Catherynne M. Valente!

Okay, so I decided to give myself a break from revising this morning because I'm starting to just stare at the words on my screen as though they were written by an evil six year old child in some dead language I never even knew existed and now I'm supposed to make this nonsense sounds like something publishable.

*tragic sigh*

So I thought, "I know, I'll search about for potential agents to query. It'll be research! Fun!"

Not fun. Sooo not anywhere approaching fun. After drifting aimlessly through various agent search sites, I was close to giving up before I'd even begun. Translating my manuscript was starting to sound pleasant in comparison, like frosting cupcakes.

Instead I turned to one of my favorite story collections to date, Paper Cities. It's a collection of Urban Fantasy. And this is REAL urban fantasy, with unique concepts, living, breathing cities, and genius seeping out of its spine, not what some people have started to call urban fantasy but which is really Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Twilight now with more sex!

Yes, I just went there.

Almost every story in this collection leaves me in awe but my absolute, underline-sentences-because-they're-so-beautiful favorite is "Palimpsest" by Catherynne M. Valente. So I looked her up and she has a site! And a blog! And wait! There's more!

This February she came out with a novel based on this same short story titled (of course) Palimpsest. I'm ordering it online right now. Seriously.

And almost as good is the sneaking suspicion I have that she owns the same breed of dog that I want: a very wolf like, longcoat German Shepherd. And she named her Grimm!

All of this is making me really happy for some reason. I guess I just get excited when I find any strained similarity between myself and a talented, published writer as if this is proof that one day I, too, will join the ranks of the talented and published.

Back to revising for me. It's going to be a long afternoon.

Edit: Please note that I am a HUGE Buffy fan and didn't mean to imply that Joss Whedon and the other BTVS writers were not geniuses. Of course they were. I just don't like the wannabes. That is all.