Lilith Saintcrow

I have been working all morning, but it seems like I’ve gotten nowhere since that work is all of the invisible maintenance variety. Ugh.

* First, the serious: NPR won’t use the word “torture” when Americans do it. But when anyone else does, it’s fair game.

* Charles Kaiser pronounces the Washington Post dead, writes obituary.

* Now the geeky-cool scientific: the Sarychev volcano eruption seen from space, and the “volcano sunsets” it’s causing.

* Last but not least, the utterly freaking hilarious: the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Contest winners are announced. SO WORTH the half-hour I spent reading them. (Hat tip to Kat Richardson for the link, and also for noting the winner hails from Federal Way, WA. Washington state rules!)

And that’s all, folks. Back I go to plugging away on the manuscript…

And I’m breaking my afternoon silence to note two things: there’s an interview with me over at Drops of Crimson, where I answer the Dean question and the Lipton questions, and there is a new Secret Life of Dolls. If you don’t read SLOD, you are so missing out. I got to “tiny Fay Wray” and totally, completely lost my sh!t laughing.

That is all.

You can win a copy of The Eternal Kiss, a YA vampire anthology, by heading on over to Suzanne McLeod’s place this fine morning. The Eternal Kiss is due out July 27 and features stories by a ton of awesome authors, including Libba Bray, Holly Black, Rachel Caine…

…and, well, yours truly has a short little story in there calledAmbition, which almost didn’t make it in. Because it’s dark and nasty. Actually, it’s one of a very few “bilateral” stories I’ve ever done. A bilateral story happens when I take a whack at a short story, I don’t like it, I scrap it and start all over again, and then go back and finish the first start anyway because the second whack at the short story showed me what the first one should have been about in the first place.

Sound confusing? It’s doubly so when I’m working at it.

Short stories are far more difficult for me, because the execution has so little space to move in. Each choice in a novel narrows down further choices, from the very first line. In short stories this is taken to the Nth degree.

And now I have to finish my coffee and get down to getting the third Dru book into reasonable first-draft shape. If I can keep up wordcount and polish at the same time I will reward myself with a sliver of choco tonight. Mmmmh. I can already taste it.

Over and out.

Day Two of the Painfully-Squeezed Internet Addiction. I got through 3.5K yesterday, a difficult scene of female violence and another difficult scene of reactions. Characters aren’t acting how I thought they would, which is a good sign. Usually when the fire of creation is burning apace, the characters start surprising me. I just have to relax enough to let the Muse tell me how it really is.

I kind of wonder what brainwaves I’m using during intense writing sessions. I am aware of the outside world, but only in a small way–the mother in me keeping tabs on who’s where and what they sound like. The rest of me is sunk in a movie of the store, watching things play out and panning the camera around, making thousands of choices per minute (is that the right word? No, this is…) and generally feeling like a racecar or a cheetah going fast and hard just as it’s designed to. I could probably explain it better, but the timer is clicking by my elbow and I’ve only got a short amount of Internet “time” today.

I suppose I should thank Jordan Summers’s recent article on the Deadline Dames, about how writers are in danger of writing around Internet time and not the other way ’round. It really lit a fire under me to stop the nascent Internet addiction in its tracks. I also recommend Dame Devon’s post on daring to be bad. (There’s a reason I’m proud to be a Deadline Dame.)

And now for something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. Not too long ago I was talking with friends about propaganda cartoons–specifically, the WWII Looney Tunes propaganda cartoons featuring Stalin as “Uncle Joe.” I mentioned that I’d heard of a Walt Disney “educate the troops about VD” cartoon from wartime, but was never able to find it. The UnSullen One didn’t find that one, but he did dig up a most awesome one from the 1970s, courtesy of Jezebel. Enjoy. Don’t say I never gave you nothin’.

Off I go. Errands to run and wordcount to achieve. See you ’round, chickadees.

So, you remember a while back I was moaning and obsessing over being on camera? Well…that was because Penguin hired a videographer (the inimitable Dicky Dahl, who was very nice) and induced me to talk about Strange Angels.

I’m not so keen on being on-camera, mostly because I am a huge nervous butterball. Still, it’s fascinating to watch how all the footage we shot got condensed and–what’s that you say? Shut up and link to it, Lili?

Your wish is my command. If the embedded player doesn’t work, click here. Enjoy! (The bookstore is Cover to Cover Books in Vancouver, WA, and the vulture’s name is Clara.)

And Lord, if this video isn’t a further motivation for me to keep working out, nothing is…