Strange Horizons.

8. muneraven also reviews it.

9. And from the Department of Head Trips, Alison Sinclair (whom I do not know, but I wish her well) has sold a fantasy trilogy which is described as being "in the tradition of Sarah Monette and Ellen Kushner."

o.O

I have a tradition?

icetome reviews Mélusine and The Virtu and generally thinks I don't know what I'm doing.

Lighthearted Librarian has some advice about reading The Doctrine of Labyrinths.

jess_ka thinks Bear and I together are greater than the sum of our parts (A Companion to Wolves).

2ce also likes the wolf book. (Favorite line from the review: "you need to show up to the party prepared for the viking gang bang.")

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I know, I promised to shut up, didn't I? But, see, something happened* this morning, and I need to give it time to settle.

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked.

I've had the experience more than once while writing these books of putting something in, basically because it seemed like a good idea at the time, and only much later, like a book or two later, finding out what it was for. Today that happened with something in the first book. In the first fifty pages of the first book, no less.

Yeah. Three books later, I know why I did that and what it means.

This is a completely unnerving thing to have happen, even while at the same time it is tremendously cool and shiny. Because it gives me the heebie-jeebies. What if I'd taken that thing in book one out? (I almost did take out something in book one that turned out to be incredibly important in book three and is going to come back again in book four. I needed to cut a hell of a lot of words, and my editor said, "This scene doesn't seem to be doing anything." And I stood my ground, even though at the time, she was completely right.) What about all the things I did take out (because they didn't seem to be doing anything)? In other words, this is a part of the creative process that not only does my rational mind not control, it doesn't even know about it except as a fait accompli.

I'm not at all a fan of mysticizing creativity--in fact, quite the reverse. I don't think the Romantics did any of us any favors in trying to divorce art from craft, or in suggesting that artists are like geese who lay golden eggs and any attempt on their part to examine what they do or think critically about how they do it will only kill the goose. But, honest to Pete, as far as I'm concerned, my mind has just done a magic trick. I don't know how it works. I don't know what just happened.

But here it is, a golden egg and a very startled goose.

And now that I know what I'm doing, I need to pause and think about how to do it better.


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*Events that take place entirely in thought also "happen," even if it feels weird to describe them as such.

More reviews of A Companion to Wolves: here, here, and here.

On the other hand, redzilla is sick to death of trilogies and wizards and thieves, with scott_lynch and myself as exhibits A and B.

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Note to self: the maribou is the thing with the feathers; the caribou is the thing with the antlers. You only hurt yourself when you get the two confused.

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UBC
Demos, John Putnam. Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
( cut for those who would really rather not )

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I have a theory about tip sheets. My theory is that once you start signing them, you enter an infinite loop. Thus the fact that no matter how many you sign, the stack never gets smaller.

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I really want to see the Muppets do Tom Waits' song, "Don't Go Into That Barn." I am a little worried about what this says about me as a person.

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Around about the twenty-second of this month, I am going to go hole up at heresluck's place in a kind of minimalist writer's retreat, and there will be radio silence on this blog until after Minicon, whereupon we will resume with, so help me blue fuzzy thing, a complete draft of Corambis which I am not ashamed to show the world. That, at any rate, is the Plan. I'm not sanguine, exactly, but I admit to some cautious optimism that this may work.

Via oursin, a lovely, thoughtful article on craftsmanship, by Richard Sennett. "Innocent confidence is weak," may need to join "Perfection is death" on my monitor.

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The wolf book gets three positive reviews, all of which are thoughtful, and all of which are engaging with different aspects of the novel. That's just . . . nifty.

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I don't even know how to explain what I love about Mateusz Skutnik's Submachine games. They're point-and-click flash games, focused on puzzle-solving--not unlike, in their different medium, the Infocom text-adventure games I loved as a teenager. It isn't the Submachine games qua games I find compelling--I inevitably resort to the walkthroughs sooner or later because I am (a.) lazy and (b.) playing Submachine when I should be, oh for instance, writing a novel--nor the story, such as it is. It's the art (I also love the visible learning curve from The Basement to, for example, The Future Loop Foundation), and the way the art builds the world. There's a sort of steampunkish, Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson ethos to the Submachines, and yet the undertones are not of whimsy, but of fear. There is an intrinsic, pervasive creepiness to this abandoned world, and I think that's what draws me back in with each new installment.