Scarlet Letters

Okay, keep in mind that this is still a work in progress. I still have to confirm most of the locations. But if you're in any of these places (or near them) and willing to help me out, please speak up! Very few of these are set in stone; if there doesn't seem to be enough interest generated in a spot, I may move on or shift the itinerary. When I say "signing," I don't mean a stuffy bookstore signing with me at a card table and a lineup of people waiting in supplication. I mean me set up in the corner of a coffeehouse or at a library, my books and photos on display and a cup of coffee in front of me. I mean a conversation, a chance to talk, to answer questions. Sure, if they want me to do a formal speech or reading, I can do that. But only if you want me to. :) Still in flux: I don't like spending eight hours driving from Baltimore to Charlotte to Atlanta on Friday; that seems like a lot of time in the car and not a lot of time talking to people. :/ I don...

Dear Spawn: The two doughnuts on the small plate on the dining table are for you. The rest of the doughnuts are hidden in my new super-secret hiding place, which is a much better place than hiding the marshmallows in the spice cabinet or the Oreos in my nail polish drawer, since you figured those out. This is part of my ongoing plot to ensure that some scrap of food remains for me and Jimmy once the plague of locusts (read: you) go to school. You've driven me to new depths, since you foiled my last plot. Taping the last doughnut box shut was supposed to be a hint. I should have taped the sides of the box as well. This is why we can't have nice things. Do let me know when you stop growing, mmkay? Love, Mom P.S. There is currently a gallon and a half of milk left in the fridge. Be sure to leave a cup or two for me and Jimmy unless you want to face Cranky Mom when you get home from school.

So, if you want to see me at Archon this weekend in Collinsville, you're gonna need a butterfly net. Here's my official Stalking Schedule for Archon: Friday 12:20 p.m. - Author Cooperatives, Salon D:4 1:30 p.m. - Your Electronic Bestseller, Marquette B 2:40 p.m. - Dystopian Societies, Marquette B 7:20 p.m. - Autograph Session, West Hallway 8:30 p.m. - Dust Bunnies (Work-Life Balance), Marquette B 9:40 p.m. - Reading (w/ Glen Cook), Illini 10:50 p.m. - Sex Without Sparkling, Marquette A Saturday 10 a.m. - The People Have a Right to Know! (How TV and movies get cops and reporters wrong) Marquette B 7:20 p.m. - How Not to Get Scammed, Marquette B Sunday 12:30 p.m. - Escape From the Pink Ghetto, Salon D:5 1:30 p.m. - It's the End of the World As We Know It, Marquette A All joking aside, we will need some help. Jimmy still has to leave for work by 4:30 each day, and my assistant is not available for the show. At the very least, I need help for Friday nig...

I've been thinking all day how I could possibly sum up the rollercoaster ride of the past ten days, and I simply don't have the words. Which is a little troubling for a writer. Ten months ago, I was seriously considering quitting this whole writing thing. A project I'd been wrestling with for an ungodly long time was hanging me up, preventing me from moving on to other things. Sales were tanking, much of my published work was staggering toward going out of print, and worst of all, nobody seemed to notice that I hadn't put out much in the way of new work for a year or so. If nobody reads what a writer puts down on paper, is she just talking to herself? They have doctors for that sort of thing. Ten weeks ago, or thereabouts, I found out that I was going to be furloughed from my Daye Jobbe. Temporarily, but the loss of a week's salary was still daunting. Now, I love my job. I am truly blessed in that I have a job that I love, that I can do well, that makes a diff...

Dear blue coffee cup, We've been through a lot together since I bought you and your brothers off the shelf at Pier 1 in 2003. I'm quite fond of your dark-blue china and funky pseudo-Oriental pattern, so I was disappointed that you went out of print, so to speak. When your handle broke, I glued it. And lo these many years we've gotten along just fine. All those cups of coffee and tea, mugs of hot chocolate for the Boy. It's been a long row, you and I. So I'm more than a little upset with you. Not just because you chose tonight to die. But the manner in which you went. I was innocently sitting on my couch, a Grisham movie playing on the screen while I accomplished any number of Endless Tasks ( tm Allan Gilbreath) on my laptop. I was looking forward to a nice mug of hot tea. Moroccan mint tea, to be exact, from my friends at Teavana. It's coffee by day, but when the sun goes down it's tea all the way. I picked you up by your lovely dark-blue handle, ...

And you know that doesn't happen often. As of this writing, the Kickstarter is at $1,195 . My goal was $750, the bare minimum needed to get me from St. Louis to New York and back. We hit that goal in 28 hours, and since then we're well on the way to doubling it. Wow. I never heard of "stretch goals" before last night, which shows what a newb I am at this. I thought about an expanded print run for the novella, doing it myself instead of contracting the rights to a publisher as planned. I thought about a voice-only reading of some of my work if we pass $1,500. But the point of this thing was to get me to places I can't usually go, meet the readers who want me to come to their city. Sure, it's good to sell books while I'm there... but how much better to meet people face to face, talk with them and get to know them? After all, they've been forking over their cash for my books for ten years now. I want to say thank you in person. And so that seems...

I don't think I've been more nervous about anything since I started this wacky writing thing! But here it is: the Kickstarter for the Furlough Tour. You can read all the details at the site, but the shorthand is: I'm being furloughed. A week off unpaid isn't much compared to the trials some of my colleagues have had to endure; I'd rather a furlough than a layoff. But that doesn't mean my family can easily absorb losing a week of my salary. But I'm going to turn this gut-punch into an advantage: I'm hitting the road for the Furlough Book Tour. I'm going to drive from St. Louis to New York and back. I'm going to stop in all those places that people have asked me to visit, and I've always had to say no because airfare isn't free and I couldn't be gone from the paper for more than a weekend. Suddenly I've got a lot of time on my hands. This comes just as we are about to launch the reimagined edition of Dreadmire! If you're ...

You know, I love the Bevo Mill. It's a nifty restaurant with great food inside a windmill in St. Louis.  And their Sunday brunch buffet is something to behold. All the omelet and carving stations you can imagine, plus unlimited mimosas and did I mention the Belgian waffles? I've been there a couple times... as someone's guest. Because $30 a head is a tad out of my price range. I'm just a humble reporter with two other jobs.  And I love Groupon. Whenever I'm flush I'll pick one up. We love restaurants, so Groupons let us indulge, try new independent restaurants around town and keep us from breaking the bank. A $14 Groupon for the Bevo Mill brunch. Oh, that's awesome. We'll make a day of it. Brunch, then the Botanical Gardens on a clear fall Sunday. That's my vision of perfect. Until you read the fine print. Limit one per person makes sense; duh, it's a buffet. Limit one per TABLE? So if I have the Groupon, I have to pay full price for Jimmy and Ia...

I won't pretend we were close friends. I may have been on a panel with her once, but I unfortunately don't have the honor of having been close to her. But I'd be lying if I said her passing left me untouched. Ann C. Crispin didn't have the fame of other popular science fiction authors, or presumably the vast riches poured onto the mega-bestsellers. What she had was the respect of nearly everyone in speculative fiction, not only for her own work, but her tireless efforts to improve the genre and the publishing business. I encountered Crispin's work as a young girl, a freshly-minted Trekkie eagerly seeking books about this vast new world that had fascinated me. Her Star Trek tie-in novels were excellent, entry drugs into other science fiction. She wrote the Han Solo trilogy for Star Wars, novelizations for movies like V, Alien Resurrection and the backstory for Pirates of the Caribbean, as well as her original Starbridge series. But she also founded " Wr...

Him: Cleaning engineering tonight. Choo choo. Me: I guess that means you're really on track. Him: EWWW! SPIDERS! Me: Enjoy your spiders. Him: This place is a MESS! The whiteboards look worse than ours! Dust bunnies the size of Godzilla! Having to fight them off with my trusty broom! Me: Defeat those dust bunnies! Him: I will win this battle of man vs. dirt! Me: Then you can attack our basement. Him: Sure thing! I like cleaning. Me: God, I love you.

And here we are, on the verge of another adventure in Hotlanta. This will be my ninth Dragoncon, which I resolutely spell as one word without asterisks or spaces because I'm contrary that way (and a lazy typist). Elevators bedamned, I'm looking forward to another wild frenzy with my fiends in Atlanta! However, I must offer a caveat: For the first time in nine years, I will not be available in the dealer's room, wherever they've put it. None of my publishers or publishing allies are attending this year, and general booksellers are hard to find. Unless I stumble across a friendly vendor who wants me to announce the name and location of his/her booth at all my panels, the only way you can get books from me this year is to hunt me down! Thus, the stalking guide. Note: I will be happy to take your money before or after panels. I'd take your money during panels, but it might slow down the conversation and annoy the other panelists who are less craven and/or poor tha...

I missed this kid. I think. SCENE: The three of us, sitting at dinner. Man and I are still eating; Boy has inhaled his food as usual. Seriously, once a waiter checking back with us a few minutes after dropping off a huge platter of Cracker Barrel nummies saw Boy's empty plate and said, "Did he drop it?" BOY: *chomps last fry* ME: You know, your food isn't going to run away from you. BOY: Yes it is. ME: Stop staring at my fries. BOY: Are you going to eat all those? ME: Yes. BOY: Jimmy, are you going to eat all of your fries? MAN: YES. ME: Are you still hungry? BOY: Yes. ME: Are you still growing? BOY: Yes. ME: If I stop feeding you, would you stop growing? BOY: No. Also, that would be child abuse. MAN: He would just return to soaking in all the radiation of the universe and converting it directly to energy. BOY: Tastes like chicken. And that, friends, is when I lost it. Also, I gave him the rest of my fries.

I remember shortly after Jimmy and I started dating, I confided in my friend Macie about him. Well, "confided" might not be the word. I do believe I bored her senseless with schmoopy declarations of how perfect he is. You know what happens to people when they're in a brand-new relationship. My friend Woof calls it "new relationship syndrome." Symptoms include gushing, random smiling, your feet don't touch the ground and you bore the hell out of your friends. I told Macie all about Jimmy, and she grinned knowingly at me, as most of my friends were doing. I finished by telling her that he was even an Episcopalian, just like both of us. "Do you know how hard it is to find a single Episcopalian man in my age bracket?" I asked her. Macie leaned over and said, "Not as hard as it is to find a Christian lesbian." I looked over at Macie's partner, Gail, and laughed my ass off. "You win!" I replied. In the early years of Jim...

Home, slightly sunburned and exhausted from an awesome ArsonFest! This was our fourth (?) ArsonFest, joining my dear friend Mitzi and her friends and family to celebrate Independence Day with shootin', barbecue and watching things go boom in the sky, just like the founders intended. It is always a great honor for me to be included in this annual tradition, and I honestly can't imagine what the Fourth would be like without it. Shooting was great, and as always we were happy that those who actually own guns let us Illinoisans shoot as well. Ian turned out to be quite good with the 9mm pistol and a .22 rifle. I brought a batch of chocolate chip cookies as our barter for admission to the range. A brief panic ensued when a sizable squall hit in the late afternoon, and we scrambled to tack down the rainfly on our rental tent. We had put up the tent at 1 a.m. without any familiarity with the tent's design, so I think it was a testament to our (read: Mitzi's) brilliance t...

Sitting on a rooftop in a cool breeze that tastes of early summer. Watching a glorious sunset begin to settle behind the city skyline. Deep breaths of fresh air between photo bursts of the sunset, all shades of deep orange and rust-red and softly glowing rays breaking through cottony scattered clouds. But no words. Notebook and laptop silent before me. If I cannot write here, where can I? The words won't come. Ideas, images... But no words.  So I force them, and of course they are awful. Cliches that fall on the ear with the thud of anvils like "glorious sunset." How did I do this in my previous life? I can't remember. The words just came. Sometimes they hid, sometimes they were rough. But never this rough, and never for so long. I was going to write about the beast in the storm. The creature that rode into a small town on the screaming energy of a tornado, and the things it did in the night between the thunderclaps. He's a nasty beast, and he wants to be written....

I'm not sure how I became management. The division of labor in our house is thus: I cook the food. Man washes the dishes. Boy dries and puts away. This is perfectly equitable, though there is the occasional sigh and grouse when dinner is over and I vanish back into my office while they go clean the kitchen. Today there was additional grousing, because I had baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies for my Relay for Life team. They're fine with cookies; not so fine when I tell them they can't eat them. MAN: Why do you like to torture us? ME: Because it's fun. MAN: You could have baked two batches of cookies, one for the Relay team and one for us! ME: I am going to bake two batches of cookies, and they're both for Relay! BOY: We should go on strike! ME: You have no cause! Back to work! Then I went into the bathroom. When I came out, I was faced with this: If you can't read them, the signs say, "ON STRIKE. NO COOKIES NO WORK." They beg...

ME: Tonight is KFC. I am not cooking. Kitchen is closed, I am on strike. HIM: You can't go on strike. ME: Can too. Mother's Day. HIM: You are not part of the union. You are management. ME: I am not! HIM: Management is not part of the union contract, woman. ME: Don't call me woman! HIM: Only union members can go on strike. ME: I do not recall signing a union contract, sir. HIM: You did. You just don't remember. ME: I would remember. HIM: I distracted you. ME: Uh huh.

Once a month, I get this one day. A weekday when I don't have to work, because I'm working during the weekend. It's a day where I have no work and Boy is at school and I can do whatever I want. I used to make sure to do something fun on That Day, either going hiking up on the bluffs or to the Botanical Gardens, a massage, photography excursion or retail therapy or just some quality coffeehouse time... something fun, a mental health day. Yeah. That doesn't happen anymore. • Awaken to phone call from new client whose stuff I'll be selling online on consignment. This is my latest part-time gig, trying to raise money for Ze Wedding. I've been doing it for charity for quite some time; now I'm also doing it for money. Because if we don't find a way to raise more money soon, we have to postpone our wedding. Do not want. • Receive email that someone wants to buy our old washer. Immediately assist Jimmy with removal of our back door, so we will be able to...

I AM ANGRY.  I am the Relay for Life team captain for St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, and I do this because each and every one of us has known someone with cancer. Some of our team members have even fought the battle themselves. When you sit down and think about it, is there anyone who DOESN'T know a cancer survivor, or has lost someone to this disease? I AM ANGRY.  I watch as this disease carries off brilliant artists, actors, musicians and writers without pause. I see grieving families and I know that none of it has to happen. When my team began walking, one of us was a cancer survivor. Eight years later nearly half of us are survivors. What does that tell us about the pervasiveness of this disease? Some time ago, I lost a dear friend after ten years of battle against the cancer that invaded her, and she was my age. She deserved more life than she got. It isn't right, or fair. I miss her, and I wish she had more time with us. And I AM ANGRY. Canc...

...I beg you all to stop it. • The Sandy Hook principal's photo is not being re-used in Boston. She really died at Sandy Hook and you're looking at photo manipulation. • The young man bent over the woman's body in Boston was not mourning his dead fiancee. They were strangers and he was comforting the victim. • There was no little girl running in honor of Sandy Hook killed in the blast; the Boston Marathon does not allow children to run. • Race organizers are not donating money for retweets; that was some cretin's idea of a prank. • The Facebook page in memory of the bombing was not created in advance of the blasts. • The so-called "fake" victim who lost his legs in Afghanistan is not the same person as the man seen wheeled to an ambulance with severe leg trauma. They are two different men, and both have lost their legs, and neither of them is "fake." • They didn't shut down the cell network; there is no cell "kill switch."...