Not Another Year End Review?!

It's that time of year when everybody gets all contemplative and retrospective, and we wish they wouldn't. So instead I'm going to put down three good things and no bad things, thereby staying true to my calling as a fantasy writer.

One: Questors earned out its advance in 10 months.
Two: The Wickit Chronicles are going to be translated into Turkish.
Three: I now almost never get a headache before a school/library/festival talk, and frequently not even afterward.

All the balancing bad things are now clamouring for equal time, but we know they wouldn't be satisfied with that - oh, no, they'll want to swell and swamp and swarm, because that's just the way they are. So poop to them.

Here's my screen saver. May it do you as much good as it does me!

Happy Christmas and Merry New Year - Joan.

Blogging

It's amazing to think of your book, out there in the world, living a life of its own, finding its way into people's hands in places you've never been to. And it's also amazing, finding out about it. A friend explained to me how to use Google Alert, and as a result I've been discovering blog references to Questors and Wickit Chronicles - people are getting hold of them, reading them, and then liking them enough to chat about them.

It's so neat.

There's a bookshop owner in New Zealand, and a woman in India, and somebody else in Iowa who's looking at possible books for an award that I'd never even heard of (not surprisingly, since I live on another continent). There are some people blogging in Germany, and some sites in the Czech Republic. Somebody in Malaysia was bewailing the fact that she'd missed out on a particularly good cafe, but had bought Questors and taken it back to her room to console herself with. And how else would I know what an 11-year-old in Florida is thinking?

And now that someone has explained to me what :) and ;) mean, there'll be no stopping me ...

Cheers, Joan.