MYSTERY NOVEL
Both Darkness and I are feeling a trifle thin on the ground. Darkness is monumentally better, I hasten to add, but he’s clearly not right yet and from the severity of this, er, outburst, I know it’s going to take a little while to calm down completely. But I’m not sure what I should be expecting and I worry easily.* I did not make it to service ring this morning and have pretty much felt like a flag at half mast all day. This is exactly the sort of thing that makes the ME come back full bore—sudden crisis followed by clean-up and worry. In theory I have a voice lesson tomorrow. And tower practise at Glaciation. Not to mention a novel to write in five months.
Mrs Redboots wrote: No, don’t tell us anything about the not-Pegasus novel you’re doing just now! Tease us by referring to it as NOT-PEGASUS and tell us absolutely nothing else until it is set in stone and the editors have given you the proof. We will all plead and beg – myself included – but it would be such fun not knowing what, or who, to expect!
This really made me laugh. I think the readers who want to know something about MYSTERY NOVEL outnumber those of you who don’t—and I had been planning on telling you enough to be annoying. I’ve pretty much had this conversation with both Merrilee and my editor—how much is enough** for various audiences—blog readers as opposed to marketing departments, for example. Because nobody knows anything at all about this book yet (except me) I had to write some copy for my editor’s presentation at her big autumn sales meeting.*** Aaaaaugh. Writing any kind of advertising copy is a unique and exacting skill, and being able to write novels and semi-truthful blog entries is no indication of success in this demanding area. And the short and snappy is not my forte. You also do find yourself thinking, what is there new and original to say about pegasi-dragons-vampires-fairies-goddesses-magic in a paragraph or two? Merrilee and I sweated over this for a while and I believe the ultimate outcome was something along the lines of: New Robin McKinley fantasy novel!!! No, not PEG II! That’s later! To be followed by PEG III even later yet! New!
. . . Tick the box and move on to the next item.†
So here are a few random facts about MYSTERY NOVEL:
(a) It is not a mystery novel.†
(b) It’s modern-alternate-this-world. Contemporary fantasy.
(c) There are no vampires. Just to get that out of the way. ††
(d) There is origami. This is why I was trying to drag what little I used to know of it, dusty and creaking, out of the back cupboard. Which is fine.
(e) There may be trying to be some . . . maths.††† I am resisting this. This is also why I pulled ALEX IN NUMBERLAND off the shelf where it’s been sitting for over a year, and when I discovered www.audible.co.uk had it, bought,‡ downloaded and listened to it. ‡‡ I haven’t decided yet if this was a good idea or a bad one. It doesn’t seem to have had any influence on the story, but then my futile attempts at research rarely do. These attempts do, however, occasionally allow me to keep up.
(f) I’m going to get this random fact over quickly: If all goes as planned‡‡‡ this will come out the year I’m sixty. It will also be my first official YA novel, with a heroine in her senior year in high school. Feh.
(g) Its working title is SHADOWS. And I’d rather call it SHADOWS than NOT PEGASUS or MYSTERY NOVEL, if you don’t mind. Well, even if you do mind. Author’s prerogative. I have to write the thing.
Audrey Falconer: Mind you, I do also want that one that featured bells….
If I’d had any sense, I’d’ve got that one out and had a run at it; there’s a lot of it already on paper.§ Although SHADOWS isn’t totally a bolt from the blue, just almost. The initial idea drifted past about eighteen months ago, and I wrote a few pages of it to check the, um, storyness of it, but I had PEGASUS to be getting on with,§§ and put it (nameless at the time) in a folder and forgot about it. But it’s SHADOWS that came boiling out of the . . . shadows . . . when I knew I had to put PEG II aside, and said meeeeeeeeeeee.
But THE BELLS OF MAZAHAN is still on the list. It’s just ‘list’ in my language is probably not what it is in anyone else’s language. §§§ Like ‘sanity’ or ‘organisation’.
* * *
*Yes, I’m going to ring the vet tomorrow and ask.
** . . . to be annoying
*** And I’m certainly not going to tell you that much.
† Eeep, I said. It’ll be fine, Merrilee said. Eeep, I said. But I’ve been reminded that she was right the last time. . . .
jmeadows: See? Merrilee told you it [the announcement] wouldn’t be bad AND IT WASN’T. You should listen to your agent more. *g* (*may have just experienced something like this and should take her own advice*)
††When I was younger, and also thought I would write ‘straight’ fiction some day, I also wanted to write at least one mystery. Even then I knew I wasn’t going to be good at the plotting and the deviousness but I thought I might manage one.
You never know. I wasn’t going to write a trilogy either.^ As several of you have pointed out, however, PEG is not really a trilogy, it’s a Novel in Three Volumes.^^ Like Tolkien’s LOTR, as one or two people further helpfully suggested.^^^ I appreciate your faith in me, but this is not a reassuring thought.
LRK:
|
PEGASUS is a trilogy. |
Oddly – and I mean oddly as I have no idea why – I’m not surprised. It just feels like one of those things that, when you find out about them, had to be.
Sigh. Yes. I should have known. . . .
^ anef: OMG you’re having triplets! Many congratulations!
Snork. Thank you.
^^ Diane in MN: Oh, Robin—not a trilogy, a three-volume novel, right?
Right. Think of all those Charles Dickens novels that were published serially in volumes.
^^^ Whom I will not quote here, for fear of bursting into tears. I can deal with Charles Dickens’ three-decker novels. I can’t deal with even remote and superficial similarities to the author who probably made me a fantasy writer, even if a significant part of how he made me a fantasy writer is by inspiring a burning ambition to have some girls involved in the story.
†† Although I think it is in SUNSHINE’s . . . continuum, as you might say. It’s not the same world, but I think it’s the same universe. I’m pretty sure all my ‘high’ fantasies join up somewhere; it wouldn’t surprise me if all my alt-moderns do too.
††† No, no, no, you maths phobics. Stop screaming. It’s not like that. It’s like . . . if there’s going to be a desert, there’d better not be a pine forest and polar bears. This is the writer’s problem. You the reader are only going to see the desert. Relax.
‡ Again. As a study aid, this two-media thing is a very good deal. From a financial standpoint . . . not so much.
‡‡ Not without difficulty.
‡‡‡ Erm. Better to say hoped for.
§ And on a floppy disc somewhere. Although you probably need an Antique Tech Translating Device to extract it any more. The floppy is not hugely crucial since when I go back to it I’ll start on page one of the hard copy and write a fresh draft.
§§ Hollow laughter.
§§§ “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – - that’s all.”
Major Rant Alert
I got a chirpy email from a friend in which she extols the virtues of a new ebook site she’s found that she’s sure I’ll want to check out as soon as I have my own ereader and mentions (chirpily) in passing that she downloaded a free copy of SUNSHINE.
The frelling gods frelling wept.
I will tell you this for free: if there’s a big bad nasty out there that is going to destroy the whole business of producing stuff for people to read—and the digital world is changing so fast, it seems to me even the word publishing is starting to sound a bit hoary—it’s piracy. There’s masses and masses of stuff out there—in our digital universe—about piracy and its effects, and I’m not going to thrash it all out again here because among other reasons I’d burst a blood vessel. This is the top link in a Google search for ‘author blogs piracy’: http://www.the-digital-reader.com/forum/blog-posts/ebook-piracy-one-authors-opinion/ and if you need a quick brush-up you can find it here. He doesn’t even froth at the mouth. I’m proud of him. I’m frothing at the mouth.
How much worse is it—how much more hopeless is it, trying to keep a lid on it, since piracy will always be with us*—if the good guys are stealing from us too? How many of you out there have done something similar to what my friend did? No. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.
My friend said, oh, I didn’t think, because it was one of your older books. What? How do you—any of you—think writers earn their living, supposing they’re among the lucky five or ten percent of published writers who can make a living by writing? The money we receive from publishers is absolutely and strictly tied to sales. The ‘advance’ we receive, usually on signing a contract, is against sales. If, at the end of the day or the year or the print run or when they yank your book out of print, you haven’t earned back in sales as much as they paid you for your ‘advance’, you’re in deep trouble, because they’re losing money on you and unless they think you’re about to morph into J K Rowling with your next book, they probably won’t take your next book. And there you are reading the want ads and wishing you’d learnt sheep-shearing when you had the chance. Royalties? Yes, a writer eventually receives royalties, if her book sells well enough to earn back her advance and keeps selling . . . but of that five or ten percent of writers, which includes me, who do manage to earn a living by writing, a vanishingly weeny sub-percentage ever builds up enough royalties to, you know, retire. We live from advance to advance. We can’t afford to retire. I can’t.
And we need those advances to earn out by sales. Our future lives as writers depend on it.
Yes, of course, lots of people who buy cheap or free pirate editions wouldn’t pay full price for the legitimate book. But some would. Who doesn’t like a bargain, if they don’t realise what it’s costing someone else? And some of those that wouldn’t buy the book would go to the library. Libraries buy books—and a book particularly popular with librarians will sell more copies, because they’ll talk it up to each other and to their clientele. And there’s the whole model thing. There’s now a model out there that says that everything on the internet is free, and everything on the internet should be free.** We need to keep that model of money being paid for goods and services alive and healthy. By paying for goods and services. Because the providers of goods and services themselves need to pay mortgages and taxes and school fees and car insurance.
So when you’re out there cruising for bargains, engage your brain. And if, brain engaged, it looks too good to be true, it probably is. None, repeat NONE, of my books is available for free. That includes the out of print ones—I still own the rights. What happens to used copies of paper books is out of my hands. But you should pay the going rate for an ebook—which I realise is a very mutable concept—and you should buy it from someone who has the right to sell it—which will also give you some clue about that going rate. And what I say about me is pretty universally true of all living and recently dead—copyright lasts for a while after you pop your clogs—authors. There are a few loss-leader experiments with free books—but they’re the exception. They are not the rule. Be suspicious. And if you find a pirate site—tell someone. Publishers have entire departments to deal with piracy these days—they have to. It’s their livelihood too. They want to know about pirates.
It was only an accident—an offhand, throwaway remark—that my friend even told me about her free download of SUNSHINE. That’s the thing that completely haunts me. And I almost didn’t even notice, because it would never have occurred to me that someone I know could be this, well, daft. The purpose of her email was to remind me of something I’d promised to do . . . ahem . . . a while ago, and I went ‘aaaugh’ and rushed off to do it. It wasn’t till I settled down to answer her email properly that I registered the ‘free’ and ‘download’. Even then I thought she must have just left a sentence out about, I don’t know, for every eighty-seven ebooks you buy you get a free one or something, and she chose SUNSHINE.
It has not been a great day. I’m even shorter of sleep than usual for a getting-up-for-service-ring Sunday because the Bats in the Walls*** were unusually chatty last night†, it’s been doing TORRENTIAL RAIN all day with occasional apparent breaks which delude you into believing you could get hounds hurtled before the next downpour and, speaking of hellhounds, Chaos took two hours to eat lunch. That tragic look of his would melt the hearts of entire audiences of bankers, newspaper-empire owners, and politicians, if I could figure out how to deploy it. I think he’d have trouble learning his lines for an open audition of HAMLET.
* * *
* If there are goods, there are pirates of those goods. There were book pirates back in paper-book-only days too.
** Economics is one of the many things I don’t understand very well or very much of, but how anyone over the age of, say, twenty, can claim that we should shovel everything onto the internet that we possibly can and that all of it should be free, is absolutely beyond my comprehension.
*** A little known H P Lovecraft sequel. I hope it ends better than the original.
† I was lying there listening to the flap-flap-flap cheep cheep cheep rustle-rustle-scritch cheep cheep CHIRRUP SQUEAK and thinking that if I were Melampus I’d know the secrets of the universe by now. Or at least some really interesting details about the bug populations of my neighbours’ gardens.
Signing Eve
Thanks to everyone who entered the Silly Signing Clothing Contest. I’m afraid it’ll probably be Friday before I can cope with the counting and the random number generator, but . . . THANK YOU. A copy of the UK PEGASUS will be coming toward one of you soon.
* * *
OH GODS THE FRELLING SIGNING IS TOMORROW. ISN’T THERE A NICE ANONYMOUS EMERGENCY IN HARROGATE OR MIDLOTHIAN OR SOMEWHERE WHERE MY PRESENCE COULD BE CRUCIAL TO SUCCESS?
No, no, wait, I didn’t mean that, of course not, what was I thinking?, I mean, OH! YAAY! THE LOVELY SIGNING IS TOMORROW! I’M GOING TO LONDON TOMORROW FOR A LOVELY SIGNING! I WILL SIGN LOTS OF COPIES* OF PEGASUS** AND I WILL HAVE A LOVELY TIME CHATTING TO ALL THE NICE PEOPLE! I LOVE PEOPLE! I’M SO GOOD AT CHATTING, ESPECIALLY TO STRANGERS!***
I don’t think I can keep this up for long. . . .
As I think I tweeted to someone recently, the only real attraction of public appearances for me is the excuse to wear silly clothing. I’ve always loved dressing up, it’s just that having got dressed up and made my entrance I’m ready to go home again and put my jeans back on. Parties. Shudder. One of the additional problems with parties is that generally speaking you’re trying to look your best at a party, rather than like a raging loony, and my idea of fun threads tends toward the raging loony end.† At least with an author gig I know what I’m there for††, which is to Engage Directly with Some Small Portion of My Audience—aside from the nightmarish possibility that no one will come†††—and so long as whatever you’re wearing doesn’t restrict your mouth or your writing arm you can answer questions and sign books dressed as the Lambton Worm‡ or the Houses of Parliament as well as in a twinset and a modest tweed skirt. I suppose you shouldn’t frighten your publicist.‡‡ In my experience your audience can usually swing with whatever is on offer, although that may be due to the flexibility of the fantasy-reading intellect.
I’m at the never mind, it’ll be over soon stage. As I was also tweeting to someone recently (I think), the vast VAST majority of my readers are lovely. They are both polite and enthusiastic, they buy books, they form a queue to the right when someone tells them that’s where the queue forms and they are generally either articulate or have pleasant giggles. . . . But I, of course, remember the ones who have travelled five hundred miles to tell me how much they hate my books‡‡‡, the ones that feel that my feminism distorts my view of reality, the ones who think my books would be pretty good if I’d only had the benefit of their insight sooner, and that my next books could be better if I’d keep their advice in mind . . . and the ones that have brought a specially printed out copy of their 1000-page manuscript (the first of a series) so I can take it home with me and read it.§ I am short on people skills! I can blow you off by email much more efficiently! I also am a terrible wuss. Unless you piss me off—which, granted, is perhaps not that hard to do—I hate hurting people’s feelings. I’ve been wrong-footed so frelling many times simply by giving way when I should’ve grimly held my line like the Greeks at Thermopylae.
But tomorrow is going to be great, right?
It’ll be over soon . . .
* * *
There were no bats last night. At least I think there weren’t any. I did turn my light out and promptly dive under a carefully prior-arranged rampart of pillows, having also spent what energy I had in telling myself they were only little bats, they were not a big deal even in the bedroom with me, and if it came to that I could just sleep through the beating of tiny wings and the ambling of tiny bodies over the hummock under the bedclothes that is me. And if I believed that I had a nice bridge I could sell myself later. I lay there under my pillows straining to pretend I wasn’t straining for any sound of tiny beating wings. . . . And there wasn’t any such sound. I think. Maybe I’m just deafer than I realise.§§ Eventually I fell asleep . . . And Atlas has now spent two more days sealing up anything that REMOTELY resembles a hole§§§, and we wait upon events.
Also, it’s raining. Fiona mentioned this yesterday#, but I’d been thinking about it. It’s already been put forward as a theory that one reason my bats may have broken through into the house this year is because of the drought. A lot of their usual sources have dried up, and they can smell the water in my tank—and to a bat smaller than the palm of my hand, the splashes in the sink may count as a good drink.## Atlas plugged a lot of the obvious holes . . . and it started raining. I didn’t have bats for several weeks, and we had a fair amount of rain, off and on, for several weeks. Then it stopped raining again. I started having to water my garden again. And the bats returned. I still want TO FINISH BLOCKING ENTRY HOLES. I DO NOT WANT BATS IN THE HOUSE EVEN IF IT’S A DESERT OUT THERE. But it is a bit suggestive. It rained yesterday and today too. Not a lot—my monarda is still moaning that it’s thirsty, it’s always thirsty—but what I hope might be enough for bats no bigger than the palm of my hand. Even four hundred and ten of them.
* * *
* Okay, the ‘lots’ would be good.
** And possibly a few others
*** ::Whining noises:: —Who, me? It’s the hellhounds. Who are, for the moment, eating.
† An additional reason why I am loath to give up the black leather mini is because it’s such good theatre. One of the major drawbacks of the SUNSHINE tour, aside from the simple fact of it being a tour, is that I did not want to get into the vampire chic thing—I am so not dangerous or Goth, you know?—so I regretfully left the sillier end of my leather collection at home. But PEGASUS? Totally the moment for a black leather mini. Never mind my age.
†† Unlike at a party. What am I here for? Is there champagne? Is it properly cold?
††† ::Suppressed rant on the subject of advertising:: Sometimes you’re just not J K Rowling and that’s all there is to it. But the occasions that have left marks on my soul have been totally frelling frelled by the shop in question. Grrrrr.
‡ They deserved to be cursed to nine generations for killing the dog.
‡‡ The Houses of Parliament may be over that line.
‡‡‡ Or anyway have travelled 500 miles to attend the convention partly so they could come to my panel and tell me what a festering pustule on the face of literature I am. Eeep.
§ And the junior high track one English lit teachers who have assigned SUNSHINE to their seventh graders without having read it first.
§§ Any of you other middle-aged and growing deaf out there, have you noticed the way you only go deaf for stuff you want to be able to hear? The idiot conversation at the next table or the sound of tiny wings you hear as clearly as a twelve-year-old.
§§§ And I bet the Bat Conservation Trust does not allocate grants to beleaguered householders paying for weeks of a professional carpenter’s time.
# Possibly while we were in the car on our way to the yarn store. I needed cheering up, okay?
## And yes, I’m aware that my saucers of water strategy may not be in my own best interests, but if I must have bats I prefer live frisky bats rather than sad dehydrated dying bats.
A Day in London
I had a lot more fun than I was expecting to. But that was mostly the yarn shop* (and the cafe http://www.lepainquotidien.co.uk/#/en_UK/locations/royal_festival_hall_se1). The party, eh. The party was a party. And yes–it was HOT.
I went to the yarn shop first, and after an hour of lust, adrenaline and HEAT I was fading badly by the time I paid for my latest foray into vice and staggered back out into the street. The party was at Whitehall [sic] so the logical thing to do was go back to Waterloo** and find a cafe in the South Bank Centre near the pedestrian bridge over the Thames; Whitehall is about a five-minute walk*** from the other end of the bridge. So that’s what I did.
Walking across Hungerford Bridge
Presumably the great barbed barricade is to prevent people from jumping the gap and adding to the ornamentation on the train-bridge pillar wall (the train bridge runs slap next to the pedestrian bridge) but the thing that fascinates me is that if you kept your nerve you could do it anyway. It's like they almost want you to try. Ewwww.
Note the date as well as the nice use of grocer's apostrophe
Party. Ceiling. Good grief.
This--the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall--was the last thing Charles I saw before he was led outdoors to have his head removed. It might almost have helped resign him to having it all over with.
I am, as we know, easily amused. Here we have old pillar, middle-aged chair, and hot, happening (purple) spotlights. Plus people having a good time (?) and a few fire extinguishers.
I assume when they don't have purple spotlights on them they're white and gilt.
Sorry. I'm mesmerised.
And our fearless leader (with pillar) gave a speech about how wonderful we all are. Did you know it's the 75th anniversary of BALLET SHOES?
Then I came home.
Party All Stars. With party socks. And feet, very glad to be out of them. I did have a pair of sandals with me in case the heat got too much, but I don't WALK in sandals.
* * *
* In case any of you missed this: http://www.iknit.org.uk/shop.html And it is INCREDIBLY impossible to find. It’s part of what looks like a really nice, funky neighbourhood community main street, but the neighbourhood is surrounded by the Dead Marshes, well populated by corpse candles, wills o’ the wisp, and Gollums. If I hadn’t found a nice cop-like person–I don’t think he was a cop, but he had a kind of cop-echt uniform–I might still be wandering in spirals around Waterloo.
** Lower Marsh Street is on the opposite side of Waterloo from where the station shoots you out onto the tarmac. So you can go out the door and turn left or go out the door and turn right. I hesitated, staring at my map, and chose left. Of course I should have gone right.
*** Even when burdened by fresh manifestations of iniquity. Which I’m saving for tomorrow’s post. I need sleep. I need sleep NOW.
Direful Anticipation
(This just in from @CambridgeMinor on Twitter: http://t.co/J3rFML3 Snork.)
I seem to be even shorter of sleep than usual on a getting-up-for-early-service-ring Sunday. Something to do with HEAT and DREAD.* Going to parties always brings out the inner eremite in me anyway . . . at this point I was going to say especially publishing parties, but ALL parties are ‘especially’, they’re just different especiallies. Publishing parties involve bracing yourself for being introduced to the author who wrote the worst book you have ever read and trying not to blurt out, in your laudable effort not to say this, something like, I thought you were dead, which in the private context of your exploding brain sounds pretty polite, but neither the author nor whoever introduced you will think so. Or—also possible—being introduced to the person for whom you are that author.
As if the mere fact of a party is not bad enough**, it’s HOT. It’s been disgusting today in Hampshire but it’s supposed to get up to 90° *** in London tomorrow. There are places on this planet where 90°F is bearable. London is not one of them. Whimper. And so the dread burgeons and ripens: will I manage to get on the only train/car whose air-conditioning is not working? Will there be a screaming child in the Only Car/Every Car of the Only Train? Don’t even think about opening a window: they’re all hermetically sealed at the factory. Will the tube† be air-conditioned? Am I better off wiltingly resisting the brutally hammering sun or the claustrophobically smothering tunnels? Will there be an outbreak of basilisks and salamanders, who are known to love being boiled? Whimper.
I could just cancel.†† But . . . there’s a fabulous YARN STORE immediately opposite Waterloo Station.††† If it weren’t for the party—well, and the heat—I’d be totally stoked about going to London tomorrow.‡
I discovered Mrs Redboots’ forum comment about it about an hour after I’d discovered I Knit myself: http://www.iknit.org.uk/shop.html I’ve been reading knitting books of course and when I saw I Knit in a ‘resources’ section the post code had made an impression as possibly near Waterloo. YESSSSSSSSS. Mrs Redboots was suggesting I go round after the signing, but I think that evening is going to be complicated enough, so really this party is doing me a favour by giving me another chance. Unhhh. . . .
I’d heard from a couple of the mods that Ajlr’s crossword was difficult, and so when I finally saw it last night‡‡ I was relieved I knew all the answers. One of the supernumerary anxieties of Author Appearances is Those Questions from the Audience Which Manifest a Stronger Memory and Overall Grasp of My Work Than I Myself Possess and Which I Therefore Can’t Answer. And, furthermore, will look like a twit by failing to answer. Siiiiiigh. The more books I’ve written the more often this happens‡‡‡ . . . and I’m going to be in worse knots and spasms than usual because of the PEG II situation. In the first place I can’t talk much about PEG I for the sake of anyone who hasn’t read it yet, which is fairly normal for new-book signings . . . but in the second place I can’t talk about PEG II at all because of that extremely nasty ending of PEG I which, because of the colliding weirdness of internet shipping and international publication dates, most of you have already read § . . . and in the third place PEG II is now mostly realer to me than mere . . . reality§§, and I’m going to have a lot of trouble remembering anything I can risk saying about anything. Usually by the time a book comes out I’m well into some other world. §§§
But anyone who asks about a sequel to SUNSHINE will be instantly killed.# Just so you know.
* * *
* That totally sounds like an urban fantasy. HEAT AND DREAD^. Maybe I’ll write it after ALBION.
^ No, no, no. HEAT AND DUST was literature.
** I’ve been trying to decide if the prospect of a sudden party—since I only found out about this one on Thursday—is better or worse than a, er, Long Awaited Party.^ No. Yes. No. I think it’s another ‘especially’.
^ I’d’ve put the Ring on at the beginning, not the end.
*** 32° for you modern C people
† Underground. Subway.
†† And if I have any sense, if it’s really gruesome, I will.^
^ In which case I will be FURIOUS because I’ve already cancelled my voice lesson. Furious and . . . whimpering.
††† Where Hampshire trains arrive in London.
‡ I think there may be something a little wrong with the logic here.^
^ Um. Logic?
‡‡ She’d offered me a preview and I said, no, no! Not necessary! Guest post and CONTEST? You can do anything you like.
To which she responded perhaps a little too quickly: ::Ponders the licence this may confer…::
‡‡‡ Age, which causes crumbliness on all fronts^, and menopause, which eats your brain, probably also have some input here
^ And backs. I will discuss prospective author apparel and the black leather mini some other evening between now and bursting in on an unprepared Forbidden Planet like a really, really bad B movie extra.
§ I will have several large, burly, invisible bodyguards protecting me from any attempt to wrest the end of PEG II out of me. Mwa hahahahaha.
§§ Barring hellhounds. Hellhounds are always very real.
§§§ I don’t ever want to do this continued-in-the-next-volume thing again! PLEASE!
# The invisible bodyguards are multi-talented.