Whooo! I just got back from two days in NYC where I was meeting up with the marketing/ publicity folks at Scholastic. It was pretty brilliant. This is sort of how it went down:

1. Arrived at airport. Tentatively hand license to ticketing counter and say "I think my publisher has booked a flight for me?" Airplane Lady assures me that this is the case and I skip off lightly with boarding pass. Flight goes uneventfully. Spend five minutes sketching guy sitting in front of me and then start reading BONES OF FAERIE by janni .

2. Arrive uneventfully in Newark. Walk hesitantly towards ground transportation, where I have been told a driver will be picking me up. As the next day is April Fool's, I'm not entirely certain whether or not flying me to New Jersey and then stranding me there could be a possibility. However, at the bottom of the escalator is indeed a guy sitting with a sign with my name on it. Spelt right. And he points to me as soon as he sees me. I ask him later how he knew it was me and he says, "Authors always wear jeans."

3. Arrive in Grand Soho Hotel, which is intensely impressive. There is, however, Scary Wallpaper on the walls. No, really. Check this out.

( cut for photos! )

If you're reading this, consider yourself tagged. Take a photo of your bookshelf and post it on your blog so we can see what it looks like. No quick clean up allowed!

I have a million bookshelves, so I just picked one random fiction shelf and one nonfiction.

( Under da cut. . .  )

Today, I lit a blondie on fire. You know, one of those cookie bar things that smells like popcorn when it gets really too warm.

It wasn't on purpose, I'm sad to say. I was making a pot of tea (did you notice that all of my disaster stories begin with eating blondie and making tea? I just noticed that) and I was distracted. I was thinking about

- making tea
- why this particular character in LINGER is so hellbent on destructive relationships
- the pages I had just sent off to my agent and whether or not she was going to love them or set fire to them in a cleansing ritual designed to make her forget that she'd ever read them
- Vikings.
- and burials at sea.
- microwaving blondie
- "Hotel" by City Sleeps
- feeding my cat so he would stop saying "MAO" and tripping me

And somewhere in there, I put the blondie in the microwave and set it for the amount of time I normally reheat my cup of tea for instead of the 15 seconds to warm it. Approximately 45 seconds later, I began to realize that the kitchen smelled very . . .

savory.

I am happy to say it did not take long for fire to happen. Just a tiny one, but a helluva lot of smoke. I immediately ran to get my camera so that I could capture the image for posterity, but sadly, the fire had gone out and the blondie, aside from deeply black crevices, looked fairly unimpressive. And a camera can't really capture the acrid smoke smell that's in my kitchen right now. My dogs are staring at me like "I thought you watched 'Top Chef' enough to know what you were doing."

Well, phbbt.

So here's my current music fixation. Well, it's a rediscovered musical infatuation. I used their album to write BALLAD, and I put it back in my cd player yesterday and instantly was happyfied. There's a scene in BALLAD that's very epick-with-FIRE that this song goes really well too, especially the end bit.

Hm. I need some more tea.

Because I was so busy swatting away Snape-the-Subconscious, I entirely forgot to link to kellyrfineman's LJ, where there is a Truly Fascinating conversation/ debate on what makes a happy ending in a book or movie, involving myself, everflame , carriejones , irysangel , and kellyrfineman .

Go and weigh in on how much happy makes a happy ending.