My schedule for Can*Con, which is happening at the end of this week. Say hi if you see me!

Every time

55 pages remain but I can feel my tired brain is on the verge of making an error, so I will have to finish tomorrow after work. Mea while I can tackle a few of the emails on which I am delinquent! And possibly walk into the woods. But the book is so close now.

I have been working on my copy edits all day, copy edits I started working on a month ago, and somehow I still have 100 pages left. If I do not finish them tonight, I have to make myself a new life deep in the forest or possibly at sea, so on we go. They're such good edits, so that helps.

The men who think women don't write good books are not going to be convinced by examples of women who write good books. They never are. This cycle is so exhausting.

I am very excited for this novel!

Good questions! It must mean young people because otherwise it would just be unemployed, presumably? Making it young people also probably helps in painting unemployment as a chosen newfangled identity rather than an economic reality, I would think!

A mullet is indeed a fish!

Throwback to the time a lovely older editor of my acquaintance queried my use of "mullet" in a column by saying "I don't think you can possibly mean the fish here, but I don't know what you do mean." It's never the fish!

This was a weird way to learn that "neet" apparently means something other than a kind of fish.

The nerdiness level of the justification I just wrote below a stet is off the charts, like "also this is the old calendar so Michaelmas was 11 days ago" (No one needs to read this, "stet" is fine, but it helps me make sure I am solid as this excellent copy editor's queries are always worth checking)

Update: I got ill from a sausage from Cut-me-own-throat Dibbler and lost 1 on all dice rolls

I made tofurkey, the excellent stuffing I make every year, roast potatoes, sweet potatoes, veg gravy, brussels sprouts. My spouse and kid made a perfect lemon meringue pie. Now we're playing Guards! Guards! the boardgame. Hooray for the harvest. Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate.

There is nothing we love more than saving one of our peers from getting bamboozled by a bad actor.

It's also most useful to talk to writers who work in your own genre or field. I don't know a lot about poetry or comics or academic book contracts, but if you have written a novel or a short story, especially in science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, or horror, I can help.

100%. I am always happy to take a look at a contract (or a non-contract situation) and this willingness is pretty close to universal among writers in my experience. We won't give legal advice but we can say whether something is standard or would be a red flag for us, and we can point out resources.

Well we are heading to an exciting end for a kind of weird and bumpy Sens-Predators game

It is a gorgeous Thanksgiving weekend Saturday and everyone who lives in my house is out staining the deck in the sunshine. Tomorrow we're cooking and baking. Somewhere in there I'm finishing copy edits on my Tudor spy novel. A+ long weekend.

In both cases there are incredibly talented hardworking people at most levels who care more about the quality of their work than anyone I have encountered anywhere else, and people at the very top who think quality is irrelevant.

In both cases I think it's worth remembering that the industries as we know them haven't actually been around THAT long; ie they are not inevitable in their current form. Mid-sized city newspapers felt like unshakeable institutions when I was a kid and well, look at them now.