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I've been thinking a great deal about urban fantasy tropes the past few months. Can you imagine what it would be like to live with a werewolf? Would he get mad if you insisted on cooking his steak? And what about the shedding? I´m thinking a new vacuum cleaner would be in order. You´d also need to put away the good silver forever. With a vampire, you´d have to keep blood in your fridge and see about finishing the basement, like, yesterday. If you were married to a fairy, you´d have to scour the house from top to bottom and get rid of the iron. I´m looking around my house, realizing it´s not very fairy-friendly at all.  No wonder I haven´t seen any since I´ve been in Mexico. -grin-

For the last four years, I´ve been immersed in another culture. In my daily life, I speak a different language. I do business in Spanish. If I order food, it´s in Spanish. Sometimes I find myself thinking in Spanish. I cuss in Spanish.  The folklore of Mexico is different, too, and it flavored my writing of Blue Diablo. (If you´re interested, you can find some examples here.) As I celebrate the release of Blue Diablo, I am proudest of the fact that I bring something new to the genre. Other people are already doing a brilliant job of exploring vampires, werewolves, and fairies (sometimes all of the above), so I wanted my contribution to the genre to be fresh and different. I´m delighted  to report that most of my ARC readers report they´ve never read anything quite like the Corine Solomon series.

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Ann Aguirre is our guest blogger during the week of April 6th. If you have any questions for Ann Aguirre, add a comment to any of her posts.

Here is more information about Blue Diablo:

 "Gritty, steamy and altogether wonderful urban fantasy."-New York Times Bestselling Author Patricia Briggs

"Right now, I'm a redhead. I've been blonde and brunette as the situation requires, though an unscheduled color change usually means relocating in the middle of the night. So far, I'm doing well here. Nobody knows what I'm running from. And I'd like to keep it that way..."

Eighteen months ago, Corine Solomon crossed the border and wound up in Mexico City, fleeing her past, her lover, and her "gift". Corine, a handler, can touch something and know its history-and sometimes, its future. Using her ability, she can find the missing-and that's why people never stop trying to find her. People like her ex, Chance...

Chance, whose uncanny luck has led him to her doorstep, needs her help. Someone dear to them both has gone missing in Laredo, Texas, and the only hope of finding her is through Corine's gift. But their search may prove dangerous as the trail leads them into a strange dark world of demons and sorcerers, ghosts and witchcraft, zombies-and black magic...

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Far more than just a comic book collector's show, Comic-Con International 2008 held in sunny San Diego at the massive Convention Center was nothing less than a freewheeling, four day lovefest for all things comic, literary and fringe.

And luckily, I could count myself in as an attendee.

From a prime position on the floor, working in the Penguin booth to greet fellow comic lovers and readers, and to distribute some of our new reads and samplers, I was pleased to be in the middle of all the excitement, reveling in the spirit of community to be found there, gawking at the endlessly elaborate and clever costumed fans (one good looking Joker, Indiana Jones, and Cat Woman after another), and exploring aisle after aisle of offerings from small press vendors and artists-collecting a small mountain of freebies from the movie studios, networks, and the comic industry heavyweights present.

Posters, buttons, graphic novels, oversized bags and tees-my nearly bursting carry-on luggage was at the sheer mercy of its overworked zipper.

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Back home from Berlin, my vacation buzz is fading fast. I'm back at work, trying to nail together the thematic climax of a novella while fending off the attentions of two needy cats and picking up the threads of everyday life -- tax forms, a car that needs its annual maintenance check, grocery shopping -- you know the drill. At least I've got work to keep me busy; it beats the alternative.

For me, writing tends to be an obsessive process, coming in wild bursts punctuated by introspective silence. It leaks out of the time allocated for it and makes a sticky mess of my time management. Some other authors have apparently figured out a way to compartmentalize, but I don't work that way, and when I'm approaching the end of a project I tend to wander around in an absent haze, trying to fit the jigsaw pieces together in my head (or, if necessary, carve new ones to slot into the holes left in the puzzle -- after all, the pieces are all hand-made). I don't mumble to myself or trip over my own shoes, but I gather I'm quite bad company when I've got my head stuck in the engine compartment of a balky story; I can have entire conversations and not remember a word of them afterwards.

(My wife is forgiving; the cats, less so.)

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Berlin in the summer oscillates wildly between thirty degree heat and wind driving the rain horizontally across broad road and exposed platz alike. It's like Germany, but different: comfortably lived-in, extensively graffiti'd but basically tidy and sane, except for the football thing.

(We arrived near the climax of the European Cup, right after the semi-final that saw Germany trounce Turkey and go into the final against Spain. And the place went wild. Convoys of flag-flying cars and bikes honking their horns, crowds on foot shouting up and down the Ku'damm ... it's a potentially explosive mixture, and in England it would have ended in a riot, but in Berlin they just drank the bars dry and went home.)

I was there on vacation, so I'm short of publishing-related anecdotes to share with you. But it's hard to switch off the authorial observation engine (that keeps making notes and filing them away for future use), and Berlin gives you plenty of fodder for fiction. You can focus single-mindedly on relaxation and still find it impossible to ignore the urgent visions of a bygone century's futurism. Berlin is modern, by the standards of European capitals; it only really got going in the late 19th century, as the hub of a new empire obsessed with progress and competition. It's littered with the spoor of stale futurism, from the bizarre impaled geodesic dome of the Fernsehturm to the Bauhaus - archive. This is the country which brought us Vorsprung Durch Technik as a marketing slogan, where engineers list their PhD's before their names as an honorific, and the futures are never far below the surface.

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This week, I'm running away from Edinburgh -- to Berlin.

Edinburgh (where I live) is a very odd city. Like Rome, it's built on seven hills; the basalt remains of an extinct volcano, and one that was scoured by an ice sheet just 12,000 years ago, so that the city is dominated by a collection of crags and cliffs. It's been inhabited since the early iron age, but the modern city dates to the middle ages, and has been shaped by war and geography. You can find the first ten and twelve story high apartment blocks in the world here, built in the middle ages to cram bodies inside the city walls. (Imagine living in a tenth story apartment with no elevators and no plumbing or water supplies!) There are roads that pass over and under each other, streets on bridges with buildings to either side, streets in tunnels, secret histories and royal societies. There's nothing quite like Edinburgh, and it's a wonderful place to live and write ... until the summer, when the Mimes arrive.

The Mimes -- in white-face, pretending to be statues, or delivering very dodgy weather forecasts via sign language -- are one of the first harbingers of the Festival. During the Edinburgh International Festival (one of the largest performing arts binges in the world) the entire city goes a little bit mad. Everywhere stays open a couple of hours longer, and the pubs and clubs (which normally open until after midnight) frequently fail to eject their clientelle until dawn. There's a performance in every basement, stand up comedy on every street corner, the population triples, and you can't go out of your front door to buy a newspaper without tripping over a street theatre troupe from Prague or a gaggle of lost tourists from New York.

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Enter for a chance to win a poster of Charles Stross' Saturn's Children!

This week we welcome Charles Stross, a brilliant new voice in speculative fiction, as our special guest blogger. To get you revved up for his visit, we're giving away fifteen posters of his latest book, Saturn's Children. This amusing and thought-provoking tale is set in a future where humans have become extinct and only our androids remain-though as the femmebot Freya discovers, even without humans the universe is far from being a quiet place.

The first fifteen readers to email us at penguin.blog@us.penguingroup.com with their full name and mailing address will each receive a poster (Approximate Retail Value ("ARV"): $0.00). Offer ends July 14, 2008, 11:59 PM Eastern Time.

For details and Official Rules click here. Get ready for Charles Stross, here and present this week!