Kickstarter Day 10 (19 left): Short story stretch goal unlocked!

I've been doing a Snoopy happy dance ever since I found out: The Labyrinth of Flame Kickstarter passed the first stretch goal!  (Special thanks to backer Leah Petersen, who put us over the top.  She's an author too; go check out her Physics of Falling trilogy!)

Happy face in Dang Canyon, Utah.  An accurate representation of my feelings today.

This means I'll be designing new bookmarks and writing a short story from the POV of one of the secondary characters in the series, as voted on by backers.  The poll's up and I'm very curious which character will win. Whichever character it is, their story will be a lot of fun to write.   I've spent so many years in Dev and Kiran's heads that it'll be quite interesting to get in someone else's!

And with one goal already passed, I've got another that I'm just as excited about: interior art for the book.  I always think it's a shame modern books don't often have interior illustrations, and I think it'd make for a really cool edition of the book to have certain scenes illustrated.  (I'm not telling which ones. No spoilers! :)  Should the Kickstarter make $9K, I'll commission 3 pieces of interior art.  Plus, because I know some of the biggest fans of my books don't have a lot of spare cash, I'll run a drawing for interested backers that'll let one lucky person get upgraded to the full-on "Ultimate Fan" reward, which includes a short story written just for you and your choice of peak climb or climbing lesson or skating lesson or lunch with me, along with a whole bunch of other goodies.

$9K really is a stretch, so we'll see.  My fingers are crossed!  In other news, the ever-excellent Paul Weimer interviewed me for SF Signal (thanks, Paul!).  And I've got another pic for you, from one of the canyons that inspired locations in The Labyrinth of Flame

Near the confluence of Buckskin and Paria Canyons

Today I rec a book that fits with my boisterously joyful mood: Diana Wynne Jones's Archers Goon.  Instead of blathering on about how much I love Jones's sharply witty humor and wild imagination and vivid characters, I'll let the book speak for itself.  Because how can you resist a book that promises to prove the following ten facts (quoted from Jones's "Author's Note" in the front):

1. A Goon is a being who melts into the foreground and sticks there.
2. Pigs have wings, making them hard to catch.
3. All power corrupts, but we need electricity.
4. When an irresistible force meets an unmovable object, the result is a family fight.
5. Music does not always soothe the troubled beast.
6. An Englishman's home is his castle.
7. The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
8. One black eye deserves another.
9. Space is the final frontier, and so is the sewage farm.
10. It pays to increase your word power.

Read it, and I promise you, you won't regret it.