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I think most of us are familiar with the phrase "busman's holiday": a holiday or vacation during which you do what you do for the rest of the year (so the busman has to drive the family to their destination, the lion tamer has to take the kids to the movies, the chef has to cook the holiday goose).  It's usually used to imply that the holiday wasn't very good, since it wasn't a break from the norm.  Well, I'd like to propose a new phrase for our universal lexicon.  The writer's holiday: a holiday or vacation during which you do what you do for the rest of the year, only more so.

Most of the writers I know write every day.  Not "every day except weekends, holidays, and birthdays."  Every day.  Many of us still have day jobs, which means that the main difference between Saturday and Monday is when you get to sit down at that keyboard and start hammering away.  On a weekday, I usually get between two and four hours of good writing time in, depending on what else is going on (and how annoying my cats are).  On weekends and vacation days, I can manage between five and nineteen hours of good writing time.  (Once, when under deadline, I managed to keep writing for twenty-seven hours straight.  I do not recommend this, as the amount of caffeine it required was probably medically unwise.)

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Growing up in Northern California, a lot of the "traditional imagery" of the holiday season seemed very arbitrary to me as a child.  Why evergreens?  Sure, they had an interesting smell, and sure, they were satisfyingly bushy, but why didn't we chop down something really interesting, like a maple or a sycamore?  They had leaves, too, and raking the carpet would probably be easier than running the vacuum six times a day until the end of December.  What was the big deal about snowflakes and frost?  The only frost I saw came in cans of spray-on plastic foam, and having a snowball fight involved the ice maker, Stacy's snowcone machine, and a lot of very cold fingers.  It seemed like an awful lot of work for something that left you with freezing hands, wet sweaters, and pissed-off parents.  The plight of Frosty the Snowman was always very real and very tragic to me, since even in the coldest California winters, he'd melt into a shapeless blob in less than a week.

The media didn't help.  All the holiday movies and specials aimed at kids showed a winter wonderland like the ones in the carols, all puffy snowflakes and happy cartoon reindeer.  California's grey Decembers didn't look anything like that.  They got snow, we got pelting rain.  They got skeleton trees clawing at the perfect holiday moon, we got wet, withered leaves dropping on our heads on the way to school.  They got snow days, we got cancelled recesses spent sitting in the cafeteria and staring morosely at the mud puddles that we weren't allowed to go play in.  I sort of hated the kids who got to live in TV Land, because wow, were they having more fun than we were.  Not even the traditional holiday "treats" made sense.  What was a chestnut, exactly, other than a color for horses?  Were all those people roasting horses over an open fire?  Because, if so, no thank you.  What was a fruitcake, and was it really the culinary equivalent of the brick?  If so, why didn't the witches use that as the foundations for their houses, rather than gingerbread, which breaks really easily?  I was a very literal-minded child in some ways, and holiday specials just left me confused.

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Seanan McGuire, author of Rosemary and Rue (named one of the Best Paranormal Fantasy books of 2009 by Barnes & Noble), blogged for us earlier this year and she's kindly agreed to blog some more for us on the winter season and her writing. You can read her previous blog posts here to find out more about her and you can also visit her website.

Check in next week for new blog posts from Seanan McGuire and if you have any questions for her, you can post in the comment area of the blog.

October "Toby" Daye, a changeling who is half human and half fae, has been an outsider from birth. After getting burned by both sides of her heritage, Toby has denied the Faerie world, retreating to a "normal" life. Unfortunately for her, the Faerie world has other ideas...

The murder of Countess Evening Winterrose pulls Toby back into the fae world. Unable to resist Evening's dying curse, which binds her to investigate, Toby must resume her former position as knight errant and renew old alliances. As she steps back into fae society, dealing with a cast of characters not entirely good or evil, she realizes that more than her own life will be forfeited if she cannot find Evening's killer.

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I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area (born in Martinez, schooled in half a dozen towns and cities); it's thus natural that I would set the October Daye books in the same place. I know the geography, I know the local history, and more importantly, I know how the Bay Area feels. Every city has its own atmosphere, its own set of tropes and customs. In the Bay Area, where geography and meteorology conspire to create a dozen tiny micro-climes, going from one city to the next can feel like going to an entirely different state. We have deserts, forests, tunda, gravid farmland, and craggy mountains. It's possible to start the day in Concord in midsummer, cross the San Francisco Bay to winter, and go out to dinner in Berkeley's lovely autumn. Northern California is a place where "logic" holds very little sway.

Toby spends the majority of her time in San Francisco, an iconic city, nestled up against the water and ringed at night in cotton-candy fog. I've spent years wandering around the city, and it still sometimes seems like a fairy tale to me, a place too improbable and perfect to be real. Then the sun comes up, or I'm walking to the train station and I'm just too tired to care anymore, and everything is dirty and broken-down and old. That's San Francisco, too, and it's that dichotomy that makes San Francisco such a perfect place to anchor my particular version of Faerie.

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So several people have asked me how—in amidst my daily routines of taking long walks and watching horror movies and playing in swamps and my cats being adorable—I actually go about writing a book. Since saying "I put words on paper until a novel falls out" seems a little bit twee, and I like writing things down, I am now writing out How I Write Books, or, What Seanan Does In Her Rapidly Decreasing Spare Time. This glosses a lot of the more complicated steps, since a truly accurate portrayal of how I write books would involve a lot of "stop writing, go find a zombie movie" and "get another can of Diet Dr Pepper," and no one actually needs to read that. Those particular steps are sort of a given.

So several people have asked me, in amidst the more general posts on writing and formatting things and watching too much television and my cat being adorable, exactly how it is that I go about writing a book. Since saying.

Soooo...

Step one: have an idea.
This...actually is and isn't as simple as it sounds, thus explaining why the question "where do you get your ideas?" makes me start to giggle hysterically and twitch. I tend to come up with books due to extremely random connections of stimulus and events. One of my books was the result of being over-tired and watching car headlights through mostly-closed eyes while "Have You Seen Me Lately?" (a Counting Crows song) played on the CD player. Rosemary and Rue practically requires a flow-chart of external stimulus to explain, and the sequel is even worse. I once wrote a romantic comedy because of a combination of jetlag and coincidence. And so on. This is the step that I have absolutely no control over, since sitting down and deciding to have an idea almost never works for me. My muse may be abusive, but she's not cheap.

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I attended my first major science fiction convention in 1993. Steve Perrin, the game master for my weekly Champions game—and coincidentally, the man who wrote Runequest and the ElfQuest role-playing game, as well as being one of the original Wild Cards—received his yearly invitation to BayCon, the Silicon Valley general science fiction convention. The invitation was for "and friend," something that actually isn't all that common in the convention world of today. Steve, recognizing that leaving a bored teenage girl without a Champions game was practically a recipe for disaster, invited me to come with him.

I don't really remember much about that first BayCon. It was a long time ago, and I don't think I slept at all during the convention—easily four days. Four days of sleep-deprivation and poor nutrition will do funny things to your memory. I just remember that I staggered home saying that I'd had the time of my life, and that I absolutely, positively, without question, had to go back the next year.

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As an urban fantasy author who grew up on a steady diet of fairy tales, horror movies, Disney princesses, Victorian Gothics, and other seeming contradictory influences, I'm pretty regularly asked "Well, can't you just make up your mind?" Unicorns aren't supposed to gore you; werewolves aren't supposed to save the day. Horror and fantasy aren't meant to exist on the same shelf, much less in the same story. And to this I say...

Once upon a time.

Once upon a time, there were three sisters, living in...well, not harmony, exactly, but living in the sort of uneasy cease-fire that comes naturally to a lot of siblings. Horror—we'll call her Rose Red, in honor of the color she tends to paint the landscape behind her—thought that her sisters played too nicely with their toys. They never stopped to smell the entrails. Fantasy, on the other hand—and let's call her Snow White, since that's a nice, familiar, fantasy name—wondered why Rose had to be so nasty all the time, and why her sisters couldn't see the virtue of sugar and spice and sleeping for a hundred years beneath the fairy hills. Meanwhile, stuck in the middle of it all, you had their poor sister Marchen—arguably the eldest, and somehow always the first to be forgotten—trying to hold it all together. We'll call her Lily Fair (and there's a reason for that), and she was constantly trying to strike a balance between the other two, or at least keep them from killing each other, because Lily understood something that people still have trouble with today: Lily understood that they were all telling the same story.