I proclaim it spring! We’ve had snowdrops here for the last three weeks, but I usually hold off declaring springtime until there are crocuses at least. There have been a few showing their noses in the warm sheltered cracks and crannies, but it’s only this weekend that they finally became so numerous that it was hard to keep the dog from stepping on them. So: spring! It is sprung, at least here on the balmy west coast.

You may spring vicariously through me, if your own climate isn’t cooperating. Maybe I’ll even get a wild hare to post some pictures or something. Wouldn’t that be nuts. Or, y’know, organized. It amounts to the same thing, with me.

In other news, Seraphina got a mention at The Book Zone 4 Boys, which I am very pleased about. I sincerely hope the book will find a male readership, and that this kind of mention will help. Amy Unbounded always had a lot of male fans, and that was (to my mind) a much more gender-specific work than Seraphina.

My husband likes my book. I know what you’re thinking – of course he does, he’s your husband – but no, that was never a given. I’m married to a physicist and quite possibly a Vulcan (the jury is still out). His entire interest in literature can be summed up in three titles: Dune, Lord of the Rings, and Sherlock Holmes (all of which he idiosyncratically insists are non-fiction).

He refused to read any early drafts of Seraphina for precisely this reason: what if he hated it? He is a spectacularly incompetent liar. He wanted to read it only when there was no chance whatsoever of his possible dislike or disinterest affecting the outcome; he didn’t want me taking his tastes into account instead of my editor’s advice. Frankly, it was the wisest approach for both of us. I don’t critique his research papers, after all. Anyway, once the book was beyond my power to change, he read it and actually liked it. We were both immeasurably relieved.

That’s a vote of confidence I take very seriously. If my hyper-rationalist husband could find something to love in this book, something to keep him reading voraciously ’til the end, then I believe it can appeal to many other flavours of masculine minds as well.

Because there is no monolithic Male Reader, right? I used to think I knew what boys were like; then I had a son and he blew my preconceptions to pieces. There will be boys who like this book (and people of all sexes who won’t!).

This book is about humans, and the boundaries of being human. I wrote it for humans. I wrote it for you.