Process does matter; you need a process. What it is is up to no one but you. But if you can't sit down, write once upon a time, and go through however many hundred thousand words to get to happily ever after, you're never going to get anywhere.
Beneath the Sugar Sky' is an homage to the portal fantasies of my childhood: it is the portal running in reverse.
I made friends - close, lifelong friends - through my love of 'Buffy.'
Indexing' is a police procedural about protecting the world from memetic incursions - which is to say, fairy tales.
If 'Buffy' the movie was the true love of my childhood, 'Buffy' the series quickly became the true love of my teenage years. It was everything I'd ever wanted in a show and more. 'Buffy' quickly became an obsession, and, shortly thereafter, became my gateway into an incredible, insane, indescribably wonderful new world: shared media fandom.
'Seanan McGuire' is my real name; if I'm being silly and third-person about it, she's a frequently cranky, foul-mouthed Disney Princess on vacation in the real world, where she studies diseases, cuddles reptiles, watches lots of horror movies, and goes to as many corn fields as possible.
James Reed is inspired, if he is inspired by anyone specific, by P.T. Barnum. He's set up to be the ultimate American showman. His whole job is to sell you shadows. But he's not a nice person, he's not a good guy.
I do a lot of urban fantasy, which is modern-day cities, but you've got magic, you've got fairies running around, or cryptozoological creatures running around, and I'm pulling very heavily on my background as a folklore major and having done some animation work and all of that, and I'm pulling from the modern fairy tale narrative.
I am a zombie fan, but all of the zombie stories I've enjoyed started when the dead rose and ended three days later with everybody looking exhausted. I was thinking, 'What happens in 20 years?'
I wrote a song called 'Pretty Little Dead Girl.'
Like all children, I spent a lot of time looking for idols.
Fans are people, and people sometimes get mad at air. I know I do. So I have people huff at me because I'm not doing what they want, but I also have people get mad because I use profanity, or because I exist in material space, or because I was at Disneyland when they thought I should be writing.
Sparrow Hill Road' is a stand-alone book that ties into the InCryptid universe, not the launching point for a whole new series.
In the long run, I think I like 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' better as a television series, because it had so much more time and room and space to grow.
I believe that humans are pretty awesome but we are not capable of understanding what heaven would look like while we're alive because whatever is out there is so much bigger than we are.
Sadly, all good things must come to an end, and 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' wound up teaching me another, accidental lesson: that sometimes you're so excited to keep going down the road you're on, you drive right past your destination.
I am a cisgender woman who has always had a lot of female friends. While many of us have traits in common, none of us will ever be exactly the same. So it's enormously important to me that my female characters be people, and be allowed to be whatever they need to be.
When I was first writing 'Feed' - which was the first book I published as Mira - I talked about it very openly on my blog, on Twitter, that I was writing this book, and it wasn't until after it was sold that I said 'Mira Grant' wrote this book. And the reason there was really purely marketing-based.
When I was getting ready for the release of 'Deadline,' when it was coming out soon, I decided that the appropriate way to get people excited about the book would be to write a novella in 30 pieces and publish a piece on my blog every day for a month... during a convention, a week-and-a-half-long trip to New York, and a doll traders' expo.
The first thing that matters: I am a child of the eighties. I grew up in a neon wonderland of talking horses, compassionate bears, hair that didn't move in a stiff wind, and the constant threat of nuclear war.
