Alaya Dawn Johnson's Blog

Amazon/B&N/Powells

Well, Zephyr has landed. With any luck she’ll be at a bookstore near you (though if that bookstore is a Barnes & Noble, that will be the MAINSTREAM section, NOT Fantasy/SF—and god, don’t ask me why, the story is too long for the telling).

I am very happy to have this book finally released in the wild. I love the cover and hope that it might entice a few more people to read about my supernatural filled, “Other” Lower East Side. This book has a lot more of Gentleman Jimmy Walker, with some extreme liberties taken (It’s a supernatural New York!) It has some scenes that I’m very proud of, just because I think it’s hard to write humor, and that kind of old-school, droll quasi-British rompery is some of my favorite stuff. Hopefully a few of you will find this about as quarter as amusing as I did (being amused at my own books is one of my greatest sins).

Anyway, even if you can’t buy or read the book right now, I’d appreciate any signal boost for this that you can spare. And if you’ve read it, and have the time, please leave a review on one or a couple of the big retailer sites. It’s always a huge help!

OTHER THINGS I HAVE BEEN DOING:

There is a FREE Zephyr Hollis short story up right now on Tor.com. I am extra lucky because it got its own beautiful illustration by Jonathan Bartlett, which is marvelously moody and very twenties. It's called "The Inconstant Moon" and is a prequel story about how Zephyr first came to New York and started to rethink what she'd always been taught by her demon-hunting daddy. As this is free, it's a great thing to send to someone who might be interested in the books but wouldn't jump into the more expensive novels.

AND, potentially even better, I wrote a long essay for Heroes and Heartbreakers about one of my favorite book couples of all time: Vicky and John from Elizabeth Peters' Vicky Bliss series. I ended up re-reading all of the books, flagging my favorite sections and then painstakingly organizing my thoughts into a multi-thousand word essay featuring many quotes and even something vaguely resembling a thesis statement. I spent about ten hours writing it (after the re-read) and then had strange, fevered anxiety dreams about having to finish an essay for a class the next day. Hmmm....

I think there's a couple other guest bloggy things going up in the next few days. Perhaps I will pop in here and link you to them, since otherwise me and the blog content are not very good friends.

In even more other news, some potentially cool things are developing on THE SUMMER PRINCE front, which I will announce as soon as I can. And I'm working working on a new YA novel that makes me very happy, though it is a little tricksy. Like all the best novels, of course :)

Amazon/B&N/Powells

The situation:

I have four copies of the ARC of Wicked City, the sequel to Moonshine that is being officially released on April 10. They are doing me no good on my bookshelf, but I have been procrastinating in the difficult work of, uh, giving them away.

Know nothing about Moonshine? Reviews and an excerpt here. Curious about Wicked City? PW review and the first two chapters here.

The Solution:

I have four books, and I am attempting to use four different social media platforms. So I will use them in a (hopefully successful) experiment. Each media platform will give away one book. So, on Tumblr, reblog this post and I will put your name into a (virtual) hat. On Twitter, retweet it. On Facebook, comment/post to your own wall about it (liking is good, but won't get your name in the hat). And finally, on my home base, dear old Livejournal, you can comment on the post and/or write something on your own LJ (or Dreamwidth!) and link back to me. If you are on more than one social media platform, you can get your name in as many "hats" as you desire. If by some strange coincidence the same person gets drawn out of more than one "hat," I will arbitrarily re-draw for one of them, so that the books go to four different people.

The Wrinkle:

I really have no idea how many people have read Moonshine, or are really keen on reading the sequel, but just in case there are people out there who are REALLY EXCITED, as opposed to just curious, I offer you a bonus. In your reblog/retweet/facebook comment/LJ post, if you ALSO list a food or drink that Zephyr enjoyed in the first book, you will get your name put into the hat twice. I figure you'll only know that if you read the book, and that way you double your chances of getting a copy. Again, this goes for each "hat" separately. Yes, I know you can game this system; no, I won't stop you.

The Details:

My twitter is @alayadj, my Tumblr is alayadawnjohnson.tumblr.com, my Facebook page is Alaya Dawn Johnson, my LJ is here. You have from today (Monday, 3/12/12) until midnight EST on Friday 3/16/12 to get your name in the drawing.

The Winners:

I will contact you via whatever platform on which you won, and we will work out the shipping. I humbly request that all entries live in the US or Canada (or be willing to Paypal me a couple of dollars to help with shipping fees to their country). If I don't hear back from a winner after three days, I'll draw from the hat again.

The Fallout:

You are in no way obligated to review the book by winning this contest, but of course I would be thrilled if you do.

Good luck!

ETA: You can tweet at me about the giveaway as many times as you want, it doesn't have to be a strict RT. And since there's space constraints over there, it's no problem for the food to be separate from the rest. (Of course, no matter how many times you tweet, you'll only get 2 entries in the hat, but don't worry about cramming everything in one tweet).

It can finally be told…my YA debut is coming out next spring from Arthur Levine/Scholastic, and I am so excited!

You can read the announcement on PW’s Children’s Bookshelf (scroll down). Here’s the description, though:

Alaya Dawn Johnson’s The Summer Prince. Set in a utopian city in a futuristic Brazil, it’s a coming-of-age story about a rebellious young artist and her unlikely friendship with the city’s “summer king,” who is destined to be sacrificed after one year of rule, as they spark a revolution that threatens to overturn the city. Publication is set for spring 2013.

Hello, world! Happy new year? Yeah, I know, this livejournal has been gathering dustbunnies lately. So of course I started a Tumblr yesterday, since what my life needs is more social media platforms I never update! Yeah! Hmmm...the idea is that Tumblr might be a little easier for me to update regularly, since I won't feel like I have to, you know, write things. But of course the first thing I ended up posting was a long essay. Whatever, life, it is weird. But since I wrote it there, I will repost it here, in case anyone is strange and is interested. Also, consider this a PSA to follow me on Tumblr if you have one, and that way I will be able to find cool people I wish to follow as well. Oh, and I discovered recently that there are people who have actually and literally drawn fanart for my books and that really needs some celebration--and a forum where I can easily repost them :)

I ought to update this LJ a little more often this month, anyway, since Wicked City is coming out on April 10, which clearly necessitates something that might vaguely resemble promotion. Or at least a method of getting rid of the ARCs I currently have sitting on my bookshelf. I'm thinking a contest revolving around drinks/food Zephyr had in the first book. This means that if you are one of the two dozen people who read Moonshine, your chances are very good for having me mail you a signed ARC! Excited? Heh.

Anyway, welcome to my Tumblr, and here is the story of the very first Altered Fluid retreat to Woodstock, wherein your heroine drives a pinto in a snowstorm up a mountain:

(Okay, maybe it didn’t look quite that bad, but it was a near thing.)

You can imagine the delight of my writer friends when I chugged up to their apartments in that thing. Why didn’t I get the upgrade, they asked? I ranted at them about car rental fraud and oily sales guys until they sighed and squished their luggage in the back. And we were off! There were supposed to be seven of us meeting at the house in Woodstock, but the passengers of car #2 had decided to be smart and wait out the storm and come up the next day. At first, things looked fine. But then the storm hit. And I got a little lost on the kind of narrow, winding mountain highway that’s tricky to drive even on a clear day. Oh, and did I mention that I’ve never actually owned a car and the longest period of sustained driving time I’ve had in my life is the summer of my freshman year in college? But No Matter! I have Courage! Determination! A tiny car with bald tires and a broken heater driving in a whiteout so thick my only hope of making off the highway alive is to tail behind a truck and pray that it can see better than I can! Awesome!

We survive the highway. Of course we do—I’m a brilliant driver. Or, you know, lucky. By the time we make it to the actual town of Woodstock, there’s at least a foot of snow on the ground. We are sliding over the tarmac like we get points if we hit the net. It turns out the rental house is up a mountain. Of course it is. A goddamn mountain, in a goddamn foot of snow, in a goddamn pinto bulging with luggage.

We try, that’s all I can say. I get halfway up the mountain before the little-car-that-could-barely gives a plaintive cry and refuses to do any more. The slope is too steep, the snow hard-packed and icy. So three of us get out of the car while the fourth gets behind the wheel. We push, trying to get the car to a place with better traction, never once wondering what would happen if the car lost its precarious grip on the road and slides back down over us. Oh, my salad days of youth.

(Salad days)

I fondly recall the sight of two of my friends bravely ascending the mountain on foot, hardly disturbing the hush of blanketing snow, with only a frail book light to guide them. Then the trees swallow even that sight and I wait for a minute or two before they come sliding back down the hill, informing me that we had better go back down. So it falls to me to back this sad little car back down the hill, since I can’t find a place to turn around. Too bad they didn’t cover backing cars down winding mountain roads covered in ice in the dark back in driving school.

Finally, one of us has a brilliant idea. We drive to the local bar, at the base of the mountain. I park and walk inside, hoping to ask someone for help. Unfortunately, this will have to be help of a non motor-vehicle variety, because everyone is fucking sloshed. A guy at the bar tells us, very earnestly, to call the Woodstock taxi. He starts rattling off a number, but halfway through the woman drinking next to him objects.

“That’s my number!” she says.

Drunk guy pauses. “Oh, yeah. I guess so.”

Okay, drunk people are a bad idea. On the other hand, this is the only bar in town. Clever little writers that we are, we park right outside the entrance and lie in wait, stranded travelers, out to snare unsuspecting sober pickup drivers on their way to getting sloshed. It works! We load our bags into the back of his pickup, squeeze ourselves into the front, and up we go, tearing up the icy roads that had stymied us for an hour in about three minutes. The guy tells us about an ex of his who lived up this road. We nod earnestly, yes, ex-girlfriends who live up mountain roads, we have much sympathy.

The house is gorgeous. A picture-book perfect stone castle with an aerie and a tower room. The beds are monstrous, the linens high thread count, the well water pure enough to wish on. We savor the victory of our first night by jumping on the mattresses and talking late into the night. A writer pajama party, with the snow still falling outside, and our little car parked at the bottom of the mountain.

How will we get down this thing without a car? Who cares, let’s drink, let’s talk, let’s write.

A quick note to let you know that if you'd like to read Wicked City many months early, you can drop by the magick4terri auction community and bid on a personalized copy. Also, you can browse through the many other amazing things on offer, all to help out Terri Windling. Terri's work has been a huge part of my life since I was thirteen, and I was recently lucky enough to participate in an anthology set in her Bordertown world, so I figured this was the least I could do.

So I just got ten advanced reading copies of Wicked City (sequel to Moonshine) and I'm wondering what I should do with them. Right now they are sitting around my kitchen, which is lovely when I get a drink of water, but not, I suspect, particularly useful. I was thinking of maybe some kind of giveaway? But I don't really know, and it's not like this LJ gets much traffic (I know, I know, because I never post). But if anyone out there happening to read this has some suggestions or pointers, they'd be much appreciated.

In other news (since I'm here), I have been working very hard on a completely new adult novel that's set in an imagined Tenochtitlan and surrounding area (equivalent to 200 years after the Conquest, if it had never happened). This thing is going to be a monstrous door-stopper, and I probably won't finish it for the next two years (mostly because of a contracted book that I can't announce yet that I have to write first). Anyway, the research is kicking my butt, in a good way, and it's really thrilling to be doing something completely different from my previous work.

And finally, I seem to have a thing for parentheses when I write blog posts. Good thing I don't write them very often!

I am so gutted over Troy Davis I hardly know what to say. I only heard of his case late, and I have absolutely no personal connection to it, but it so perfectly encapsulates the medieval, racist, morally stunted blood circus that is the death penalty in the US. No, I don't think my country is better than this. No, I don't think we've betrayed our ideals. I think my country has been pulling this bullshit for going on a goddamned third century and I am not okay with that. I have always loathed the death penalty, but if it's possible to loathe it more, well, there you go.

The best thing that could come of this is a country-wide consciousness raising, where perhaps people finally meaningfully ask what moral logic allows them to murder another human being for anything less than immediate self-defense. Revenge is not a reason. Deterrence is laughable. It is a racist institution, a modern-day form of lynching that allows the ones who advocate it to feel morally superior even while indulging in the most immoral of actions.

This article is particularly relevant, discussing the racial aspects of how the death penalty is carried out in the United States (it's a decade old, but still damming).

This bit struck me as so bleakly relevant (Troy Davis was sentenced in '91; his Georgian prosecutor expressed embarrassment that the execution had taken so long):

University of Iowa law professor David Baldus found that during the 1980s prosecutors in Georgia sought the death penalty for 70 % of black defendants with white victims, but for only 15% of white defendants with black victims.

Prosecutors have unfettered discretion in deciding which cases become capital cases, seeking the death penalty in approximately 1 percent of all capital eligible cases. Notably among the 38 states that allow the death penalty, approximately 98% of the prosecutors are white.

But it's all about justice, right? It's just about the case, isn't it? Race and class have nothing to do with it, huh?

I want to curse a lot more than I have, but let me just say this once more, with profanity: abolish the fucking death penalty.

It takes a lot to make me overcome my inertia and actually make a blog post, internets, but that time has come.

So, you might not have heard the YA blogosphere blow up yesterday, but it did! Here are good summaries:

cleolinda makes an excellent and well-reasoned overview of the situation, complete with many links to the major players that you should follow

oyceter offers very good thoughts about where any effort at change has to start (try: everywhere)



I want to make a few points, because I think some aspects of this are getting drowned out. This is what Brown and Smith say happened to them in their original article:

The agent offered to sign us on the condition that we make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation.

Rachel replied, “Making a gay character straight is a line in the sand which I will not cross. That is a moral issue. I work with teenagers, and some of them are gay. They never get to read fantasy novels where people like them are the heroes, and that’s not right.”

The agent suggested that perhaps, if the book was very popular and sequels were demanded, Yuki could be revealed to be gay in later books, when readers were already invested in the series.

This is how the agent describes the exchange (an exchange, I might add, to which she was very ambiguously involved, since she wasn't the actual agent in question offering representation, but a colleague of hers):

The first bit of editorial feedback we gave was that they change the book from YA to middle grade, which would mean cutting most of the romance entirely (for both the straight and gay characters). The book included five character points-of-view (POVs). Our second bit of editorial feedback was that at least two POVs, possibly three, needed to be cut. Did one of these POVs include the gay character in question? Yes. Is it because he was gay? No. It’s because we felt there were too many POVs that didn’t contribute to the actual plot. We did not ask that any of these characters be cut from the book entirely. Let us repeat that, we did not ask that any of the characters in the book –gay or straight—be cut from the book. Also, we never asked that the authors change any LGBTQ character to a straight character.

We suggested this editorial feedback, because it’s our job, the initial step of the ongoing author/agent dynamic.

So, the agent starts her rebuttal categorically stating that "there is nothing in that article concerning our response to their manuscript that is true" and ends with a long description of the process that boils down to:

We told them to take out the gay character's POV and remove references to his sexuality [FOR REASONS THAT ARE ONLY ABOUT THE STORY AND MARKETING CONCERNS, OF COURSE ]

As my mother would say, "They went in like gangbusters, and came out like we the people."

The rebuttal is a masterpiece of misdirection and subtle cues, pointing people away from the heart of this issue (a heart that Brown and Smith cogently addressed in their original piece).

Number one, Brown and Smith never accused the agency of asking them to cut the character from the book. According to them, the agency wanted them to "make the gay character straight, or else remove his viewpoint and all references to his sexual orientation." So when the agency makes the repeated, pointed denial "We did not ask that any of these characters be cut from the book entirely. Let us repeat that, we did not ask that any of the characters in the book –gay or straight—be cut from the book," it is meant to imply--falsely--that Brown and Smith had accused them of doing that.

But they didn't! They reported that the agency told them to remove his POV. Which, whatever the justification, no one denies. They also said the agency told them to remove references to his sexuality. Does the agency deny that? Well, no, actually: "cutting most of the romance entirely (for both the straight and gay characters)."  What they offer, it turns out, are not actually denials, not actually anything that justifies that categorical statement up front "It isn't true." What they offer instead are justifications. They offer editorial and marketing based reasons that just so happen to neatly dovetail with an undeniable fact of YA publishing.

As Malinda Lo very helpfully compiled this week, queer YA comprises LESS THAN ONE PERCENT of current YA novels. I am sure this number is even more abysmal in the subgenre of SF/F, which is what Smith and Brown write.

So, to recap, Smith and Brown say a prospective agent called them up with editorial feedback, informed them that, among other editorial issues, they wished the gay character to not be a POV and to not have any references to his romantic life in the text (which would mean in effect removing his sexual orientation from the text). Smith and Brown don't give the stated reasons for this. Presumably, I feel, because they were not very relevant to the larger discussion that they wanted to have. Which is:

Systemic issues in publishing, not necessarily due to overt or even subtle homophobia on the part of any one person, still at every level of the process prevent YA with queer main and secondary characters from being published, and being supported when published.

For those who doubt this is true, for those who think that YA is one of the most queer-friendly genres, and there's no problems at all getting it represented, published and supported when published, look at those pie charts Malindo Lo put together and tell me if you think 0.6% is an even vaguely defensible number. Tell me if you think that such paltry representation (and she included secondary, non POV characters in her tally) really indicates an industry dealing healthfully with sexual diversity. Tell me if you really can sustain the illusion that it's all about the readers or just about marketability.

(And as a disclaimer, it's probably a lot better in YA than it is in romance, for example, or other genres, but relative difference doesn't make the situation here awesome.)

The probable objection to the foregoing is that the justifications matter because it de-emphasizes the remove-the-gay aspects of the critique if they were also asked to remove-the-straight. But that, I think, combines a certain element of naivite with a dollop of why does it matter? Because it's not like there's some dearth of straight people in YA. And Smith and Brown say they explicitly objected on the basis of the effect these changes would have on the queer character. Stampfel-Volpe's reply relays nothing of what Brown and Smith said about these changes, and that's probably because what they said has a strong resemblance to their report in PW. And if we want to get into details, then: why would MG mean removing all references to the gay character's sexual orientation? Not a crush? Not a hand-hold? If there are too many POVs, and the authors like the gay character's, why not suggest removing one of the straight character's POVs instead and thus giving the gay POV more plot to move (the stated objection to his POV)? My point is that in the rebuttal, Stampfel-Volpe displays a willful ignorance of the real life effects of editorial notes that result in the marginalization of a gay main character, even if that was not their intent. She fails to realize that in a case of systemic prejudice intent doesn't matter, especially not in a rebuttal to a piece that explicitly pointed this out.

The one overt contradiction in the accounts of Smith and Brown and Stampfel-Volpe is the issue of just flat-out "mak[ing] the gay character straight." That is actually a he said/she said, and I guess in this instance it might be useful to think of the rest of the context. First, I repeat that the agent writing this account and rebuttal was not, in fact, the agent suggesting changes. They are colleagues. It is not explicitly addressed how Stampfel-Volpe was involved in these discussions, but there's a reference to a speaker phone. We don't know if she was actually sitting down with the manuscript with her colleague and going through these points, or if she was overhearing the conversation from down the hall. I think it is telling that Stampfel-Volpe does not make her role in this explicit, and relays a conversation her colleague must have been primarily engaged in as if it was one she had herself (many people had that misreading of her piece).

So it is then quite plausible that making the character straight this was mentioned as a possibility of overcoming the Middle Grade-friendly issues, and Stampfel-Volpe wasn't involved enough to remember. It's also plausible that Smith and Brown interpreted the repeated statements of the need to remove the gay POV and removing overt references to his sexuality as a de-facto straightening, but the agents themselves didn't see it that way.

Either way, I think you can grant that given the rest of the context, this is some serious hair-splitting, and you could easily concede that Smith and Brown were never told to "make the gay character straight" and still come away with the idea that this was a deeply reactionary stance for the agency to take.

It's telling that the agent never directly addresses what is probably the crux of Smith and Brown's account of the conversation: "The agent suggested that perhaps, if the book was very popular and sequels were demanded, Yuki could be revealed to be gay in later books, when readers were already invested in the series." Well, did this happen? She categorically denies everything, but as we see, that categorical denial gets a little fuzzy in the details. So to the original agent: did you suggest this? Stampfel-Volpe doesn't say either way.

It is also telling that the post focuses on Smith and Brown's credibility and the implication that they have manufactured a controversy (or a hoax!) to bolster their own careers at the expense of an agency that they took great pains to never identify. From Stampfel-Volpe's reply:

One of our agents is being used as a springboard for these authors to gain attention for their project. She is being exploited. But even worse, by basing their entire article on untruths, these authors have exploited the topic. By doing that, they’ve chipped away at the validity of the resulting conversation.

Given that this is a response to a post that never identified the agency, and spent all of three paragraphs discussing them explicitly, I feel that this is needlessly personal and dismissing. It also leads into this:

So let’s continue this conversation, and let’s base it on the truth, which is:

There are not enough mainstream books that depict characters of diverse race, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and physical and/or mental disabilities.

Changing this starts with the readers. Scott Tracy has a great post about this on his blog. If more people buy books with these elements, then publishers will want to publish more of them. Sounds simple…yet, it’s not so simple.

Right there, we have our giant derail. Smith and Brown's post focused, quite explicitly, on things everyone could do to help the problem, starting, yes, with consumers buying the (0.6% of) books, but also focusing on what agents and publishers can do to solve the problem. And I think we need to go farther: agents and publishers have no business discussing this issue by fobbing the responsibility back onto readers, the people in this equation who have the least amount of power to change things. The publishers have the most. They're the ones with the money that makes the system run. Even more importantly, they're the ones who choose what to market with their dollars, and that, in turn, has a monstrous effect on a book's penetration among the plebes like us who just buy the things. Beware when a person at the high end of the power dynamic see-saw tells the person below them that they have to "start the change." Beware white people telling black folk that all they have to do is give their babies sensible names and learn to speak properly and they'll be invited into the riches of equality. Beware the IMF telling poor third world countries that all they have to do is privatize their water supply. Beware BP telling poor Americans that all they have to do is wear sweaters and use energy efficient light bulbs. And beware agents and editors implicitly rejecting the idea that their greater power gives them greater responsibility to address these issues about which they claim to care.

Should readers who care about this issue try to buy more of these books? Yes! But the buck just doesn't stop here, and it strikes me as possibly the most disingenuous aspect of a disingenuous defense for her to imply, by removing those important aspects of the original call, that it does.

So, you know how sometimes your heroine will fall in love with a cad? A hustler, a deadbeat, a no-good, low-down playa? And you know how betrayed she feels when she finds out what we, the long-suffering audience, have known since episode/chapter two? She has several choices of how to behave, but generally, the reaction falls into two categories:




[Sister Cantrell preaches: "Spend until the last dime for all the hard times...Because revenge is better than love."]

or



[Sister Parton begs: "Please don't take him just because you can!"]

You know, I can't fully endorse maxing out your cheating boyfriend's credit cards, but it sure as hell beats begging the lady he's sleeping with to take pity on you.

Seriously, it is astonishing how much modern TV and fiction still has its heroines doing the Dolly Parton two-step instead of picking up their shit and telling the man to get out. How hard can this be? It isn't like your man cheated by accident. And yet, over and over, heroines are far more likely to blame and confront the women involved in an affair than their own significant other. I was just watching a television show I otherwise really enjoy, with an incredibly strong female lead (lady doctor in late Victorian London). I was honestly shocked when the huge cathartic confrontation scene involved her cad's new wife. And the cad? Oh, she doesn't blame him. It was her fault for being too distracted by doctoring.

[redacted]

Sorry, that was me screeching.

So, the next time you find yourself writing a juicy sexual drama, with betrayals and recriminations and the jagged remains of hearts littering the pavement, keep this in mind: the "Jolene" scenario is condescending and degrading to women. This is true even if she's gone over there to beat Jolene up, not beg her. It's infantilizing to always have women engage other women in antagonistic ways over their male partner's sexual  peccadilloes, as though the central issue isn't the betrayal of the original partner by her significant other. The Other Woman is, at best, marginally involved. Leave her that way, and let your heroine vent her anger on the asshole that done her wrong.

Hello friends! Yes, I know this is one of those rare-as-unicorns posts of mine, but I have something exciting to share! First, Moonshine officially has a sequel, which is called Wicked City. It will be out in April, and I have just gotten the official cover and permission to share it with you from the publisher. I am SO EXCITED about this one, I can't even tell you. It is actually coming out as a hardcover this time (gulp). Here's the pre-order listing on Amazon--a kindle edition will be forthcoming, I'm sure. And here's the cover!



I don't have a publisher's blurb, but this book involves more djinni antics, a huge political fight over the "vampire liquor" and our intrepid heroine finding herself on the wrong end of a police investigation. So...I'll just post a decent blurb when the publisher sends me one, how about that? :) I am planning to write a novella this fall, which is loosely supposed to be Zephyr's "origin story." I'm going to use it as an either free or very cheap ebook teaser, so if you already like this series, hopefully that's something to look forward to. But I'll post more about that when I'm closer to having it finished.

I also have some other awesome news I will hopefully be able to announce soon. In the meantime, I had a great time at Readercon this year. I met some very interesting people, had conversations about subjects dear to my heart (Mexico! Urban design! The gentrification of DC!) and learned a few things that I think will be very helpful to me in my writing. I came away furiously thinking up story ideas, which is a good way to leave any convention.