How is it I leave for NYCC in just over 2 weeks? How is it the Kickstarter campaign is due to start Saturday? I must get this show on the road!
I need an Android app to scan & record my library barcodes. I don’t care about price comparison, I just want a log. Does such a thing exist? (Nevermind, I asked on Twitter and it does exist. Later I will examine the apps and see which one seems to work best.)
Ah, there it is, posted publicly: Betsy Mitchell is retiring. Betsy is my editor at Del Rey, and let me know last week that she was taking early retirement. My reaction was AUGH! followed hard by “Holy crap have I been lucky, then,” because it was literally one of my career-bucket-list dreams/goals to work with Betsy, whose name I had known for a long, long time. The woman is a rock star among editors, has a stellar reputation, and I wanted very badly to have the chance to work with her. I figured if I ever got there it would be a crowning glory in my career.
I went to the RMFW conference in 2005 because she was going to be there and I hoped for the chance to meet her. As it happened, I met her the first evening because my friend Robin Owens had already met her and so we all sat down to dinner together. URBAN SHAMAN had just come out, and in my wildest dreams, Betsy Mitchell might have heard of it. I had a little author tag on my name badge, and she said oh you’re a writer! what do you write? and I said fantasy, and she said oh! she was a fantasy editor (no *kidding*, Betsy), and had I written anything she would know about?
Probably not, I said. My first book, URBAN SHAMAN, had just come out in June.
“Oh!” said Betsy Mitchell, Editor in Chief at Del Rey, “you’re the one who wrote URBAN SHAMAN!”
I pretty much exploded of squee. :) She’d heard about it at a con a couple weeks earlier, from a mutual acquaintance who apparently talked me up, so the title was fresh in her mind. My timing couldn’t have been better, as it turned out. :) That weekend I pitched HEART OF STONE to her (and the following Monday, Luna, who had been faffing around to the degree that I thought it was safe, obviously, to pitch it to someone else, bought it). My agent said to me, “What should I say to Betsy?” I said “Ask her if she’d like to read THE QUEEN’S BASTARD.” :)
Six years and four books later, I’m sad for me that Betsy is leaving (I’m rather delighted for her, it sounds like she’s got great stuff planned in her early retirement), but I am so, so grateful for having gotten to work with her. It’s been great fun and I am so, so lucky.
Oh, and I’ll be working with Anne Groell at Del Rey from here on out. I’m excited about that: I’ve heard nothing but good things about Anne, and am really looking forward to working with her!
– plane tickets to alaska
– empty garbages
– call UPC grrr
– make a Kickstarter video (*squinchy face*)
– redesign the P-Con website
– jumbletown the old TV