Author Life Month? Author Every Month.

The author's photo a day challenge I am participating in on Instagram this month is absolutely sustaining me. It only feels fitting to be sharing it with you at the tail end of Valentine's Day, as every new day feels like I'm adding a line to a love letter addressed to readers, to Eiren's world, to the craft of writing. I've always had good intentions when it comes to photo a day challenges but have previously lacked follow through. Not so this February.

The prompt for this one was "killed darlings," and this was one of oh-so-many I had to choose from. I always write more pretty things of little substance than I need.

And "where I write," which I've elaborated on before. But I felt this one showed some love to the stickers so rarely seen on the back of my laptop.

These two were each collages of character inspirations, for Eiren and Gannet, respectively. You can read more on the original posts.

If you aren't already following me on Instagram, please do. It's the rare social media haven I can haunt on the regular right now - I feel rather guilty for my prolonged absence from Twitter and Facebook, longer even than was required for the heady rush of editing that consumed my January, and resulted in one of the strongest drafts I think I've ever written. Come May, I hope you think so, too.

The challenge carries on through the end of February and I think I'll be looking for another one after. Any recommendations?

Five Favorite Reads of 2016

I'm not gonna lie, I really killed it in 2016. I always make time for reading, but as a working, writing, mothering adult I don't usually manage quite so many books. There was a fair amount of escapist reading in there, but I'm still absurdly pleased. Even if it makes picking five favorites rather more of a challenge this year than in previous years.

Jessica Khoury's The Forbidden Wish was a clear winner for me for 2016, though. I listened to it on audiobook first, and then I read it, and then I listened to it again. It has everything I need to absolutely lose myself in a book: a genuinely complex heroine, the supernatural, a rogueish romantic interest, and just enough authentic drama to keep me up at night - and mooning over the story the next day. If you read even one book I recommend this year, it should be this one.

Not surprisingly, Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom were flawless - and I told her so and she tweeted back to me so THAT HAPPENED. Bardugo is a national treasure. Each tremendously gripping and masterfully-crafted in their own right, they hung together in all of the right places and diverged in surprising, delightful ways. I do not typically enjoy books that switch perspectives, but her pacing was spectacular and I cared so much about everyone that I was all too willing to follow her characters anywhere.

Sarah Porter's Vassa in the Night was a grim, glorious little surprise. I'd read a review that said if you liked weird, you'd like this book, and do I love some weird. But there's more to it, even, than that. Reminiscent of Kelly Link but with more to hold on to and a far greater investment in the lives of the characters she's tormenting, I took my time with this one, savoring the strangeness of the world and the hot-beating heart at the center of it.

I read Lev Grossman's The Magicians a few years ago, and Quentin Coldwater was such a selfish prick I almost didn't finish the series. While I get he had some growing up to do, I found it so stifling to be limited to his perspective and spent most of the book wanting to throttle him. The Magician King, with Julia's voice, was a breath of fresh air, and Quentin's growing maturity was dynamic and believable. The Magician's Land knocked my socks off, and I am so glad I gave the series another chance.

The world-building in Sharon Cameron's The Forgetting was inventive and unique, and I was bound to love a book where writing one's own story played so central a role. I really enjoyed the narrator and the detail that was put into her culture, and the direction the story took was surprising. I appreciate when books aren't what I expect, and books that remind me of some of my favorite episodes of Star Trek.

What did you read this year? What did you love?

Under the Covers

My second book has a publication date, a title, and now it has a cover - along with a matching refresh of the first book which will be re-released in paperback at the same time. I haven't been belting it from the rooftops because I am wildly superstitious. If I celebrate too soon, it won't actually happen, right? But, it is happening, so I'm going to make a little noise.

Here's this first lovely little mystery. I feel so lucky to have seen my first book baby realized in not just one but three separate covers, and this one has a sweeping depth to it that I really love. I also had the opportunity I am sure far more deserving writers have dreamed of: to revisit a few sticky places in the story and make small but mighty edits to a book that was first published three years ago.

I want to go to there.

And here, too.

The Dread Goddess follows Eiren in her flight from Jhosch, from Gannet, and from herself as she attempts to reconcile who she knows she is - a gentle-souled storyteller - with the monstrous dread goddess who dwells within her. There's more of her world, more stories, identities literally and figuratively unmasked, madness and havoc and kissing. I am extremely excited about continuing her story and I hope that you are, too.

And I won't be sitting on my hands until their publication on May 30 of next year - I'll be working on the third and final book, partnering with the spectacular Nita Basu of Diversion Books on some promotional fun times, and blogging and reading and mothering and dreaming. If there's something I can do for you or questions I can answer about how I am not going slowly insane managing all of these things, you know how to reach me.

Meet Me at CONjuration

I didn't anticipate returning to Atlanta until next year's Dragon Con, so I was surprised and delighted when I received a last-minute invitation to CONjuration, a fan-driven convention celebrating all things Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and other magical literature, movies, and experiences. It's being held November 4 - 6 at the Marriot Century Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

I've scrambled to acquire more copies of The Hidden Icon and also to assemble chapbooks of The Two Sisters to disseminate. I am positively stoked to be sharing a table in the vendor hall - aptly named Diagon Alley - with Lee Martindale, and trying to figure how many goodies I can squeeze into my suitcase along with clothes and a Yule Ball gown. Priorities, friends.

I'll also be on a few panels.

• Saturday, 4:00 PM, Tail and Tongue: Don' t Step on the Worms - Grima Wormtongue and Peter (Wormtail) Pettigrew both get a bad rap. Yes, they were pawns of their evil lords. Yes, they betrayed their own kind. Could they really help it or were they victims, too? Did their deaths give them any redemption or did they just confirm their roles as tragic characters and tools cast aside by their masters?
• Saturday, 6:00 PM, Stranger Things: The Magical Influences - Drawing from such influences as Dungeons & Dragons, Tolkien, Magic: the Gathering, Stephen King, and the movies made by Chris Columbus and Steven Spielberg, the supernatural, enchanted elements of Stranger Things fairly drip from the screen! The series’ surreal atmosphere is propelled forward by humanity’s lack of understanding of the paranormal. The unknown science is magic!

In addition to some seriously cool programming - really, I don't know how much I'll be willing to stay at my vendor table because everything looks so fun - there are opportunities to win House points, live performances, and of course, a Yule Ball. I am also over the moon excited to meet Juliet Marillier, who will be launching and signing her latest book at the event, and whose writing has been influencing and inspiring me for more than a decade.

So, if you're in the Atlanta area, I don't think you'll want to miss this, and I won't want to miss you.

Books are Forever

While I love me some libraries, I'm also thrilled to finally be in a financial position as an adult and grown ass woman to buy books (almost) whenever I feel like it. For Christmas this past year my husband gave me a year-long membership to one of my favorite local booksellers, and I began working within a block of another. And if I was going to take advantage of the discount at the first, I really ought to grab a coffee and a paperback on my lunch break at the second. Filling the shelves - and the mantle - of my new home with novels that lack the used college bookstore sticker on the spine has been an absolute treat.

It used to be I would only buy books I knew that I loved, and even those, rarely in hardcover. There's a book festival in Cincinnati where I've been caught up in the happy moment of chatting with an author and purchased an unread story, because it makes everybody feel good, and leads sometimes to beloved friendships.

This year I have bought more books than ever, and while I've certainly loved some of my acquisitions less than others, I'm keeping all of them. When my girls are grown I want what I wanted as a child: a room full of books and books in every room. My parents weren't readers, but they went out of their way to be sure that I was. They provided me that early and everlasting love of libraries - I'd be warned when I started reading books in the car on the way home from our local branch that it would be a whole week before I would have new ones - and a handful of yard sale-acquired paperbacks you can still find peeking out from in between weightier tomes on my shelves.

I was a reader well before I was a writer, and when I am a mad, half-blind old woman raving about the way paper books used to smell, I expect I will demand that one of my great-great grandchildren read me the latest Margaret Atwood.

A few years ago I vowed to buy an eBook for every overpriced cup of coffee I bought, but I was pretty broke that year and am also desperately addicted to coffee. I didn't commit. But, I am trying to make up for it. One of my 34 in 34 goals is to read as many books, and ideally, I ought to own them. I suppose I'd like you to think, too, about how you could bring more words into your life. Please read, and please talk to me about what you're reading. Show me what it looks like on your digital and literal shelves. Because you're not just pumping blood into an author's heart and vital air into their lungs, you're bringing friends into your home. Adventure. Whimsy. Gravity.

Clothes and coffee are temporary treasures. Books are forever.

Meet Me at Imaginarium

Excitement! I'll be participating in the Imaginarium Convention this coming weekend, 7 - 9 October, in Louisville, Kentucky. I've been trying to attend this convention pretty much since it began, and my babies kept being born and preventing me from doing so. If you're local to the area, it looks to be a pretty fabulous event for reading, writing, gaming, and cosplay. I'm on a few panels with some cool folks and I'm practicing my jokes so they aren't lame. Except, my rehearsed jokes are possibly lamer than the spontaneous ones.

My schedule:

• Friday, 5:00 PM, Slow Down, Hot Stuff! - If you’re into waiting a solid six hundred pages before characters jump into bed together, instead savoring meaningful glances, heated accidental brushing of hands, and lots of dancing around feelings, have we got some book recommendations for you.
• Friday, 8:00 PM, Author Signing in Vendor Hall
• Saturday, 11:00 AM, How to Fracture a Fairy Tale - Fairytale and mythic retellings are a popular storytelling device – some might say too popular. How do you pull it off in a way that feels fresh and interesting?
• Saturday, 5:00 PM, What's In a Name? - How to create names for your characters that fit your world’s language and culture.
• Sunday, 1:00 PM, Bad Boys (and Girls)! - The anti-heroes, the lone wolves, the ones so bad they are good. Why do we like the bad boys and anti-heroes sometimes more than the white knights?

Guys, I bought the good treats for my signing and will have paperback copies of The Hidden Icon available for sale - the very same editions you can no longer buy on Amazon, or ever again, as it will be re-released along with the second book next year. Consider yourself bribed.

What's Your Fictional Type?

I definitely have a "type" when it comes to fictional characters. These are the sorts of folks who I wouldn't find myself associating with in real life: they'd be unbearable to be around, impossible to talk to, or just intimidating as hell. But on the page or the screen? It's true love. The Strong, Silent Type

Dudes who are supremely self-contained, whose moods occupy the eye of the storm until they are the storm itself, who communicate volumes with their eyes alone... it's no surprise I love them, right? One of the first - and possibly most embarrassing - fictional crushes on this sort of fella was Conner McDermott from Sweet Valley High: Senior Year. When you identify strongly with bookish, rule following Elizabeth Wakefield as a teen, it's kind of hard not to fall for the boy you 100 percent shouldn't. But, this archetype is an interesting one, and has appealed to me the longest possibly because I want to believe there are hidden depths to everyone... or want to justify my tendency to lose my tongue in the company of quiet, steely-eyed, handsome dudes. Noteworthy SSTs: Bran from Son of the Shadows, Mr. Darcy, John Thorton from North & South.

The Scoundrel

I really ought to know better about this one, and while I've certainly crushed hard on some real-life troublemakers in my time, I much prefer the fictional variety. No consequences with those - and no need to confront the reality that you neither can nor should try to change who someone is to accommodate your love of law and order. This guy can make a girl laugh even when he's about to get her killed. I've not found many mischievous book characters I find believable or likeable, which makes me worry about attempting to write this sort of person myself. But I'm sure someday I'll try. Noteworthy miscreants: Han Solo, Sky Masterson, Malcolm Reynolds, Rosto the Piper from Tamora Pierce's Terrier and Bloodhound.

The Boss Bitch

I want to be her and I want to be her best friend. She's tough, smart, and capable. There's not a day in her life she's taken shit from anybody. I like that these women are strong, physically and emotionally, and I swear half the reason I've been working out lately is to be more like the fictional women I admire. I doubt my capacity to ever write this sort of woman, though, because I am, regrettably, too much of a pleaser. I blame being raised in the Midwest, and, as my best friend recently pointed out to me, the sort of person who apologizes when other people bump into me. Noteworthy bosses: Katniss Everdeen, Beka Cooper from Terrier, Bloodhound, and Mastiff, Garth Nix's Sabriel, Aeryn Sun.

So, who's your type?

Kristy's Great Idea

As a reader, I have always felt the need to be able to sink into a character, to identify with their moods, their actions, their motivations. As a young reader, this kinship was more superficial: did I look like the character? Were they interested in the same things as me? How much were they like me, and how much were they like I wanted to be? There are few book series that enabled this tendency more than The Baby-Sitters Club. Reading about capable, creative, independent teens a few years shy of entering those golden years for myself not only contributed to my skewed perspective of adolescence - Saved by the Bell is also to blame - but also provided my weird little soul several comfortable archetypes to try on.

I wanted to be Dawn. She was cool, easy going, and could wear an embellished denim jacket with effortless style. Her hair was hippie-long and blonde, two things mine would never be. She cared about the planet and people listened.

But she didn't eat chocolate, and I just wasn't down for that. So I couldn't, wouldn't be Dawn.

Mary Anne was closer to home. She was bookish, reserved, wore a lot of sensible skirts and saddle shoes. She had brown hair - bonus - and her dad was super strict and picked out all of her clothes. My mother may have dressed me through eighth grade, maybe. Not telling.

But Mary Ann had Logan, and for a girl who didn't get kissed until just before her eighteenth birthday, I felt that Mary Anne's ability to acquire and keep a boyfriend was essential to her character. And fraternizing with boys? Not my strong suit. Mary Anne just wasn't me.

In retrospect, I was really a Mallory. Anxious, eager to prove herself, with literary aspirations enough for the whole BSC. Glasses, braces, wild hair. Her family was a mess and her best friend her life line. I just never wanted to be Mallory. She didn't feature prominently in any of the Super Specials, which were my favorite because they were thick and featured the girls' handwriting fonts. She was a junior member - and thus junior in my esteem.

At the time, none of the baby sitters felt like a perfect fit, which I judged as a personal deficiency, rather than an issue with an ensemble cast of fictional, suburban tweens. I had the same problem with The Nancy Drew Mysteries, The Unicorn Club, Animorphs, with any middle grade fodder offering me more than one female character to latch onto. I wanted to see me in what I was reading, or at least someone near enough that I could use their behavior as a model in the rocky waters of middle school.

Is the impulse to find a representative in books still there? Sure. It's complicated now by the fact that as I get older, the heroines I admire, and the heroines I feel compelled to write, are younger than I am. They're grappling with the challenges of youth, new love, and self-discovery, while I am a woman in her mid-30s, married, with two young children and a relatively sound understanding of my heart and mind. Books about women in my situation bore the hell out of me, but I'm quite happy with my life.

Perhaps what's possible now that I've grown up off the page is the ability to let go more easily of who I am because I know exactly who that is. I have the space to let a character be, without needing them to be me.

Books to Grow On

Writers are always readers first. It's Children's Book Week, and I'd been thinking all about my girls and what they love to read before a post from my best library reminded me of my own favorites as a child.

I distinctly remember making a weekly visit to the library in my hometown (it was such a small place it was actually a home village) and checking out as many books as my mom would allow - and beginning to read them in the car despite her warning that if I finished them all before the week was up, I'd just have to wait until we could make it back to the library again. I was used to lingering in the early readers, repeatedly checking out In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories because my oldest daughter didn't get her Wednesday Addams tendencies from thin air.

I was in third or fourth grade when I decided I wanted a BIG book, and pushed a stool against the shelf of juvenile fiction and selected the largest tome I laid eyes on among the As. It was Avi's Bright Shadow, and in addition to being the longest book I'd ever attempted to read, it would be my first fantasy, too.

I remember the book feeling mysterious and dark and possible, the magic delicious and different, and I remember, too, the extreme satisfaction of finishing. Even just seeing the cover again gives me tingles. There'd be no going back to Cam Jansen, now. I'd seen what a character-driven narrative arc could do, and I wanted more.

Favorites in later years included Julie of the Wolves, A Wrinkle in Time, Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, Anne of Green Gables, The Boxcar Children, Pippi Longstocking, Heidi, Little House in the Big Woods, The BFG, and so many more. As a child, I was not a particular reader - I would read anything. My mom and dad would pick up stacks of books for me at yard sales or flea markets and within fifteen seconds of thanking them I would be invisible behind the spine of one of my latest acquisitions. I enjoyed, and still do, books about uncanny girls and strange happenings and compelling, believable settings, whether historical or otherwise.

There's still something about that Avi, though. A young girl? A friendship? Struggling with how to spend the last five wishes in a whole kingdom? Feels to me like the beginning of just the sort of thing I'd spend the rest of my life hoping to write.

Five Favorite Reads of 2015

Though I really tried to squeeze one last book in - I just finished Kirsty Logan's The Grace Keepers - I'm not too displeased with what I managed to read in 2015, given what a temperamental year I've had. We moved - twice, really, as we had a six-week stint with family before finding a new home - I began a new job I did not love, I left that job for another that I love so much I ought to marry it, after the closure of my first publisher I signed with a new one, and I've spent the last few months scrambling to stay well ahead of a deadline for the sequel to The Hidden Icon. The bad news is that I didn't meet my personal deadline of this past weekend, the good news is I'm super close. But on to what I've read this year, despite me being me. While Garth Nix's Clariel had a slow start, my anticipation of more stories from his beautifully imagined Old Kingdom and the book's absolutely killer second half secured its place in my heart. It wasn't the story I expected or even a story I was sure that I wanted, once I realized what I was reading. But I was delighted to be wrong, on all counts, and am really looking forward to Nix returning to the Old Kingdom again, which it is rumored he will, with more of my beloved Lirael. It is not remotely surprising that I loved Amy Poehler's Yes Please, even though it confirmed for me that I am just not cool enough to like Amy Poehler. She's so very real and very funny. One of my favorite parts was her admonishing readers to stop reading and call their mothers to hear the story of the day that they were born, if they hadn't heard it already. I learned that my mother's OB-GYN encouraged her to drink a beer when she thought she was in labor, and if that didn't stop the contractions, to come into the hospital. Much though I'd like to think my birth was heralded by a craft brew of some kind, I expect it was Budweiser. Ah, well. Erika Johansen's The Queen of the Tearling wasn't without flaws, but I admired her daring as a writer so much, the world she built, the questions she left boldly unanswered, and more than anything, a whole, complicated heroine in Kelsea. I was willing to follow her anywhere. Right into the sequel, in fact, given it's waiting right now on my bookshelf to be read.

There are few writers whose imaginations delight me as much as Laura Bickle's, and Dark Alchemy was everything I've come to expect from her: playful, wicked, and unexpectedly dark. Petra Dee was intimately likeable from the start, with just enough mystery and flirt to pull me along to the book's satisfying, if so very sad, conclusion. Both Dark Alchemy and the sequel, Mercury Retrograde, are quick, easy reads, and explore territory you won't find anywhere else in urban fantasy. Easily my favorite book of the year, though, was Naomi Novik's Uprooted. It wasn't a fairy tale retelling but had all of the best elements of a genre I love so much; it felt fresh and familiar at the same time, was delicious and creepy and just plain cool. Though I could guess from early on the characters' trajectories, I was nevertheless delighted that she could still surprise me, and that even what I'd guessed at played out in a pretty spectacularly unusual way.

What about you? What did you read and love this year?