jimhines

Welcome to the last of our Transgender Michigan Fundraiser auctions!

Transgender Michigan was founded in 1997, and continues to run one of the only transgender helplines in the country, available 24/7 at 855-345-8464. Every tax-deductible donation helps them continue to provide support, advocacy, and education.

Our final auction comes from award-winning and bestselling author, filker, and all-around talented person Seanan McGuire. Today’s winner will receive an autographed hardcover of EVERY HEART A DOORWAY, as well as a copy of McGuire’s album WICKED GIRLS.

About the Book:

Children have always disappeared under the right conditions; slipping through the shadows under a bed or at the back of a wardrobe, tumbling down rabbit holes and into old wells, and emerging somewhere… else.

But magical lands have little need for used-up miracle children.

Nancy tumbled once, but now she’s back. The things she’s experienced… they change a person. The children under Miss West’s care understand all too well. And each of them is seeking a way back to their own fantasy world.

But Nancy’s arrival marks a change at the Home. There’s a darkness just around each corner, and when tragedy strikes, it’s up to Nancy and her new-found schoolmates to get to the heart of things.

No matter the cost.

This auction is open to U.S. residents.

How to bid:

1. Minimum bid is $10 U.S. Bidding starts at http://www.jimchines.com/2016/12/tgm-fundraiser-mcguire/ the moment this post goes live!
2. Enter your bid in the comments. Bids must be a minimum of $1 more than the previous bid. (No bouncing from $20.01 to $20.02 to $20.03 and so on.) Make sure to include an email address I can use to contact you.
3. Each auction will run for 24 hours, starting at noon Eastern time and running until noon the following day.
4. To discourage last-minute sniping, I’ll wait until 10 minutes after the last bid to close an auction.
5. If you want to be notified about other bids, check the “Subscribe to Comments” box when you bid.

Winning the auction:

I’ll contact the winner, who will then donate the winning bid to Transgender Michigan. You’ll forward me a copy of the receipt, at which point, I’ll contact the donor to arrange delivery of your winnings.

About Seanan McGuire:

Seanan McGuire is a native Californian, which has resulted in her being exceedingly laid-back about venomous wildlife, and terrified of weather. When not writing urban fantasy (as herself) and science fiction thrillers (as Mira Grant), she likes to watch way too many horror movies, wander around in swamps, record albums of original music, and harass her cats. Her cats are plotting world domination even as we speak, but are easily distracted by feathers on sticks, so mankind is probably safe. For now. Seanan’s favorite things include the X-Men, folklore, and the Black Death.

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Don’t forget about the DAW Raffle!

My publisher, DAW Books, has agreed to contribute:

6 Tad Williams Bundles: each bundle includes one copy of Otherland: City of Golden Shadow (hardcover first edition, first printing)  plus 1 Advance Review Copy of The Heart of What Was Lost.

6 DAW December Release Bundles: each bundle includes one copy of all DAW December titles: Dreamweaver, Tempest, Alien Nation, and Jerusalem Fire, plus a bonus ARC (dependent on stock).

At any time between now and the end of the day tomorrow, December 23, donate $5 to Transgender Michigan and email me a copy of the receipt at jchines -at- gmail.com, with the subject line “DAW Raffle Entry.” Each week, I’ll pick at least one donor to win their choice of either a Tad Williams or a December Release bundle from DAW.

You can donate more than $5. For example, donating $20 would get you four entries. However, you can only win a maximum of one of each bundle. This is separate from the individual auctions. Winning an auction does not count as a raffle entry.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

Lots of friends with new books out this week. Because apparently I don’t have enough to read already? At this rate, I’m never going to reach the summit of Mount To Be Read!

Morgan Keyes’ Darkbeast Rebellion [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] is a middle-grade fantasy, the follow-up to Darkbeast, which I enjoyed and reviewed here.

Martha Wells has a Star Wars book out about Princess Leia, called Razor’s Edge [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy], set between the events of Star Wars and Empire.

Anton Strout’s Stonecast [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] is the second book in his Stonemason Chronicles. There may or may not be were-jaguars.

Laura Anne Gilman’s Soul of Fire [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] is the second part of the Portals Duology, following Heart of Briar.

Marie Brennan has put together a collection of essays on writing fight scenes, called (appropriately enough) Writing Fight Scenes [Amazon | B&N].

Elizabeth Bear’s novella Book of Iron [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] is a standalone prequel to Bone and Jewel Creatures.

Finally, the tenth issue of Seanan McGuire’s serial Indexing [Amazon] has just been released.

As always, please feel free to suggest other new books I’m forgetting, or just share what you’re reading and enjoying right now.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

One of the best parts of going to Book Expo of America? The books, of course! Including a few I grabbed when I visited the DAW office, like Seanan McGuire’s Midnight Blue-Light Special [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy]. This is book two in McGuire’s Incryptid series. (I reviewed book one here.)

This one picks up quite smoothly where book one left off. Discount Armageddon introduced us to Verity Price, cryptozoologist and ballroom dancer, who was watching over the cryptids of New York City and doing her best to avoid attracting the attention of the Covenant of St. George, something that got more complicated when she started dating Dominic De Luca, a member of said Covenant. Also, there were dragon princesses and talking mice, a scary psychic math whiz, and lots of sharp pointy things.

Book two ups the stakes: the Covenant is sending a team to purge New York City. If Verity runs, the cryptic population she’s tried to protect will be slaughtered. If she stays, well, there’s a good chance they’ll be slaughtered anyway, along with Verity. Though the Covenant wouldn’t kill her right away. First they’d force her to reveal the location of her family so they could wipe out her entire line.

While the plot felt a little light, there’s a lot that impressed me about this one. First of all, when you combine it with book one, you have a full character arc for Verity. It feels like you’re reading an episodic book, just like a hundred others, and suddenly you realize McGuire knows exactly where she’s going with Verity’s internal journey as well as the external battles. A lot of books have action; not all of them have that kind of internal development.

McGuire also demonstrates her willingness to break the rules (guidelines? expectations?) of first person point of view novels, and does so effectively. I love the way the chapter dingbats (the symbols at the start of each chapter) change when we jump to a different PoV. That was beautifully done.

I’m quite fond of the characters, as always. From the religious mice to the introductory quips from Verity’s family to Sarah the cuckoo, who we get to see much more of this time around. (Sarah is both wonderful and scary.)

Basically, it’s fast-paced urban fantasy that passes the Bechdel Test with ease, includes McGuire’s trademark creativity and banter, and makes for a fun read. If you liked book one, pick this one up as well.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

My second guest blogger of awesomeness is the award-winning author Seanan McGuire (also known as Mira Grant). Her pseudonyms’ newest novels are Late Eclipses and Deadline, respectively. If you enjoy her guest blog post, I’d encourage you to check out her LiveJournal or go say hello on Twitter.

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…zero hour, five a.m.

When I was a kid, I used to read about the lives of working writers. They seemed to live mostly in one-room apartments, where they hunched over their typewriters and pounded out a living one word at a time. They weren’t, for the most part, rich, but they kept the lights on with sonnets and movie reviews and the occasional filler column for the men’s magazines (and as a little girl, I assumed they were all writing for wrestling magazines and car catalogs, because there were some ways in which I was very, very sheltered). Edgar Allen Poe didn’t flip burgers. Lord Byron…well, he was a lord, which often comes with some financial assistance, but he never asked anybody if they wanted fries with that. Life as a writer was hard, but it was something you could do. All you had to do was write. Like Ewan MacGregor’s character in Moulin Rouge!

Times have changed. Thanks to inflation and a mutating market, it’s a little harder now to make do and keep the lights on with a few short story sales and some ghost-written letters to Penthouse every month (”Dear Penthouse; I never believed it would happen to me…”). It doesn’t help that we have more “vital expenses” than ever before. My grandmother used to talk about thinking of shoes as the sort of thing you only had to buy once every two years. I would go nuts if you took away my internet connection, cellular phone, and cable TV–and yes, I am one of those writers who still watches TV. Sometimes as much as ten hours of TV a week. I watch the shows, they do not watch me.

Regardless, even without children, I have more expenses than my predecessors, and the cost of living isn’t going down. Add on the sad necessity of private medical insurance (assuming I don’t feel like melting any time soon), and it becomes clear why I have joined the ranks of the many, the not so very proud, the utterly exhausted.

Writers with day jobs.

My clade is a strange one, neither fish nor foul, the synapsidian inhabitants of our fantastic ecosystem. Each day, we lumber from our caves, dressed in the colors of the regions, and shuffle into our places in the great working jungle. Maybe we press keys. Maybe we assemble small machines. Maybe we make your coffee. Regardless, we are synapsids in disguise, pretending to be one thing when we’re secretly another. At the end of the day, we shuffle back home, shedding a little more of the illusion with every step, until we fling ourselves at our keyboards, maybe pausing to shovel something into our mouths, and begin our real jobs. The ones we wouldn’t be doing if we didn’t really love them, because damn.

Being a working writer means constantly fighting a battle against our twin arch-enemies, Procrastination and Social Life. Procrastination says “Hey, there’s a big shiny internet right there. Maybe you could learn something cool. Become a better writer. Get even more awesome. Finally get that big break and quit your day job. Or just play Farmville for eight hours. Don’t you wonder which it would be?” Meanwhile, Social Life says, “It’s not like you’re doing anything, you’re just sitting there, we’re all starting to think you don’t like us anymore, you need to come outside, it’s not healthy, it’s not right, and hey, wasn’t that Farmville I just saw?” Sure, we have team-ups from time to time–even Magneto occasionally joins the X-Men–but at the end of the day, Procrastination and Social Life will do their best to make sure nothing ever actually gets done.

Zero hour. Five p.m.

Balancing work and life is hard in our modern world. Balancing work-that-pays-bills, work-that-soul-demands, and life can seem borderline impossible sometimes. Being a writer is exhausting, time consuming, and yes, incredibly rewarding…but it’s reward that comes after hundreds of hours of work that is borderline invisible to the people around us. It’s secret work. It’s work that only the other synapsids really see happening. And it’s work that, unless we have co-authors in our closets, we have to do alone. All this science, we don’t understand, you see. It’s just our job. Eight days a week.

Have you hugged your member of order synapsidia today?

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

I wrote both of these reviews a while back, when I was thinking I might try to start up a separate book reviewing blog called “Magic ex Libris” — a tie-in to my new series.  And then I realized there was no way in Hades that I could add another blog to my online obligations.  I found my notes tonight, and figured I’d clean them up and get ‘em posted.  Better late than never, right?

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Dead Matter [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] is the third book in Anton Strout’s light urban fantasy series, in which Department of Extraordinary Affairs agent Simon Canderous uses psychometry and a big bat to fight the nasties of New York.

Our story begins with Simon’s partner Connor taking a sabbatical to look for his missing brother, leaving poor Simon to cover twice the workload.  Simon eventually manages to slip away for some personal time with his girlfriend (ex-cultist and technomancer Jane).  Naturally, given Simon’s luck, Taco Night is interrupted by an angry, lumbering monster with lots of pointy bits.

Pointy monster is just the beginning.  Simon, Jane, and Connor slowly uncover a bigger problem — one which puts Simon in the crosshairs of just about everyone, monster and human alike.

I like this series.  I like the sense of fun, and there’s much less angst than in your average urban fantasy.  (Though sometimes it feels like Strout is trying a little too hard for the funny.)  Like the previous two books, this one is a quick read.  My only complaint is that the beginning meandered a bit.  Taco Night monster seemed like a random encounter, and it took a few chapters to start to get a sense of a larger story.

Dead Matter stands alone pretty well, but you’ll get more out of it if you’ve read the first two books in the series.

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Seanan McGuire scares me.  She’s writing two series simultaneously, under two different names.  She’s also a singer with multiple albums, as well as a gifted artist.  I think she’s also Batman.

A Local Habitation [Amazon | B&N | Mysterious Galaxy] is the second book in McGuire’s urban fantasy series about October “Toby” Daye, a half-human, half-fairy changeling and knight of the Shadowed Hills.  (In the San Francisco area, for those not familiar with fae territories.)  This time around, Toby must visit the realm of Countess January O’Leary in the County of Tamed Lightning to investigate a series of bizarre murders.

McGuire gives good fae.  Reading this series, you just know she has a dozen notebooks filled with the details of the various fairy bloodlines, territories, allegiances, and powers.¹  She makes them real.  Often more real and complex than humans, who are mostly just background noise this time around.

A Local Habitation uses the locked room mystery format.  Someone in Countess O’Leary’s computer company is murdering her people.  Is it Alex, the irresistibly sexy love interest with a secret?  April, the dryad whose “tree” is the computer server?  Gordan, the cranky but skilled healer?

There were times when I wish Toby had been quicker to pick up on various clues.  It sometimes felt like McGuire was trying a little too hard to hold back information.  In a mystery, you obviously don’t want the reader to figure things out too quickly.  At the same time, the fae of Tamed Lightning were a little too secretive, holding back one important revelation after another, even as they’re dying.

There’s a lot to like about this book.  It was great to see more of fairy society.  I particularly enjoyed the revelations about the night-haunts.  The murder mystery, once we discover the truth, was fascinating on a number of levels, and I hope McGuire follows up on some of the things we learn about Faerie.  And April is just great.  (I tend to have a weakness for dryads.)

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Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

I’m very fortunate. I’ve got a lot of very nifty friends and acquaintances, both the real-world and the online variety, and sometimes I’ve just got to show them off.

To that end, I’m declaring this an open “Promote Your Friends” thread.  Please feel free to post whatever cool projects or accomplishments your own friends have been up to lately.  (If you’re on my jimchines.com blog and your comment doesn’t show up, let me know and I’ll rescue it from moderation.)

Let the promo begin!

• My daughter Clara was promoted from purple belt to third brown in Sanchin-Ryu on Monday.
• Seanan McGuireis currently in Australia at Worldcon, where she’s a finalist for the Campbell Award for best new writer.  Between her Toby Daye books and the success of her zombie thriller Feed, I think she’s got a good shot at bringing home the tiara.
• Lynne Thomas, editor of Chicks Dig Time Lords (and my archivist!), has a new project: Whedonistas: A celebration of the worlds of Joss Whedon by the women who love them.
• My friend Steven Saus has a story online called The Burning Servant, part of a chain story project founded by Mike Stackpole.  (Stackpole sounds like he’s doing a lot of interesting stuff … I need to check that out!)
• Elizabeth Moon is a well-known SF writer, but she’s also a very good blogger.  She wrote a great post about gender bias in publishing last week.
• John Kovalic provides a very nice, pointed comment on race and gaming in this Dork Tower strip.  (Check out the follow-up strip, too.)¹

Finally, my author friends have some new books out.

• Marie Brennan’s third Onyx Court book, A Star Shall Fall [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon] (my review is here)
• Harry Connolly’s second novel, Game of Cages [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon] (the sequel to Child of Fire)
• Elizabeth Bear’s By the Mountain Bound [B&N | Mysterious Galaxy | Amazon] is out in mass market.

Your turn.  What nifty things have your friends been doing?

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Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.

I debated whether or not to post this, but in the interest of keeping myself honest and talking about all sides of this writing thing, I decided to go ahead.

My friend Seanan McGuire’s debut novel Rosemary and Rue [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] came out at the start of September.  It’s a great book, and I’m thrilled for her success. Yet there’s a part of me that compares her Amazon listing–50+ reviews, a ranking in the 1000 range, and #99 of all fantasy titles at Amazon, all more than a month after her release–to my own, and comes away feeling envious.

I hate comparing myself to other writers. A friend gets a $30,000+ advance, and while I’m truly happy for them and excited for their news, there’s also that tiny whisper asking why I’m not earning the same.

I hate it because it makes me lose sight of what I already have.  The Mermaid’s Madness [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] has a month-long face-out display at most Barnes and Noble stores.  Mermaid’s first week’s sales were the best of any of my books so far.  Publishers Weekly called it “a witty, well-constructed adventure tale about powerful women stepping up with skill and cleverness.” I’m the freaking guest of honor at Icon in Iowa in two days!

But then I compare my web-only PW review to Laura Anne Gilman’s starred PW review for Flesh and Fire [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] (which looks like an awesome book, by the way), and suddenly my good news feels … deflated, somehow. Even if only for a moment.

Screw that. The fact is, I’ve got an awful lot to be proud of.  I have five books in print. The first three have earned out their advances and gone back for multiple printings. They’ve been translated into a half-dozen languages. I even have miniatures of my characters. How freaking cool is that???

The self-doubt and the insecurities are insidious, and they don’t magically disappear once you get a book deal. It’s only three years since my first book with DAW hit the shelves; I’m still a fairly new writer. Maybe this is normal. Maybe it takes a good track record with 10 or 15 books to start earning those higher advances, and for the big review venues to really sit up and take notice.

I love what I’m doing, and I wouldn’t trade it. Fairy tale princesses might not be as hot as My Little Pony with Steampunk Zombies*, but I love these stories, and I’m proud of them. I know there will always be more successful writers, and that to compare myself to everyone who does better than me means I’m creating completely distorted expectations for myself. I know all of this, but the emotions don’t always listen to the logic.

Fortunately, I also know the envy is a transient thing. I’m proud of my friends, and happy for them. The envy will pass (for the most part), but the pride remains, because my friends rock, and they’ve earned that success. I’m happy for myself, too–happy and proud, and that will still be there after the envy fades.

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*Yes, now I want to write it too.

Mirrored from Jim C. Hines.