There are a few other books besides Hallowmere coming out in the next few months you should be aware of. (Hallowmere has gotten talked about a lot lately because we’ve been doing a lot of promotion for it this summer.) (ETA: Not least because it’s ‘s birthday today. :D)

Also releasing at the same time as In the Serpent’s Coils is another book I edited, A Practical Guide to Monsters. If I haven’t posted the final cover here (and I don’t think I have), here you go!

Then coming up after that we’ve got the final installations in several Dragonlance: The New Adventures trilogies, starting with ‘s Stolen Sun in September, Stephen D. Sullivan’s Warrior’s Bones in December, and ‘s Tempest’s Vow in April 2008. If you haven’t read the first two books in those trilogies, now’s the time to pick them up to be ready for books 3!

Then, the exciting news for Jan. 2008, the first of a series of novels featuring the dragons from A Practical Guide to Dragons! Be sure to look for Red Dragon Codex in January.

One book that I was able to acquire but due to scheduling changes, another editor has been working on, is a new anthology edited by

called Magic in the Mirrorstone. A number of amazing writers have contributed stories, which I’ve mentioned here before–like Holly Black, Cecil Castellucci, Cassie Clare, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, as well as our own Tiffany Trent–but I don’t think I’ve showed you the cover before.

Those are just the books I have edited–check out the rest of Mirrorstone’s books on our site.

 

Thanks for all your birthday wishes. I had a great day. Had a couple meetings at work–one in which things happened that hopefully will result in some sort of good news sometime in the future, but which I obviously can’t spill the beans about yet–and after work went to see the Bourne Ultimatum with my roommates (not Supremacy like I posted–have to admit, I get the different names confused).

It’s Employee Appreciation Week here at work, which means free pizza for lunch today, various contests, and also today, Game Day! I went to a discussion group on girls in gaming earlier this morning, and this afternoon we’ll be talking to

 for a book discussion group. There are groups learning to play D&D (both basic and advanced; believe it or not there are some people at this company who learn the game after getting hired), Magic, the new Star Wars RPG, etc. It’s a good day to work at Wizards.

For those of you wondering about the chocolate chip cake recipe, here it is:

1/4 cup oil
1 yellow cake mix
1 large box vanilla pudding mix
2 eggs (don’t forget the eggs!)
1 1/4 cup water
roughly 6 to 12 oz of chocolate chips (my grandma says 6, I say the more chocolate the better)

Pour the oil into a cake pan and coat. Then dump in all the other ingredients except the chocolate chips–right into the pan. It might help to beat the eggs into the water first, but I don’t notice a significant difference. Beat with a fork until moistened and relatively smooth (but don’t overbeat, just like any cake).  Smooth out, then sprinkle chocolate chips evenly over the cake.

Bake at 350 for about 30 minutes or until cake is golden brown.

It’s SO easy, and the cleanup is obviously a cinch due to mixing it right in the cake pan. It’s a dense cake, quite rich, and even better on day 2 than right out of the oven. HIGHLY recommend it for chocolate lovers to do a chocolate cake instead of yellow, but be warned: it’s
REALLY rich, and you might want to try the yellow first for comparison.

Yes, today is my birthday. I hung one more year on the line. I should be depressed, my life’s a mess, but I’m having a good time.*

(Okay, so you’re supposed to sing that the day after your birthday, I know, but “yes, today” sounds almost like “yesterday”!)

Funny enough, I just discovered that on my 17th birthday (a day on which I was eating cake with my then-boyfriend at his family’s house, and a good year before I learned what email was–that didn’t happen till freshman year at U of I), the world wide web became available to the public on the internet. Not that the internet and the www didn’t exist before–it was just not available to anyone outside of a certain handful of researchers. Whaddaya know?

(As an aside, I feel like an old fogey when I tell people I read email during those early years on pine and elm (mostly elm), and that when I transferred to BYU two years later the trend hadn’t quite hit that campus and they claimed that if I wanted an email account, I’d have to switch my major to computer science. No wonder all the people I’d met via the internet (usenet!) from BYU at the time were all CS majors. And I once upon a time also typeset college textbooks in Unix, which was why I could understand elm. I think it was called elm. I remember being so jealous of the people working on humanities texts (I worked on physics and mathematics texts) because they could use that program that had just come out called Quark. Because my texts were so complicated, what with all the formulas, I had to stick with Unix till Quark got powerful enough.  Wow, I’m getting old. Which is what, I suppose, birthdays are all about.)

In the ongoing saga of my shoulder, the CT scan confirmed that yes, indeed, I have a fractured shoulder. Happy birthday! Now I have to go to the orthopedist about it, but I couldn’t get an appointment for another week, so in the mean time I’m just supposed to not use that arm.

Have I mentioned I’m right-handed?

But I took Monday off (well, today, still, because I haven’t gone to bed yet, but it is officially Tuesday now). And I did absolutely nothing all day. I slept in, I read, I talked with a couple friends. My roommate made me birthday cake so we can eat it in the morning because we’re going to see The Bourne
Supremacy tomorrow night (I love those movies!). But I gave her the recipe from memory and my faulty memory forgot to mention it needed 2 eggs, so we have an eggless cake which is even more dense than it usually is. But that’s good, because hey, I like chocolate chip cake dense. (It’s a recipe my grandma latched onto as the easiest birthday cake ever, which has become the traditional birthday cake in my family. Now it doesn’t feel like a birthday without chocolate chip cake! And it’s so easy, you can make it right in the pan. If you want the recipe, I’ll edit and add it.)

But tomorrow is back to work! Meetings and editing and such, life as usual. It really is a nice treat, though, to get to take your birthday off (or at least, a day near your birthday). The day of extra rest was welcome–especially while I’m not supposed to be using this stupid arm.

*ETA: If you don’t automatically start hearing Paul Simon singing when I say that, be aware that I’m not depressed and that my life isn’t a mess–but I am having a good time. 🙂

Due to my crazy weekend, a lot of things have happened that I haven’t had the chance to post about. So, here you go, all in one post.

n       First of all, if you don’t know about Readergirlz, go check them out–they’ve got thousands of teen girls excite
d about reading. As Tiffany Trent posted on her LJ (), for Teen Read Week this year Readergirlz is hosting 31 Flavorite Authors for Teens, and Tiffany will be one of them on Oct. 2. They’ll talk to a different author every day. But don’t wait until October–they’re featuring Holly Black this month.

n       I already told you about hallowmere.com, but you should go there again. And share it with your friends. And their friends.%
3C/span>

n       Speaking of which, if you’re on MySpace, you should be Corrine’s friend! And Hallowmere’s, too. (I’m there too, though I don’t go over there as often as here.)

n       I will be traveling down to L.A. in early September to talk to some YA librarians. I’m very excited about it.

n       I am spending the week catching up on my way-too-far-behind towering pile of submissions. If you’ve been patiently waiting to hear from me, fear not, the wait may be over soon. Though the wheels of justice—er, publication—do grind slowly, so if it’s not a rejection letter, it might take a little longer for deliberation. I’d post a picture, but I think the real thing is guilt-inducing enough. If you want another editorial perspective on how that goes (and/or, if you miss Miss Snark), I’ve recently discovered Editorial Anonymous, the blog of an editorial assistant who deals with this stuff in a most Miss Snark-ish manner.

On the advice of my doctor, when I was looking for exercise less stressing for my knees than walking (seriously–my knees swell up every time I go for a long walk), she suggested rollerblading. I do pretty good at ice skating–just the basic push-yourself-forward stuff, nothing fancy–and I thought, you know, a set of Rollerblades would be a great birthday present for myself.
So I went out and got a good pair, at a nice discount–they were marked $129 but apparently weren’t marked for the significant sale price, and I got them for $80-something instead. Very nice!
Today, for my maiden voyage on rollerblades, I figured I’d just skate up and down my block. It looks pretty even, despite being at the top of a hill.
At least, I thought so.
After a block of slight-uphill fumbling, I turned the corner and realized that despite looking pretty even, it was actually enough of an incline to get me rolling at a pretty good clip despite me only standing there, without pushing off. If I didn’t stop–and I know how to stop several ways, but at that speed, I didn’t have the skill to do it without causing some major flippage–I’d be on my face at the end of the block in the middle of the intersection.
So instead I steered for the grass, thinking I could slow myself. But I was WAY too fast for the difference in terrain, and instead sent myself sprawling. Messed up my knee pretty good (low impact?) and decided I wasn’t making it the 3 blocks to the library after all. No, it was time to go home.
So I turned around and rolled around the corner to my house… and repeated the process, this time in front of the four twenty-something girls two doors down, and several of their guy friends, who all laughed at me. And I think I nearly dislocated my right arm in the process.
I had wrist guards on, but didn’t go for knee and elbow pads because I thought I’d be okay for just this little jaunt. So, road rash galore on elbows and knees, and a little humiliation to boot.
Next time (and there will be a next time–I am GOING to figure this out) I’m just going to walk down to Green Lake to the smooth, even track there (concrete, but it’s EVEN) and figure out where to stash my shoes after that. I don’t think carrying anything is a good idea–that was part of my problem, I was carrying a library book I wanted to return, which threw me off balance) so I’ll have to figure out the shoe issue somehow.
Any suggestions in starting rollerblading i
n your “not as agile as I was in my 20s” years? I mean, I’m as flexible as I ever was, but I just don’t fall as easily, I’m not as quick physically, etc. Not nearly the reflexes of Katara anymore, sadly.
As a side note, it probably wasn’t a good idea to even try today of all days, because I’m still dealing with a sinus infection that gave me nasty vertigo most of last week. The vertigo is mostly gone, but what remains didn’t help AT ALL. I came home wanting to puke from the nausea the rolling and falling induced, so pretty much that’s a good sign that I shouldn’t have tried this today.

I told you there’d be more fun stuff coming. Check out the newly expanded Hallowmere.com site and you’ll find several goodies, including this book trailer:

Also, go explore Falston! And meet the characters in their blogs!
Feel free to pass this on to friends, the teens in your life… 🙂

Alvina’s posts at Blue Rose Girls are always great for insight into the editorial perspective. Today she asks, How do authors feel about receiving editorial letters? If you’ve received an editorial letter, chime in.

I was talking to a UW student this last week who wanted to become an editor and who was asking for advice on finding a job. Among other things, that reminded me that I’ve never put in one place a link to all the different places you might find job listings in the publishing field. If you’re in publishing and have some advice for prospective editors, please feel free to add to the list.

Here’s my general list of where I tell people to start looking, other than networking (because that’s another whole ball of wax):

Publisher’s Lunch (both to subscribe to the daily industry news, which is invaluable, and to watch their job board listings) 

Individual publishers’ websites (though different companies’ job boards can be hit or miss; one company I used to work for kept filled listings for a year or two after; while some positions never saw the light of day on the online listings because they were filled in house or through the in house temp pool)

The Children’s Book Council job site

MediaBistro.com job boards (as well as their industry articles, though I can’t vouch for whether it’s worth it to subscribe to the paid portion of the site, because I’ve never subscribed. Same goes for Publisher’s Marketplace paid content. Anyone here a subscriber? What would you say?)

Book Builders of Boston

Publishers Weekly job board

The Purple Crayon, if I remember right (and it’s getting too late at night to hunt too deeply) has a few resources on finding a job as an editor, too.

Also, keep an eye on listings of staff changes within companies. These can be found at several of the above sources, particularly Publishers Weekly and Publishers Lunch, though Harold Underdown also posts a Who’s Moving Where? column, too. These not only give you insight into a company but also might tell you information about whether jobs might be opening up (if someone is starting a n
ew imprint or perhaps if an editorial assistant is being promoted to assistant editor, etc.). Of course, the listings might have taken some time to be posted, though, so they’re not the most reliable job hunting source. Still, it’s good to keep an eye on such things.

That’s the short list. I feel like I’m forgetting something, but what it comes down to is keeping your eyes open for listings, networking to find out if anything is opening up that might not be listed, and just making sure to also be as proactive as you can in the search. My first job came about because I’d decided to go through the yellow page listing for “Publishers” alphabetically, just cold calling to ask if there were any job openings. I got a job within a couple weeks–with a company whose name started with B.

Okay, so the day I called through the whole list, didn’t just stop with B when they said actually they were hiring. But hopefully you get the point: if you’re looking for a job in publishing, job listings are just one way of finding out about the right position for you. Hope this helps, and good luck with your hunt.

P.S. DON’T just post your resume on a job board and expect to be contacted by headhunters and publishers. Publishing doesn’t work like that–most companies get more than plenty applicants the traditional way without having to comb job boards for resumes with the right keywords. The thing to remember is that it’s your job to find yourself a job, and the only way that’s going to happen is if you reach out for it. However, that’s just my experience, and other editors might have had different experiences at different companies. Feel free to chime in if it’s different for you.

I must say, All For Kids knows how to throw a Harry Potter party. Not that I’ve ever been to one before. Actually, this was my first one. But I wanted to make sure to get a copy tonight so I could start reading right away–I mean, I work with a bunch of fantasy fans; did I really think I could make it through Monday without hearing a spoiler?–and I wanted to support my local independent on this, given the magnitude of impact this was going to have on independent booksellers (independents in Britain even said they wouldn’t carry it because they’d actually be paying to sell it, because other retailers were discounting it so much).

So there were so many kids there. It was really great to see all those kids, boys and girls, standing in line discussing their predictions and their reading habits. Three boys I stood next to in line, who were all roughly 10-12 years old, were talking about speed reading and comparing notes on whether, if reading a book for fun and not school, they’d go slowly and savor the book (those were one boy’s words) or speed read to know what happens. No reluntant readers, these guys. 

There were kids running around with some awesome Harry Potter paraphernalia, including some great Quidditch robes, but my favorite were the two 6 year olds in tshirts like this one

which will definitely be on my Christmas list for my nephews this year! (And I’m thinking for the 11 year old all the way down to the 3 year old, it works.)

As you can see from the pictures above, my bag of HP goodies included not only book 7, but a witch hat and a coupon for 20% off any book at All For Kids, as well as some bookmarks and a baggie of Bertie Bott’s Everyflavor Beans (which, by the way, ugh; I’m not into the idea of biting do
wn on a disgusting-flavored one).

There had to have been a couple hundred people there tonight, much larger than I expected for this tiny little store–as many as I expected to see at any major chain store. And they did it so efficiently–when you called to make a reservation for the party, they took credit card numbers, which meant that they didn’t have to ring up 400 books the night of, just hand out tickets and check names off the list. It was a very smooth operation.

Now, I’m off to read. We’ll talk again when we’ve all read!

Okay, that ticks me off. The entire entry somehow got lost as I clicked “post.” I’m annoyed now. Let’s see if I can recreate it…

Perfect expression of many people’s thoughts this weekend, no? I don’t know about you, but I’ll be spending late Friday evening at my local independent children’s bookstore and then reading all weekend. That is, if I finish editing Hallowmere book 3 this week, which of course will happen!
Oh, I had also said that this video is from Brotherhood 2.0, a most hilarious blog by two brothers, author John Green (Looking for Alaska, An Abundance of Katherines) and his brother Hank. They make me laugh pretty much every time, but I must say my favorite has to be Hank’s songs, especially his tribute to Helen Hunt, which makes me giggle every time I think of it.
Also, to go along with the Harry Potter mania theme, I saw the movie last week, and I really liked it. I think it helped that I haven’t r
ead the book for a good 2 years (or whenever it was released, 3 years?). I think the removal helped me to really appreciate the movie as a separate entity. There were some things I thought missing though I couldn’t think what they were–I’ve been reminded since of at least one, Ron and Hermione being prefects–and I’d liked to have seen a little more of the school year, but overall the action was great, the plot was tight, and they chose to focus on the most important parts. I give it a thumbs up.
Happy reading this weekend everyone! No spoilers!