W.I.P. and Reading

I finally handed out the first fifty pages of my newest work-in-progress (the young adult vampire/witch series) to Wyrdsmiths last week. I'm now trying to untangle their comments, my thoughts on them, and do some revision. Interestingly, some of the issues people had were with "world-building" (something I pretended to be an expert on yesterday), and, thus, I spent a good deal of last night talking to my partner about the world of these novels and my vision for them.

And now there's a psychic cat... or maybe it's a ferret.

That part is still undetermined.

Also, sometime last week I got my latest (and last) issue of TALEBONES (issue #38, Summer 2009). I started reading it right away, and, because I'm kind of pedestrian, I started at the beginning with Mary Robinette Kowal's "Ginger Stuyvesant and the Case of the Haunted Nursery." (Nothing about her story was pedestrian, I only say that I'm kind of pedestrian because I think it might actually be wiser to skip and jump through any collection of short stories.) The story takes place in that time of the "Spiritualists" in 1920s in a British manor. Our heroine is an American medium who can see and communicate with ghosts, and has a strange sort of desire/affinity with the otherside (in that without the anchor of the seance circle, her spirit wants to just leave and follow the spirits.) The ending wasn't incredibly "ah-ha!," but it was an engaging, well-told story none-the-less. I was particularly enchanted with how the medium interacted with the ghosts (and the ghosts with their obsessions), as well as the sub-plot that involved a non-believer husband. A good, well-told story. I'd recommend it, particularly if you like ghost stories.