Today has been one of *those* days.

Which started last night, about 1 AM. I was actually being good – editing as opposed to farting around on tumblr – until I got an email just as I was about to head to bed.

My NWN MMO account had been hacked. Now, I’m a veteran of MMOs. I don’t click links I shouldn’t click and I keep my nose clean and my passwords tight. But however the person got it, the reason I found out was because PWE sent me an email indicating that they’d had a request for a new email address to be connected to my account.

But instead of letting me confirm this particular request, they sent the confirmation to the NEW email address. Which was some bogus hotmail account. The icing on the cake is that I got this notification about 30 minutes AFTER the request was made.

And the hacker then immediately changed my password and stole all of my ZEN. (in game money you buy with real money.) Now, I have a founder account for NWN – this means I dropped $200 of actual cash to play the game with a distinct number of advantages – including over 2 million astral diamonds (another form of in game currency. This is also all gone.)

The long and short of it is that I was up until about 2:30 AM or so trying to sort out my account and desperately reaching out to customer service. At this point I haven’t gotten anything back but an auto responder, though a quick run through the game forums shows I’m far from alone. Sadly, many people are reporting weeks without a response from CS…and those that are getting their accounts back are finding them banned and with no way to recover anything that was stolen.

I’m pretty fucking burned about it, honestly.

(I also don’t expect to get my account back…or if I do, I doubt I’ll get any of my stolen currency back. In which case, I’m done with PW and Cryptic for good. The game is fun but they’ve clearly got some major security issues.)

Not much I can do about other than wait, but between being so riled up about it that I couldn’t sleep and a cup of green tea this morning that set off my Interstitial Cystitis into a rageboner of suck, it hasn’t been a particularly good day.

Hopefully this weekend will be better.

Since Carniepunk is coming out in a few months (July 23rd!), I decided to have Darchala draw me out a lovely scene from my story, A Duet with Darkness.

(It’s not an exact match as far as the story goes, but it’s freaking awesome and I love it. So there.  Plus Dar got the livestream working and I was able to watch her work.)

We wavered a bit on a title and finally decided on “Pride and a Fall” – though the working title was “No More Pride, Little Bird”  - honestly I couldn’t decide between the two.

But we’ve got Melanie there with the red hair and the rainbow socks…and her sin-eater fallen angel paramour Nobu.

*sighs*

I may look at turning it into a print if there’s interest.

Also, it looks like Carniepunk is going to be released in audiobook format as well. This tickles me silly, though I’m not sure I’ll be able to listen to it without giggling. My words or not, I have a hard time hearing them in other voices than my own. But we’ll see how it turns out – more details on that when I know them.

Some details of the image below.

So it occurs to me that I’ve been rather lax in updating my website with a few key things.

First off – I’m over at SF Signal’s Mind Meld today, weighing in about Faerie (along with several other fabulous authors, including Seanan McGuire and Julie Kagawa) – so go check it out!

Also, if I haven’t mentioned it before, I’ve got a set of signed Abby Sinclair books (and trading cards) up for auction at the Brenda Novak Online Auction for Diabetes, so if you are interested in donating to a great cause, please check that out as well.

And the hard copy version of Womanthology Space is available for pre-order too – if you were unable to get a copy of Issue #5 and wanted to read my story, The Wind in Her Hair – you can find it here.

So I guess the only thing left to talk about is the broken Kindle up there.

Which in a frustrating bit of irony, decided to fizzle out yesterday, just as I was attempting to download some of the books I’d pre-ordered a few months ago. (I do so love Tuesday.)

It’s several years old and past its warranty, so I ran out to Best Buy to take a look at some of the newer models. I don’t mind plunking down to buy a new one since I do use it so much, but although I’m not interested in the Kindle Fire, I did want to check out the Paperwhite.

As you can see, I ended up buying one. There’s obviously a size difference, but the thing I wanted to see what 1) the backlighting was like – I’m not fond of reading books off a backlit device, particularly at night, but I have to admit that the Paperwhite was a pretty pleasant surprise and not obnoxious at all.  (Gave it a trial run in bed last night and it worked very well.)

and 2) No buttons. I’ve become rather fond of the old Kindle’s side buttons to flip pages. The Paperwhite uses a swipe or finger tap to move forward and back, but I discovered I can use the thumb of my holding hand to do it easily enough, so it’s pretty much a win-win either way.

I don’t read as much when I’m in the middle of writing, but now that the pesky rough draft is over, I’m allowing myself a little down time – my TBR pile is ever larger and I really need to make a dent.

For some particular reason I decided to start out each chapter in this new book with a poem of sorts. They’re a bit like twisted nursery rhymes, shaped to the environment of the characters.

Of course, I did this for about 10 chapters or so and then decided it was a better use of my time to actually write the book and go back and add them later (which is what I’ll be doing in the next few weeks.)

This first one is actually a play on words since two of the other character names are Ghost and Sparrow, so I liked the tie-in.

In either case, the rough draft is finished now. It comes in at just over 92k words, but it’s going to get longer when I go back to flesh things out. Pantsting through a fantasy means a lot of the world gets built as I write it – and that means certain things like the political structure or technology end up changing conceptually. (And I *did* do some planning before I wrote it, but not everything turned out like I planned, so time to smooth things over. I’ve got some biology to rethink, if nothing else.)

I’ve been itching to edit it for months, but it’s better for me to complete the draft before I start mucking things up. So even though the ending isn’t quite what I wanted, there are so many details I need to add in the earlier part of the book that I’m not sweating it too much. Editing is the fun part for me anyway.

I’m going to have to look at drawing out a detailed city map too. I’ve got a good idea where everything is, but I suspect having something to look at is only going to help. I’ve got some dungeon/city builder software that was meant for D&D campaigns, but I think I’ll break it open and see what I can do with that.

Normally when I finish a book without a deadline, I’d let it sit for a few weeks or a month before I got back to it. In this case, I’ve printed it out – for some reason hard copy lets me edit easier. And while I don’t have a direct deadline, I did tell my agent I’d have something for her in June. (Plus, I’m still trying to work out my surgery schedule for the summer – I don’t want this draft hanging over my head while I recover.)

Otherwise things are what they are. There’s a lot of personal stuff going on via the home front that I may talk about later. Or not. Yesterday was the 11th anniversary of the passing of my mother, so I’m always fairly quiet during this time of year as a result.  I used to blog about it more, but I don’t think I’ve got much to say about it these days except that it still sucks.

New Fox & Willow up today as well. (We’ve been running a little behind on the updates due to real life stuff. Hopefully we’ll be able to get that under control soon.)

I’ve been staying offline a bit the last few weeks for various reasons, but on twitter yesterday I noticed a bit of buzz going on about what happens when a reader releases spoilers of a book before the book has been released.

Now, the actual thing is that the latest Sookie Stackhouse book is due to be released on May 7th – but it’s not just the latest book in the series – it’s the LAST book. For readers who have been heavily invested in these stories (this fandom, let’s call it) – it’s a pretty big deal.  Long-awaited answers should be revealed, plots lines should be wrapped up…in short, we want to know what happens to our favorite waitress and her vampire suitors.

Here’s the thing though. A German reader ended up with a copy of the book and released the last chapter spoilers.

And people are angry.

Not because the spoilers were released…but because of who Sookie ends up with. Or doesn’t end up with. Or whatever.

Now, I’m a Sookie fan, so I found said spoilers and frankly, it was something I’d figured was going to happen about two books ago. Would I maybe have preferred a different ending? Maybe…but guess what? It’s NOT my story to tell.  And yes. I’m still buying the book…because books are the sum of their parts – not just the endings.

However, there are a great many readers who don’t feel that way. If the Facebook messages on Charlaine’s wall or Amazon forums are anything to measure against, there are some extremely disgruntled people out there. Many expressed dismay at the way the series ends, as well as made statements at “feeling duped” for having wasted their time/money/investment on a series that didn’t end the way they felt it should.  Many are canceling their orders.

Here’s the thing. I’m not going to tell people they don’t have a right to feel a certain way. I completely understand fandoms and the obsessiveness with which they exist. That’s part of what makes them fandoms.   But I do think there is a point where it stops becoming a legitimate expression of anger and starts moving into abuse.

And I’m certainly no stranger to it. After all, one only has to look at the Mass Effect 3 hubbub last year. There were a LOT of extremely angry people about how the series ended – and a lot of articles posted about what a gaming company owes or doesn’t owe its players. I stayed out of it, for the most part…except to completely poke fun at it in A Trace of Moonlight.

Where does the line get drawn?

Controversy is nothing new. But when does a character or a piece of media stop becoming the creator’s and start being owned by the consumer? In the case of Mass Effect, it makes more sense. After all, you create a player character and you spend years making choices and questing and building up a legacy in this world…so when the last game doesn’t deliver the way it was promised it would, then it’s easy to see where the disappointment comes from.

With books or series I’m not sure it’s so cut and dried. How many books does it take before a reader is so invested that they feel they are “owed” by the author? What exactly are they owed? I’m not really expecting an answer to that, because it’s going to be different for everyone. Though I’m still going to point people in the direction of Neil Gaiman’s “GRRM is not your bitch” post, because he puts it out there much better than I could.

Now, what about the reader mentioned above who did the spoiling? What role do readers play in these fandoms? Certainly there are spoilers and speculation that abound everywhere. That’s part of the deal. But in this case, the reader had the actual book in hand and decided to disseminate that ending out onto the internet.

As an author myself, yeah – I’d be pissed. Once the cat’s out of the bag, there probably isn’t much that can be done, but if I’ve spent years crafting a story, it’s going to be completely awful to realize that it’s undone in a matter of moments.  (And being judged on one part, that MIGHT be taken out of context. It also might not, but still.)

From a reader perspective? I have no idea if it was done maliciously or if it the person thought they were doing other fans a service by letting them know. I’m not sure it matters.      (And honestly, massive spoilers for a lot of fandoms are everywhere – there’s no way to really stop it from happening. Shit, sometimes I read the end of a book first, for the exact same reason. I want to know NOW.)

The thing is? Creators are still people. I don’t for a minute think any legitimate author or artist or musician or game developer is sitting there behind the scenes tugging their mustaches in glee over the idea of being able to fuck their fans over. (Or at least, not most of them.) Most of create because we love to create and we want to share our creations with the world.

Sometimes things are out of our control. There are often creative decisions that are made behind the scenes that consumers aren’t privy to, and that’s probably the most frustrating thing of all – because they can’t always be shared, nor should they be.

Speaking for myself, I totally admit getting bummed if a reader is disappointed in my work. But it’s always a given that I can’t make everyone happy. I still like to read reviews that are negative because it helps me to sometimes understand if there was something I could have written better or made more clear – but there’s a line between someone expressing disappointment or anger in a rational way (e.g. I didn’t like the ending because of X) vs someone spouting a 20 foot rageboner that devolves into calling me a cunt because Y.

TL;DR  ;3;

I realize there’s no exact answer here. I can see both sides of the argument but at the end of the day, I am writer. The only thing I owe my readers is the best written story I can tell.

Yeah, I know I’ve been pretty bad the last few weeks with the blogging. Lots going on in real life – additional surgeries to plan,  diagnoses to deal with, AC units to install…it’s been a rather lopsided time.

(I’m taking a mini vacation this weekend to go visit Danielle though – just two gals and their laptops and comfort food for a few days. Really looking forward to it, frankly. I’m 90k into this first draft – still slower than I’d like, but I’m plugging away at it. Hoping to some good writing hours in on the train tomorrow. I just want to finish it so I can start ripping it apart.)

As an aside note, the panel at Awesomecon DC went pretty well. (Shout out and thanks to Alma Katsu for giving me the heads up and inviting me along…and giving me a ride back to the metro afterwards.) There was a great turnout (much, much larger than I thought there would be.) As a starter con, I think it’s got some great potential, and I’m looking forward to watching it grow. Also? It’s just nice to have something close by that’s easy to get to.

Today’s Word Whore post deals with procrastination – of which I’m the master, apparently. I decided to devote my time to talking about Tumblr. I think I may have freaked some people out, but that’s okay. I consider Tumblr to be more of a personal space in a lot of ways, since I’m not really looking to accomplish anything in particular on it. If I like it, I reblog it. I don’t have to worry about putting it into context and it doesn’t matter to me if people get it or not.

That’s rather freeing in a lot of ways.

It’s also really hard for me to pull myself away from it at times, but as a distraction I suppose it’s harmless enough.

New Fox & Willow page is up today too, so go check that out.

So I’ve been reading through one of the Carniepunk arcs and I have to mention just how excited I am to have been included in this particular anthology.

There’s some fabulous stuff in here – I don’t think anyone is going to be disappointed.

(On the flip side, I have to admit to feeling a tad intimidated that *my* story is in here. There’s always that odd little ripple of wondering if it’s really good enough? I suppose that might sound odd, but writer insecurity, I guess.)

Anyway, thought I’d talk a little bit about the story – there may be some spoilers ahead, so you’re warned!

Even though it technically is set in Abby’s world…it’s really a Melanie story. I know some people have wondered about certain things over the last few books – how Abby and Mel’s relationship was started, why Melanie and Brystion appear to have a bit of history together, where Nobu fits into it all…and of course, that magic violin.

So A Duet With Darkness does answer some of those questions - but keep in mind that this story happens well before A Brush of Darkness.

The Brystion you meet here isn’t exactly the same incubus you come to know later on. (BoD readers may recall references to Brystion being blond and dating a girl named Elizabeth? *cough* Quick spoiler there in the picture – it’s a tiny bit smutty, fair warning.)

Same with Melanie, actually. By the time BoD rolls around, Mel’s had her world rocked – and her entire outlook on life ends up changing as a result.

As a side note, it was rather interesting to write her as I did. In my head, I see her more as she is is now, so to be able to dig into her past and figure out who she was before this event occurred was pretty cool. And a little harder than I expected.

I know this probably all sounds vague. I don’t want to get into too many specifics and ruin the story. Incidentally, if you have read A Trace of Moonlight, I leave some fairly obvious clues as to what went down…so it’s there if you read between the lines. I’ve just had this particular idea in my head for so long it’s been great finally getting it down on paper.

Anyway, just a reminder that I’ll be at AwesomeCon DC on Sunday (details here) and Carniepunk is available for pre-order, pretty much everywhere.

Just a quick note to mention that the panel at AwesomeCon is now official.

Here’s the scoop:

April 21, 12 PM: Room 102A – Writing Fantasy: Novels and Comics
In publishing today, fantasy is a crowded field that encompasses the supernatural and paranormal, high fantasy and more science fiction-ish elements such as time travel and alternate realities. Join novelists and comics writers to learn what both publishers and fans expect from writers today. Justic Jordan, Allison Pang, Diana Peterfreund, Meagan Spooner and Alma Katsu.

There will be a signing after that (tho I’m not sure if it’s in the same room yet or if it will be somewhere else.) I won’t be selling any books, but I may give a few copies away.

Should be a good time, so come on down and join us!

In other news, I should have a few Carniepunk ARCs in my hands next week, and I’m going to be looking to offload those onto a few lucky bloggers, so keep an eye out for that. (Who wants one?? )

And today is Fox & Willow’s 100th page! In celebration of this fact, Aimo drew it in full color, so go check it out!

I can’t believe we’ve been writing this for nearly a year now. Amazing.

Yes, I’ve been humming that to the tune of Unbreak My Heart. It’s about the only thing I *can* do at the moment, short of becoming a hot mess of unhappiness.

Weekly rant about the back upcoming, so duck and cover time.

Anyway, went to Doc #2 yesterday to get a second opinion. It’s so tiring to have to explain the entire situation again and again, and hoping that 1) I don’t forget anything 2) The doc takes me seriously enough. I get that a lot because of the hypermobility issue. Just because I can still nearly flatpalm the floor doesn’t mean things don’t hurt. It just doesn’t hurt when I do that.

Anyway. Had to talk to the surgeon in training first. He was nice enough, though he was pretty good looking and he knew it. His smug grin seemed to indicate I was expected to swoon at his feet. I’m going to call him Guy Smiley.  (I was immune to his charms thanks to my Painkiller BS-O-Meter powers. I was pretty high, and therefore didn’t have time for that stuff.) I laid it all out for him. I guess he was supposed to come up with a diagnosis as part of his training. (I suspect he was going to say something like: “Try a facet injection!” If he had, I would have punched him.)

Anyway. They had me put on these super sexy disposable shorts and get some x-rays, after which the actual surgeon came in and looked at those and my discogram CT and MRIs. And here’s the thing. Most docs look at the images first and *then* come talk to you.

But not this guy. He just came in, gestured at Guy Smiley to look over his shoulder and just went off. Most of it was doctor-speak, which I can’t really translate. But an awful lot of it went like this:

“Look here. And here. And here. See this? There’s a fracture here. And see where the bone is rubbing up against this part over here? What the fuck were these people thinking? You’d probably suggest she do what as a course of action?”

Guy Smiley (frowning): “A facet injection?”

Doc: “You’d be wrong.”

(Yeah. He was swearing a blue streak. It was sorta surreal?)

It went on like that for a while. (He actually told me to take the CD back to the hospital to have the docs there look at it again, because they’d clearly had their heads up their asses when they did the report. “Sure they focused on the disc tear, but what about this massively fucked up facet?”)

But the long and short of it is, he wants to do a fusion also…but in a different place than Doc #1 wants to do it. I have a fracture, the vertebrae from my first surgery are just sitting on each other now (Bone-grinding action, yo!) and I have a host of really funky birth defects in that area that aren’t making things any easier.

Him: “And no one has told you this before?”

Me: “Mmm. I think I knew about some of it, but no one suggested they were the issue.”

Him: “Assholes.”

Well, then.

Doc 1 wants to fuse L3-L4 and L4-L5. Doc 2 wants to fuse L4-L5 and L5-S1. (But he said I’ll have a 15 to 20% reduction in mobility as a result, so be *really* sure I want to go there.)

I asked him about the massive tear in L3-L4. He was all “Congratulations. You have a tear. Lots of people do. You’re problem is down here.”

Anyway. He wants me to go get a third opinion from this other surgeon, which I’m going to do, but of course I can’t get in until the end of May.

Doc 2 doesn’t consider me an emergency case, and I was under the impression that if I thought I could just manage and NOT get surgery, he’d be all for that.  I don’t know. While it’s certainly refreshing to have a doc NOT bullshit me for once, I kinda felt like crying anyway. One more list of potential things wrong. One more potential fix that might not actually fix me.

Mmm. So, there you have it.

I really wish I could drink.

I put this out on Facebook yesterday, but for anyone who may have missed it, there’s a free online class on Canvas Network dealing with Gender in Comic Books.  It’s put out by Ball State University, and it just started yesterday, so you still have time to enroll and check it out.  It’s a 6 week MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) – which means there’s about 7k people in it, but there’s a lot of good discussions going on.

Once a week there’s a live chat with various comic book creators. (Including Gail Simone on week 4, so yowza!)

Also cool? The required reading is comics- which Comixology is offering a discount on, even if you *aren’t* taking the class, so worth checking out anyway.

Seeing as gender portrayals in comics and video games is one of my current hot buttons, it only made sense to sign up. I know I won’t be able to give it a full 3 to 4 hours a week, but just getting access to the content has been pretty eye-opening so far.  And quite honestly, most of this stuff could easily be applied to just about any current bit of pop-culture medium. As a writer, it can only be helpful.