One of my writer friends uses the phrase “going to New York” as a kind of shorthand to herself, to remind her that writing has to go all the way. It’s not enough to hypothesize about New York or view it from a polite distance. You’ve got to go there, to the place in yourself that intimidates you, that’s big and unruly and dirty and magical. The scariest, realest place you’ve got.

It’s a good metaphor, although I modify it for my own use. In my personal mythology, that city-to-end-all-cities tends to be Izmir, Turkey, where I’m always lost. Or sometimes Tokyo, where I’m illiterate AND lost. The principle is the same, in any case.

As the gods of irony would have it, however, I am at this moment in real New York for real. It’s my son’s spring break, so I dropped him off with his grandparents in Kentucky and came that one step further. I am here to meet the many wonderful people who have helped – and are continuing to help – bring Seraphina into the world.

Meeting people is intimidating for an introvert like myself, but it’s exciting too. I met my editor for the first time today, someone I’ve been working with for three years. After three years, you really feel like you know a person – and I think I do know him, but I know him as words and ideas, as this disembodied voice who helps me see my own work more clearly. Until you see that person standing in the world, that real human right in front of you, the picture isn’t complete, somehow. You haven’t actually been to New York, in the metaphorical sense, if that makes any sense at all.

I’m vaguely afraid it doesn’t. I’ll translate: meeting people is scary, but worth doing!

Seraphina is at a similar juncture, strange as it may sound. This book, which has lived so long as an idea in my head, or words on my screen, will soon embark on a journey of its own. Where is metaphorical “New York” for a book? Other people’s houses, other people’s heads. It’s going to walk out into the world, just like me, and meet people.

And that is as must be, of course. And obviously, I feel it on the book’s behalf, and the book doesn’t feel it at all. I feel fortunate and grateful, as the day approaches, that I haven’t had to do this alone and that Seraphina has had so many friends to set her on her path.

(I do need to apologize to the friends, cousins, and cousins of friends who I won’t have the opportunity to see on this trip. I am scheduled right up to the eyeballs. I should have made it a longer trip – next time I will know. When you go to New York, take your time!)

Today we’ve got it at both ends of the spectrum!

A blazingly enthusiastic review at Stella Matutina, and a genuine, thoughtful one-star review at Booktastic Reviews.

Thanks so much to both of you for your time and consideration.

I spent the weekend giving moral support to my mother, who just got her second knee replaced. It’s a painful operation, and the rehabilitative physical therapy afterwards is no picnic, but it’s ultimately less painful than the bone-on-bone grind her knee was undergoing in the first place. She’s going to come away stronger.

She’s going to be half-cyborg, too, which is AWESOME.

One thing I admire about my mother is that she never sits still. It can be a weakness, of course. It makes lying in rehab a misery to her. I can’t imagine what she was like as a schoolgirl; I look at my son bouncing around and say, “Yup, that’s his grandma all over.”

But I don’t just mean fidgeting. She never lets herself stagnate. She is always working, always growing, always striving and reaching. One of the CNAs who was taking care of her at the rehabilitation centre kept saying, “You’re going to be running in a week!” That won’t literally be true (you’re not allowed to run much with artificial knees), but we all knew exactly what he meant. She’s going to be up and lively and chatting and into everything. She gets such joy out of life. She can find the barest glimmer of joy when there really isn’t much to be found. She takes a licking and keeps on ticking.

Seriously, as a half-cyborg she’s going to be utterly unstoppable.

She’s an artist, first and foremost, but is only just getting back to it after about ten years away. Here’s her painting webpage. I wish the scans did those paintings justice; if you click on them they expand a bit, which helps. If any of you feel inclined to leave her a friendly get-well message, you can do that on the contact page. You don’t have to, if it’s weird, but you’d make an old lady happy.

I had to think about it very hard, but I this might be my favourite of the paintings (as of right this minute) —

Orange! Blue! It's mind-blowing in person.

I’ve seen this one live, and it’s just mesmerizing. And it’s so her. She believes the world is as lively as she is, and her paintings are a view through her eyes. You get to put on her goggles for a minute and live where the trees are exciting and vital and beloved and bursting with joy. I like seeing the world that way.

Anyway. I’d end this with “Get well soon, old lady!” but she’s going to be RUNNING within a week and we all know it. I just hope we can keep up.

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.

I got all the way to the end of the draft! I’m “finished” – meaning “finished with one specific challenge and ready to move on to the next one!”

I realized I was done this morning while I was trying to write one last scene. It was going poorly, and all of a sudden it hit me why: the scene wasn’t necessary. Being finished before I realized I was finished is something that has happened at least once before. I wish I remembered which draft of Seraphina that was. One of the really major rewrites, to be sure. It’s hard to know when (or how) to stop sometimes, to be able to let it go and step away.

It’s like ending a symphony. Here’s the last movement of Beethoven’s 5th. Move it along to about the 7:30 mark, and listen to those resolving chords resolve, and resolve again, and get beaten to death with a hammer.

I’m not saying Beethoven wasn’t brilliant. A big symphony needs a big ending, and I like this one, but you can see how it could easily have gone on for another minute or two – or five – in the same vein. Ending a book is like that too. Here’s the chord! Oh, here it is even better! And one more, to make sure you’ve got it! And… I just can’t let this one go!

I’m letting it go here. Let this stew for a bit while I work on a short side project, and then go back and fix it enough that it won’t give my editor an aneurysm when he tries to read it. There’s still a long way to go, honestly, but I like acknowledging the milestones as they go flying by.
 

(Where Phoebe and Sean teach exobiology and quantum phlebotinodynamics…)

Some of you will already have seen Sean’s review of Seraphina which ran last Friday. Well today I have a “guest lecture” up on Science Fantasy, and why I think my book fits that genre pretty well.

Those of you who love High Fantasy, don’t panic. My book is also that, perhaps even more convincingly so. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m not really interested in genre except insofar as I can poke it in the eye and dismantle it and see what it’s made of.

But go! Read! Argue with the teacher! That’s the best part of school, isn’t it?

Happy Chinese New Year!

My friend Els pointed this out to me yesterday: my book on dragons will be coming out in the year of the dragon. I’m not superstitious, but I’m proclaiming that propitious.

2012 had me kind of bummed, but a dragon year? I am so there.