Five things, mostly news.

(Locked Patreon post is here.)

First off, this is a preliminary cover for the collection! I now have a date (10/24/2023) and a cover and I guess it’s gonna be real? I like this artist a lot, though the cover doesn’t really say much about the ways that I intersect animals and people in my stories: no well-dressed, property-owning animals; no squid girls; even the Sphinx looks more like an angel than a half-lion with a snake’s tail. Still, it is lovely. We’ll see how the book does!

Second, a couple of interesting events have been added to my dance card: one is a writer guest gig at Comicpalooza 2023, Memorial Day weekend in Houston, with Terry Brooks and Stephen Graham Jones. I’m not on the website yet, but I have actual panels and a place to stay, so that’s all great.

And I was invited to be a guest writer at Kansas State University (in Manhattan KS) this fall: a class, a reading, that sort of thing! Dates to be determined. I love these sorts of appearances! I am only sorry we won’t have the new book available yet.

That seems like plenty of news for a two-week period, but I am sure there is something I have forgotten to mention.

I spent last week in Wisconsin, at my mother’s house. There had been an enormous snowstorm shortly before my arrival, and everything was Yule-card pretty. While I was there, a series of warm days did their work on the two-story piles where plows had pushed the snow off various parking lots, but even when I left they were still plenty high! It was a good visit, at which I achieved nothing but obsessively reading Ellis Peters novels, which is an admirable spring break.

I said that when spring break was over, I would start writing again in earnest, and to that end I cleaned up my downstairs office and made it functional again. I know I am starting to get back in the head game of writing, because the last task for setting it up was to set the Roomba to cleaning the carpets — totally normal, except that for an hour and a quarter, I followed the Roomba everywhere, watching it nose its way into all the corners and under the couch, every move from its first excited little hop from the charging station to its last contented little race for home. This sort of idle noodling is always connected to getting my creative motor restarted. I do have a short story in mind; we’ll see what comes of it!