In light of my house drama (~$35k and counting!) I need to do something to try and offset a teeny tiny bit of it.

EDIT: I'M SELLING CARAMELS ON ETSY. I PROMISE THEY ARE YUMMY. If you're not on Etsy, but are interested in buying some yumminess, just paypal to me at nicolekornherstace AT gmail with a note saying what  you want. Please don't forget shipping costs (listed on the etsy pages)!

EDIT ALSO: STORY WITH TIP JAR IS UP!

Also there are books for sale!
Signed/inscribed (or not, as you like!) copies of The Winter Triptych ($10)
Signed/inscribed (see above!) copies of Demon Lovers and Other Difficulties ($5) -- note: these are in transit to me, I think, so I can't mail them immediately.
Signed/inscribed (see above, again!) copies of Desideria ($15 -- sorry so expensive, the thing has an $18 price tag)

Shipping info for books is $2/book. All the shipping info for the caramels is on the etsy link!

Please add shipping costs to your total and paypal to nicolekornherstace AT gmail. You don't even need to comment here if you're ordering something -- just put what you want in the notes section of the payment. Also please please please do the "payment owed" option so I don't incur a bunch of fees (and you shouldn't either with that option). But if you have any questions or you want me to double-check your total or anything, do please feel free to ask in comments. Please remember to include your mailing address in your payment!

Thank you so much in advance if you can help out. You are helping to rescue our house from its builder's multitudinous fuckups (seriously about $35k of fuckups we have to fix and it's only a 10-year-old house we just bought in 2009), and for that I am extremely grateful. We bought the house primarily so we wouldn't have to move Julian from house to house like I was when I was a kid, and you're helping us make that possible for him.

Signal boosting is also extremely helpful and VERY much appreciated!

Okay, so I've been even more terrible than usual at updating this thing. But! I have an excuse excellent reason!

I just drafted my third full-length novelthing. (Well, apart from the one I wrote in my freshman/sophomore years of high school, the less said about which the better.)

Something funny about this. Let's recap.

I wrote my first novel the summer after I graduated from high school, because I fell down the stairs and fucked up my ankles and spent the better part of two months sitting in bed. I got five legal pads filled with notes, murdered I don't know how many trees with my rather copious use of index cards, and got the first half or so written. I finished it when I was 20 or 21. It took two years and change.

My second novel, Blithen's Tarot, I also spent about two years on. Shopped it to the interested agent, interested agent changed her mind, it's on the back burner. But yeah, again, two years and change.

This last one, which doesn't even have a working title, took about two months. And that's with full-time mommying and also running a fairly bustling little etsy shop. I'm still not entirely sure how it happened except that this book basically ate me alive. I literally enjoyed every moment of writing this thing. I woke up every morning excited to get back to work on it, and drafting it made me feel more depressed than relieved, like what, over so soon? I wanted to back off of it for a week before I went back in for revising, but this thing has other ideas. I'm sitting here next to a pretty lengthy page of notes I took on it in the lousy day and a half I managed to keep my fingers out of the file. The last two, I was so happy to have them put behind me. This one, I never want to climb back out of.

I have no idea whether it's at all marketable. I could probably pitch it as YA, and will try to, as the protagonist is sixteen. I've been referring to it over on Facebook as a postapocalyptic katabasis ghost story, and it is that and it isn't. I'm terrible at synopses so I'm not even going to try, but in a nutshell it condenses so many disparate, mismatched things I love and somehow built them into itself: postapocalypse, katabasis, and ghosts, but also a Golden Bough-ish mythology and stars and a strong flawed ghosthunter-historian-priestess girl and (hopefully!) overturned tropes and dead sort-of superheroes and contested cities and loss and freedom and grail quests and knife-fights and swordfights and history and breaking oppressive systems down and Unlikely Alliances and trial by ritualized single combat and things-are-not-quite-as-they-seem, and about a million other things I won't tl;dr you to death with now. And also a saltlick. For catching ghosts with.

I've never had so much fun writing anything in my life.

I'm sure you all saw rose_lemberg's post on fundraising her way to Wiscon, so I won't clutter up your flist! I've just learned I have masses of surprise!new! dental work to have done, and a mortgage to refinance, so donation money is sort of at low tide right now, BUT if anyone places any orders from my etsy shop and mentions Rose's fundraiser in the notes to seller, I'll send her 25%.

I've seen lots of really smart posts about why con_or_bust is a damn fine idea, and I bet you have too, so I don't need to hop up on my soapbox. Lots of shiny auctions to be checked out on there. I've donated signed copies of my books and also caramels from my Etsy shop. So if you were looking to get your hands on either of those things, this is an Opportune Moment.

1. 20,000 words into the postapocalyptic katabasis novel. It's fun. I think it might be accidental!YA. Which I'm okay with. It's going really quickly (most of that 20k in a couple of weeks), though I just lost this past week due to enplaguened 4yo plus etsy v-day rush. Apparently both strep and pinkeye have just been confirmed at preschool, which, well, we'll see how that plays out. I wave my white handkerchief to my ms from the shore.

2. this, in which I'm flattered to be listed with sovay, a genius in any light.

3. prospective agent does not in fact want to represent Blithen's Tarot, despite previous enthusiasm, and without requesting rewrites. Onward, I guess. First, though, writing new bookthing abovementioned. Prospective agent has "great confidence in [me] as a writer" and is very eager to see more from me. Deciding whether I want to pursue that if it means giving up on a book that my readers generally thought was pretty strong, and after only one rejection. Eh.

4. two poems written last year, two Rhysling nominations. Pretty cool.

I'm pretty sure the bugs in Skyrim are the most amusing part. We are never, ever, ever going to pick this cabbage.

Hey, I had the list for last year and then completely forgot to post it, so this is a step up for me. And yet again it illustrates how little time I actually have for reading. Meh.

Some really sweet nonfiction this year! (And I'm starting 2012 with some more sweet nonfiction: On Monsters by Stephen T. Asma, which is so much fun.) As usual the list is pretty much all over the place -- I'll read anything. A couple of these were gifties from mer_moon (the Byatt and de Lint) and the Hunger Games trilogy was on csecooney's recommendation. I hardly ever read anything trendy but it was surprisingly fun.

Anyway, the list!

1. Cherie Priest, Dreadnought

2. Catherynne M. Valente, The Habitation of the Blessed

3. Joe Hill, 20^th Century Ghosts

4. Geoff Ryman, Lust

5. Cory Doctorow, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

6. JoSelle Vanderhooft (ed), Steam-Powered: Lesbian Steampunk Stories

7. Christopher Barzak, The Love We Share Without Knowing

8. C.S.E. Cooney, Jack o' the Hills

9. Elizabeth Bear, All the Windwracked Stars

10. Kathe Koja, Under the Poppy

11. Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber

12. Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

13. Roger D. McGrath, Gunfighters, Highwaymen, & Vigilantes: Violence on the Frontier

14. Claire Rudolf Murphy & Jane G. Haigh, Gold Rush Women

15. Life and Exploits of the Daring Frank & Jesse James

16. Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds

17. Francine du Plessix Grey, At Home with the Marquis de Sade

18. The Complete Marquis de Sade

19. Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

20. Gemma Files, A Rope of Thorn

21. Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

22. Paolo Bacigalupi, Pump Six and Other Stories

23. John Crowley, The Solitudes

24. John Crowley, Love & Sleep

25. John Crowley, Daemonomania

26. John Crowley, Endless Things

27. Christopher Barzak, One for Sorrow

28. Dictionary of Rogues

29. Charles de Lint, Dreams Underfoot

30. A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book

31.  Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs

32. Parker Pearson, The Archaeology of Death and Burial

33. K. David Harrison, The Last Speakers

34. Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

35. Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

36. Joe Hill, Horns

37. Joe Kelly and J. M. Ken Niimura, I Kill Giants

38. Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games

39. Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire

40. Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

No time to add anything to it yet (cranky sleepless child!) but my etsy shop now has a shiny new Facebook page!

Go forth and check out magick4terri to benefit Terri Windling! There is some seriously shiny stuff here. I've added books and caramels! Wheee!

How cool would it be if it were possible (obviously it isn't, this is me wishing for ponies) for all editors to put this amount of time into rejections? No, I don't expect it. Yes, this was a pro market. That's why I was so pleasantly surprised to see it! I mean seriously, how often is it that a rejection makes you feel good about your story?

Nicole,

Thanks for the submission!  I hope you can forgive me for taking so
long to get back to you.

I was very impressed with "Queen's Progress" -- you have a real
gift for prose.  It has a marvelously colorful setting, carefully
depicted, and complex and fascinating characters.

Most readers will be delighted to be immersed in such a colorful and
original landscape, and be patient enough while the narrative takes them
places they don't yet understand. Unfortunately, the opening pages of
"Queen's Progress" are so densely packed with unexplained
references and asides that they are virtually impenetrable.

For example, paragraphs 7 to 11 are pretty much incomprehensible, and the
next few pages are almost as bewildering.  While you take great care
to eventually unravel the mysteries you lay down in those pages, by the
time you do I think most of my readers would have given up.  As
strong as your story is, I'm afraid I'll have to return it, with genuine
regrets.

[etc etc etc],

[Editorperson]

See? It's constructive, it's useful, and the criticisms are specific and absolutely true. Most of my rejections follow this same pattern of "Wow, this was a super cool story and here are some things that we dug about it but we're not buying it." They don't often bother to tell me WHY they didn't buy it, and I love that this one did.

In other news, Blithen's Tarot is off to the agent! Longer post about that later, probably.