Category Archives: Uncategorized

Magic fairy birthday princess

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I am a few weeks ahead of the Buffy rewatch, which is important for sanity reasons and nice for the Tor.com folks too. Anyway, it worked out that this week I wrote the column for “Surprise” and “Innocence,” which I called “A Very Unhappy Birthday.”

Anyway, by some peculiarity of timing, it’s now my birthday… whee! And it started at 12:30 a.m. when our downstairs neighbor started pounding nails right under our sleeping heads. They’re replacing the windows in our building, and just got to her suite, and I’m sure there are things needing remounting. She was very apologetic. She hadn’t realized it was so late. But Still!

My plans today are modest: running out to play a quick round of 1-800-I Gave You Life, you Give Me Tech Support! with Barb, a little teaching, a big late lunch at the home of cheesy goodness on Hastings, Au Petit Chavignol.

And, if I get lucky, maybe a nap. Meanwhile, here’s your gift: a visit to Youtube for my favorite birthday earworm.

Klausnered! Blue Magic gets the business…

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Actually, this paragraph is most complimentary:

The return to Indigo Springs is an exciting and enthralling fantasy that once again looks at the consequences of “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

So you want to get going on a novel?

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As some of you may have deduced, my spate of posts on basic writing skills is an effort to create some new resources for the students in my next UCLA Extension Writers’ Program course–Novel Writing I, Writing the First Novel. The class opens for ‘business’ on April 16th and the point is to conceive of and start a novel… to do the preliminary planning and get a first chapter drafted. I’m scheduled to do the N2 class in the summer, and the tentative plan is to then do N3.

What does this mean? It’s an opportunity for writers located anywhere on the Internet, and working in any genre, to have me look over their shoulders for three quarters in a row, and to workshop their books-in-progress with a group of 10-15 like-minded writers.

Questions? Let me know!

AmReading: Stephanie Burgis’s Kat, Incorrigible

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I have been simultaneously finishing up the last book I was reading–Atlantic, by Simon Winchester, and now I am reading the clever and charming Kat, Incorrigible (Unladylike Adventures of Kat Stephenson), by Stephanie Burgis. Adorable Niecelet will be getting a copy of this as soon as she gets into chapter books, which should be any minute now, as she is of course a supergenius.

Kat is a twelve year old girl with many misfortunes: a dead and disgraced mother, a snippy stepmother and two older sisters who expect her to engage in proper Nineteenth Century Girl Behavior™, to be entirely sanguine about seeing Sister Number One married off to a heinous creep, and above all not to practice magic. When we meet her she’s chopping off her hair and going in search of work to support the family, the better to put off her sister’s impending engagement. It all goes delightfully downhill from there.

Previously read in 2012
BOOKS
1. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
2. Among Others, by Jo Walton
3. Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories, by Simon Winchester

Buffy Rewatch, BLUE MAGIC countdown

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My latest Buffy rewatch, “The Worst Part is the Stains,” can be found on Tor.com. I hope you all are enjoying these. There’s been some passionate discussion of the show in the Tor threads, and I encourage you all to sign up and join the fray.

In other news, BLUE MAGIC is a mere fifty days from hitting bookstores. There will be an excerpt on TOR at some point, and interviews and giveaways, and a Vancouver launch whose date I hope to announce soon, soon, soon, and many exciting things! There will also be a short story, “Wild Things,” which takes place between the events of the two novels. I’ll let you know as soon as I know when that’s gonna be up.

(By the way, if you are a reviewer, and you have an ARC of BLUE MAGIC, and you’ve never read INDIGO SPRINGS… drop me a line. I still have a few galleys; I can hook you up.)