Friday Cat Blogging

Look, I'm a skinny little Halloween cat



A study in gray



All shall love me and despair!



Can I climb you? Pleasepleaseplease!

Look What I Found!

Amazon.com has ALMOST FINAL CURTAIN up and ready for pre-order! Whoot!

An interesting article from the New York Times about post-apocalyptic/dystopian young adult novels and their appeal, with contributors including Scott Westerfeld and Paolo Bacigalupi: The Dark Side of Young Adult Fiction

Friday Cat Blogging

Suave and debonair.



Now can I be centerpiece?



Have to figure out how to immobilize the hand too…



Shh, I iz a seekrit!

Superheroes and the Law

Courtesy Naomi: The Multiverse and the Law. Honestly, I find the law bits a bit boring, but it's kind of fun to look at the questions they ask.

Happy Yule

The long darkness ends, here comes the sun! (Carefully guarded by cat.)

Where is the Field Going?

Above is the question of the day. It used to be that you could come up with broad and not entirely correct descriptions of sf decade by decade.

The 1940s was the Golden Age of John Campbell and Astounding.

The 1950s was Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy -- the quirky, gritty stories by people like Cyril Kornbluth, William Tenn and so on. Post WWII, McCarthy Era fiction.

The 1960s was the New Wave.

The 1970s was women and feminism.

The 1980s was Cyberpunk.

After that, I don't know. I can't characterize the 1990s. The new space opera, maybe?

And what about the most recent decade, the Naughts? Are there any new schools of writing? Any new trends?

The most interesting thing I have noticed is the appearance of increasing numbers of non-white writers and writers from non-European backgrounds.

NASA Photo of the Day

What's lighting up the Cigar Galaxy? M82, as this irregular galaxy is also known, was stirred up by a recent pass near large spiral galaxy M81. This doesn't fully explain the source of the red-glowing outwardly expanding gas, however. Recent evidence indicates that this gas is being driven out by the combined emerging particle winds of many stars, together creating a galactic superwind.. The above photographic mosaic highlights a specific color of red light strongly emitted by ionized hydrogen gas, showing detailed filaments of this gas. The filaments extend for over 10,000 light years. The 12-million light-year distant Cigar Galaxy is the brightest galaxy in the sky in infrared light, and can be seen in visible light with a small telescope towards the constellation of the Great Bear (Ursa Major).

Friday Cat Blogging

Watch this dive I duz double backflip



Do I look like I care?



My cuteness is beyond awesome



I prefer to think of myself as stately…

Lookie, Lookie!

Hey, look who's over at Jim C. Hines' "First Book Friday." (Hint: it's not me.)

Genre Overload?

Here's a call for submission for a Steampunk Shakespeare anthology. Thoughts?

2010 Favs!

SF Signal asked me and a bunch of others what their favorite movies/books/TV for 2010 were. Check out the answers: Mind Meld: BEST of 2010

Photos of the Storm

Patrick decided we needed to go out and photograph the storm yesterday. So we did, wading through three foot drifts of snow. I fell down twice. No big deal, since falling into a snow drift is like falling into pillows.

It was a very satisfactory blizzard. Today is bright and clear. The east-west streets are being plowed. Tomorrow will be north-south, and the Cities will be back in operation.

I think the next time I need an author's pic, the one immediately above will be it.

Friday Cat Blogging + Bonus Invisible Dogs

Rotating counts as moving, doesn't it?



Still life with Kleenex



I can to hold my ligu-liq-booze!




Me too! Zzzzzzzzz



Invisible dogs aren't doin' nothin'. Honest.

Our Tax Dollars At Work At NASA

The robotic rover Opportunity has chanced across another small crater on Mars. Pictured above is Intrepid Crater, a 20-meter across impact basin slightly larger than Nereus Crater that Opportunity chanced across last year. The above image is in approximately true color but horizontally compressed to accommodate a wide angle panorama. Intrepid Crater was named after the lunar module Intrepid that carried Apollo 12 astronauts to Earth's Moon 41 years ago last month. Beyond Intrepid Crater and past long patches of rusty Martian desert lie peaks from the rim of large Endeavour Crater, visible on the horizon. If Opportunity can avoid ridged rocks and soft sand, it may reach Endeavour sometime next year.

Friday Cat Blogging

What do you mean I'm supposed to move once in a
while so the audience at home will know I'm not dead?



Go way or I burnz you with my half-open lazer eyez!



Artistic cat is deep and brooding.



I want to brush my teefs like the big kidz!

Misconceptions about Publishing

This is an interesting article about Common Misconceptions about Publishing.

This one is my favorite, as it makes me feel a LOT better about being mid-list:

"1. It’s all about the front list.

The front list gets all the attention because new things almost always do and the books on the front list are by definition new. Also, an editor’s reputation may live and die with her choices of what to publish next. But a publisher’s real asset — the majority of its good will, in business parlance — is the backlist, those books that deliver steady sales year in and year out. It’s the ballast in the ship, the revenue that keeps the lights on. It’s the main reason why some entity would bother to buy an existing publishing house at all. And the absence of a backlist is the reason why newly formed publishers often prove short lived, even despite occasional front list success."

Alien Life Found...

...on Earth.

Gizmoto breaks the news that NASA will be announcing a new form of life completely alien to anything else on earth has been discovered. It is a bacteria living in Mono Lake, California whose DNA chain includes/is based on arsenic (let the scientists explain it).

Timing

In case someone out there wonders about the timing of book production. I got the cover art for ALMOST FINAL CURTAIN on Monday, and turned in the copy edits today. I often see cover art before the book is "done" (though never before I turn in the book.)

Next, I'll see the readers' proof, which may or may not become a galley/ARC, depending on how invested the publisher is in the book's success. And, yes, I have had books that have NOT had galleys made (which means no reviews from any print publication that needs a lead time of a couple of months or more, like Romantic Times, Library Journal, etc.)

All the while, I'm working on the next book in the series, which is due in April a month before ALMOST FINAL CURTAIN hits the stores.