I’ve always said that the mark of a good book for me is dreaming about it. Well, maybe I should amend that. Not saying that the book I’ve been “reading” on my commute (via audiobook) isn’t an amazing book. Yikes, it’s wonderful and you should read it if you haven’t. But it’s also disturbing. 

Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer is narrated by a girl who is a witness to world cataclysm through her diary. As the world falls apart, she and her family are fairly able to keep themselves together–so far, at least, seeing as how I’m only halfway through it. That’s what I get for listening on audiobook on my commutes.

I’m already feeling the need to eat–usually chocolate and McDonald’s and all the food she can’t get anymore after the moon gets knocked out of its orbit and causes cataclysmic climate change all over the earth–and this morning right before I woke up I dreamed about such cataclysms happening to me. Dreams about needing to get together my food storage (it’s something that my church encourages as part of disaster preparedness, and I also think it’s a general good thing to have enough food on hand to last a year in case of disaster). Dreams about starving to death. 

I actually don’t remember much of it by now, but whatever the actual story arc of what I dreamed, the feeling of desperation still remains with me. Especially because the heat is currently out in my house and has been for the last four or five days because of a gas leak. Thank goodness it’s been mostly warm, though the last couple days I’ve spent the evenings in bed under my quilt because it’s cooled down.

But even awake I am kind of obsessed with the idea of what I would do if such a huge worldwide disaster occurred. This is far beyond the apocalyptic ideas of one country losing electricity through a pulse (Dark Angel, which I love, and Jericho, which started out well but I haven’t watched in months because they went in a direction I wasn’t comfortable with). They start losing even the basics that would be able to give them renewable energy. We’re talking *major* cataclysm. Not just losing modern conveniences.

And I also keep thinking about the difference between losing all my modern comforts now and even 20 years ago. Back when I was a kid I used to think “no problem, I could just live as my ancestors did.” And I could have–I lived on a farm, we had animals that could be turned to work, and my grandpa
still had 100 year old farm equipment in his barn that he’d probably never get rid of. Our furnace was still woodburning and our family spent most of our weekend time cutting, splitting, and loading firewood. I know how to age it. I’ve helped my dad build two barns by hand (though with the help of the loader on the tractor for the posts and roof beams). We had a half-acre garden. 

Of course, we preserved that food by freezing it, the art of canning long gone. Even then we were dependent on refrigeration.

Well, since then I’ve moved 2000 miles away, and I live in a city like all the people I ridiculed as completely removed from the land. And I’m just as dependent on my electricity and electronic devices as the next city slicker. I could grow things in a garden, no problem. I could teach people how to get firewood, but urban sprawl and population growth and a number of other factors mean that we really wouldn’t be able to just go back to how it was 100 years ago. Back then, people had community and even on a relatively self-sufficient farm, they had needs that could only be met by a supplier of seed or a dry goods store. Transportation involved at least horses and carts, and how many people do you know nowadays who could get their hands on a horse and cart?

So as I listen to the book, I think of all the things I know how to do to cope, and Pfeffer
is taking away those things one by one. What would you do, if faced with this level of calamity? Yikes. Literally gives me nightmares.

At any rate, that’s another episode of Stacy’s Book Recommendations via Dreams. Go read the book and tell me you don’t feel like stockpiling a year’s worth of supplies or more!

While waiting for the latest episode of the Dresden Files to download in Itunes, I thought I’d catch up on a question here, but suddenly I’m torn because I remembered what I bought at the bookstore this evening while waiting for my hairstylist to catch up on her schedule. 

It had been a good six months to a year since I’d seen her last, and I figured, what was another half hour? Well, that half hour can be dangerous when there’s a bookstore nearby.  Despite continually reminding myself that it wasn’t like I had all that much time to read the books I already had, I couldn’t resist picking up the first book in the series by Jim Butcher that the TV series is based on. Will have to let you know how it is if I ever get the chance to read it.

While talking to the booksellers at the Waldenbooks in the Southcenter Mall (which was great–they were so helpful and excited to learn about Mirrorstone, too), I remembered that I wanted to grab a copy of the Buffy Season 8 comic. They only had the first installment, but I was proud of myself for remembering while I was near a place that might sell it! So far, hilarious. I got several strange looks while sitting in the salon waiting room for laughing out loud at some of the dot-connections within the first pages. As others have mentioned before, if you’ve seen Angel Season 5, there are some little details thrown in for you.

I have a pile of books here next to me with great openers that I wanted to go through one by one to answer the question posed in an earlier comments thread. 

However, it’s very late, and my episode just finished downloading, so I hope you all won’t get too ancy if leave that until later. But at least I have a pile of examples and I’ll hopefully have time in the next couple days to get my thoughts on them together.

Until then, perhaps y’all should go find Buffy Season 8 for yourselves! (Have you watched the first seven seasons? And all of Angel? That’s what my now-roommate and I have been doing off and on since last summer and we just finished season 7 in Jan. or Feb., so this is fortuitous timing!
)

 

Jim MacDonald over at Making Light has put together a tour de force of early-1800s-literature-as-Buffy-tie-in that has made me giggle. Or perhaps it’s the insomnia (brought on by a nap much too late in the afternoon, though I’m sure I’ll be able to sleep again in a little while). Thinking of a girl rolling around beating up vampires in an empire-waist dress just feels like the epitome of incongruity, English manners versus girl power.

In honor of the lighter side of Easter, I give you the most hilarious thing I’ve found today aside from ‘s waking up as an Easter egg. I think would be proud. (if you haven’t seen her Peep shows–links to more at the bottom of that entry–you should head on over there; my favorite is the Peeps joust)

Apparently it’s a Seattle tradition: a photo contest of Peeps! 30 winners were posted on the Seattle Times website. My favorites (though most of them are hilarious):

Peepcocks

Peepiary

Peep Art

Ameripeep Gothic

FrankenPeep (note: starring Gregory Peep, Penelopeep Cruz, & George Peepard)

GreenPeeps take a stand

Peep vs. Viaduct (a very Seattle joke!)

iPeeps

Catzilla Peep attack (from a 10-year-old!)

Peeple Magazine (read all the text! especially if you like Lisa Yee’s jousting, notice the obese peeple :D)

PeepCSI (Apparently they still haven’t found the bodies from the microwave mob fight.)

And my  #1 favorite:

The Peepernacle Choir

Must Love Books is a new blog by T.S., a colleague of Alvina (of the Blue Rose Girls). He’s an editorial assistant at a children’s book publisher and has made a good start with a post giving advice on getting into publishing. Welcome, T.S.!

ETA: Thanks for all the congratulations and well-wishes. And yes, my slush pile *does* get promoted with me. Nobody else will be reading it…

I just received some very good news. I’ve been promoted to full editor here at Mirrorstone (from associate editor). It’s a nice feeling, to be promoted, though I can’t imagine my duties will change drastically today–we’ve been working on expanding my duties and the imprint as a whole over the course of the last two years and we continue to work on that, so it feels like a natural fit. I’m just very very grateful today.

So now my title is Editor, and I’ll have some new business cards. I think I need to go out for dinner to celebrate. I’m thinking I might just indulge in that salmon chowder at Cutter’s I’ve been craving since my first taste at ALA Midwinter….

We’ve got window washers this week. Last week, it was inside, and now I have a guy suction-cupped to the outside of my window, ropes dangling beside him and suds slipping down the side of the building.

If you’ve ever seen our building, you’ll know that it’s entirely glass-fronted, so this is a large job. It’s one of two twin buildings, which we alternately have dubbed the Flash Cubes or the Borg, depending on who you’re talking to. The Borg will be shiny clean in a day or two, the better to assimilate you.

Today I am trying to catch up with submissions. Perhaps it’s the window washing, but probably more likely just the state of my desk, but either way I’ve decided I need to catch up.

Now that I have a longer commute, I’ve picked up several audiobooks for the boring half hour drive each way to work. Lately I’ve been listening to Pulling Princes: The Calypso Chronicles by Tyne O’Connell, which is read by the author in a lovely British accent that I’m now hearing every time I read anything. A friend’s email was talking about babies, for example, and I couldn’t help but hear it in my head as I read as “bay-bies” in that posh English accent the author uses for the rich upperclass girls who call each other “dahling.”

(ETA: I’d never heard of this book before, just grabbed it off the YA audio shelf at the library. Now, browsing the author’s site, I see there are 4 books! And I’m afraid the cover text for the sequels has given away more than I wanted to know. Na nanana I didn’t see that! I didn’t see it!)

I must say, though, that I’m really enjoying the book. She pulls out a lot of chick lit cliches–the idea of winning over the popular girls by lying about having a boyfriend, the nasty A-list girl enemy, etc.–and turns them on their heads. Hollywood has spoiled me and I cringe anytime anyone tries to lie in a story, because I have a feeling that it’ll either turn into the teen-movie cliche of everything falling apart and the girl learns her lesson that she didn’t really want to be friends with those non-humans anyway, or even worse, the result will end up sounding more like a sitcom than a teen movie. 

(There are a lot of teen movies that I love despite the deception bit, but really, it’s an overused hook that just isn’t original anymore.)

But O’Connell uses that cliche value to her advantage, and every time I expect a certain event to blow up on Calypso–such as leaving a letter, presumably from her fake boyfriend, on another girl’s bed–it turns out to be a nice surprise instead, completely not what I was expecting. The cool girls turn out to be mostly human, the prince is a modern-day boy who happens to have to deal with papparazzi and nasty girls, and people are human for better or worse, no matter their station or richness.

Now, saying that, I’m only in disc 4, so I’ll reserve final judgement until probably tomorrow, given that I seem to go through a disc a day or a little more. But so far, it’s a good listen. It’s made the drive better, and it makes me want to hear more even when the drive is over.

But I’m going to answer over the course of a few hours, when I need a breather from a manuscript I’m frantically trying to finish up. Have a deadline to beat and beat it we will, even if bumps keep coming up in the road with this particular project. That’s another part of the life of an editor, though–sometimes manuscripts are tough not because they’re badly written (this one is wonderful!) or because the author is hard to work with (this one is wonderful!) but because things happen in the transit of files that you didn’t realize, or deadlines get moved, or other things come up that you have to be flexible for. Sometimes an editor can get horribly behind because of a snowball effect, and she has to spend a week working late to catch back up to nearly-breathing-free. (You never quite make it to breathing free, because there’s always something that needs doing next!)

So here’s my name-meme post, which I’ve seen making the rounds via 

  (creator of Meme Girls), which I got tagged to do by

Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? If you’re as name obsessed as we are, fill out this Meme Girls original meme and share your name- and your favorites- with the blogging world. Then tag five friends to do the same.

1. First Name: Stacy (the 24th most popular name to name a baby girl in the 1970s)

2. Middle Name: Lynn (though Jennifer may have been the #1 first name for baby girls in the 1970s, I submit that the #1 middle name for baby girls in the 70
s was Lynn–and usually attached to Jennifer! See also the three different Jens/ifers I’ve seen do this meme. Well, you could if I linked, but since I’m doing this in spurts, I might not go back and link…)

3. Name you go by: Stacy

4. Name(s) your parents call(ed) you: Stacy (I know! I was so nickname-deficient)

5. Other nicknames (past and present): Stace, Stacer (bestowed upon me in high school when I admitted I had no nicknames to speak of, when the dance team wanted to put nicknames on our dance camp t-shirts)

6. What did you call yourself when you were little?
Stacy (though I wished my name was Anastasia so I could have multiple nicknames, including Stacy–can you sense a theme here?)

7. Were your parents considering any other names (that you know of) before they settled on yours?
Not that I know of. All I know is that my mom picked it out of a baby book because she thought it was a pretty name.

8. What does your name mean?
As far as I know, there are multiple meanings that I’ve never really pinned down a real one. I’ve seen “stable”–which as a horse-girl I loved the double meaning of. Think Baby Names says that the boy version is an English shortening of Eustace
and the girl version is generally considered to be a shortened version of Anastasia–aha! vindication!

9. Do any famous people share your name?

• Stacy on What Not to Wear (she’s really annoying and I much prefer Trinny and Susannah in the British version, who aren’t nearly so condescending and even help women with not-perfect bodies on a regular basis)
• Stacy Keach (actor)
• Stacy’s Pita Chips

10. Can you pronounce your name backwards?
Ysats. I always thought it was a great name for a villain when I was a kid.

11. Favorite girls’ names: I loved the name Victoria so much growing up that the only extant story I wrote as a kid that has survived in my records involved a girl named Victoria. Now I’m not so sure what fascinated me about it. 

I still like Anastasia and may end up using it as a pen name someday.

Other names… I don’t think about it as much anymore. I like a lot of my ancestors’ names. Bessie Beatrice was a lovely combination for a teen girl in the 1910s.

12. Favorite boys’ names: Blair. It’s a family name–my dad’s first name, my grandfather’s middle name, and my great-grandmother’s maiden name. I’m afraid of ever naming a child Blair, though, boy or girl, because my generation has been tainted by The Facts of Life.

13. Favorite name you’ve ever read in a book: Tally Youngblood from Uglies. Scott Westerfeld has done a series on why he chose his character names that I think authors would find useful. He talks about all the different considerations that go into choosing a name for a character 300 years in the future that I think can be directly applied to questions authors can ask about any setting they’re thinking about.

14. Favorite name from a TV show: Veronica Mars. Though it’s not been the best of seasons and I’m kind of on the outs with the show at the moment, I think the combination of first name/last name was just inspired.

Second choice: I second Alana in Hiro Nakamura, which really is a nice play on words, if a bit obvious.

15. Favorite name for a dog/cat: Mogget. I can say it again and again and again. It’s just so fun to say. MoggetMoggetMoggetMogget
Mogget. It’s almost sounds like I’m a frog when I do that.

WRITERLY BONUS QUESTION:
16. Favorite character name from one of your own books: I’m making this an editorly question just because I can. Favorite name out of all the books I’ve edited: I’m torn between Koi (a perfect and deliciously fishy name for a kender in the Elements trilogy by Ree Soesbee (

)) and Ilona, the Hungarian girl in

‘s In the Serpent’s Coils. 

From my own books: I’ve only written
one novella/novellette (I’m never sure of the difference) and have been meaning to expand it to a novel, but you know how that goes when you don’t actually devote time to writing. However, I love the characters’ names, Dach (short for something that slips my mind at the moment) and Maggie (short for Maghdain).

But my question, for you out there in the know of Scots dialect (or British English in general), what’s a tailback? British for traffic jam?

Drivers see red as farmer dyes flock to beat tailback blues

A FARMER has dyed his sheep red in an effort to cheer up drivers sitting in tailbacks on Scotland’s busiest motorway.

Today’s final post is a morality tale. It is a tale of an annoyed editor and a newby writer who should have known better.

The setting: Editor is cleaning out her office. There comes a time when “organized disorder” becomes plain old disorder and you have to do something about it. It’s been over a year since the move to the new building, and she has decided that it’s about time to organize the files before they rise up and eat her alive.
Between juggling (literally) files and juggling (metaphorically) all the other duties of her day, including people stopping by her cube numerous times an hour to ask her questions, and colleague yelling over the wall to tell her to check her email to answer more questions, Editor is feeling kind of frazzled, but triumphant. She will conquer this organizational nightmare, and she has the label maker to make it happen.

The phone rings.

E.: Hello?

Newby Writer: <Announces name. No greeting.>

E.: . . . Yes? How can I help you?

N.W.: I sent you an email yesterday.

E.: You did?

N.W.: Yes, why didn’t you write me back? Or answer my voicemail?

S.E.: . . .

N.W.: Well, like I said in the email, I’ve got the next best thing in children’s literature right here, and true to my word, I’m going to call you every day until you give me an answer.

E.: Have you looked up our submissions guidelines? You’re welcome to submit, but you need to follow those guidelines.

N.W.: No. Here’s what you’re going to do. I’m sending you a postcard today with my idea, and you can check off whether you want to sign me up.

E.: <puzzled look, can’t get a word in edgewise>

N.W.: I went through all that before. I found a publisher, and they signed me up and sat on my book for a year. A year! And didn’t do anything with it. So my brother drew up a letter of disillusion and I fired them. I’m never going through that again.

E.: Well, pretty much the only way to get published through us is to read the guidelines and then follow them. If I get your submission I’ll give it careful consideration, just like every other submission. Thanks for calling, have a nice day! <click>

There are several things wrong with this scenario, number one being the fac
t that the author thought he could “fire” a publisher. It’s unclear whether he was actually under contract with a reputable trade publisher, but from the context it doesn’t really sound like he was.

Problem number two is that the author is showing right off that he’s not an easy-going, professional guy to work with. Even if you have the most amazing, stunning ideas, if the editor can’t stand you, there’s a big chance she might pass, because such an author isn’t going to take editorial direction very well. And don’t get me started on the phrase, “Here’s what you’re going to do.”

Problem number three is the obvious: he called. Even if you must call, perhaps it might be a good idea to be polite. But as you can probably imagine, if you catch an editor in a bad moment–such as when she’s got a million things going on, which would be pretty much every day–she’s going to be much less likely to be patient.

That said, the polite inquiries I get from time to time requesting information about an author’s submission are welcome. Certainly if you haven’t heard from me after a couple months you have every right to ping me–via email or snail mail–and check in on the status of your submission. I’m afraid I’ve been quite swamped since Christmastime and manuscripts I thought I’d get to several months ago have been languishing in the to-rea
d pile, sadly neglected and–to use a phrase just used the other day regarding silver and china–taunting me, giving me extreme guilt complexes. We’ve been slowly catching up on the backlog, don’t worry! And I’ll usually respond with a thanks for keeping in touch and for the polite reminder.

But (and I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but this is for posterity) calling is probably not your best option.

*Though this is a true story, this did not happen to me.