With the October Daye series on the Hugo ballot again, I figure it's time to introduce y'all to the pieces in play. We begin with ROSEMARY AND RUE.

ROSEMARY AND RUE was my first novel. I originally wrote it when I was eighteen years old, meaning I finished draft one in 1996. I spent the next twelve years rewriting and improving it, until it was finally purchased in 2008, and published in 2009.

ROSEMARY started out as a fourteen-page short story called "Of Koi Fish and October Dayes." It was, at the time, the best thing I had ever written. My girlfriend read it and said "Toby wants a novel."

I objected, saying that Toby didn't have enough story to support a novel. She argued with me, and for about a month, all she'd say to me was "Toby wants a novel."

I really, really liked my girlfriend. I started writing Toby's novel, originally titled HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL. The original draft was written one chapter at a time on the typewriter at my temp job, almost entirely out of order.

There are absolutely things I would do differently if I were starting the series now; some of the rules of the world would be heavily modified, if not thrown out completely. But I'm still pretty damn proud of this book. It makes me happy.

ROSEMARY AND RUE is available from @dawbooks
at bookstores everywhere. We released a tenth anniversary edition in 2019 that includes a new novella set before the events of the series; this is included in the hardcover edition and all ebook editions.
.

Many of the paperbacks in circulation, especially at used bookstores, are reprints of the original text, and will not include the novella. Sorry.

While the anniversary edition includes a substantial amount of new material, it didn't come with the opportunity to revise the text at all, so the book still includes a substantial amount of ableist language, for which I am sorry.

When I wrote the book, I legitimately didn't know that those words were rocks, and so I hurled them with impunity. I have worked hard since then to do better (the improvement really starts with book four, LATE ECLIPSES).

Time for your second Toby introduction! My dearly beloved A LOCAL HABITATION.

Because it took me a decade to re-write book one into something saleable, A LOCAL HABITATION got to be revised at least six times before it could settle into its final form.

Book two in a series is always in an awkward place: not hot, fresh and new like book one, not comfortable and comprehensible like book three. It has a hard row to hoe.

A LOCAL HABITATION was originally written without Quentin, Toby's eventual squire, and had to be ripped apart and totally stapled back together in order to fix its lack of an emotional core.

This is my locked room mystery, and a good friend was pregnant while it was being written. I sent her each chapter as it was finished as a sort of prayer against miscarriage. Her child is in college now.

This book introduces January, Li Qin, April, and the night-haunts. It seems like a side quest, but it's so integral to the structure of everything that it can't be skipped.

A LOCAL HABITATION was released by @dawbooks, and is available from bookstores everywhere (assuming they carry genre fiction, and possibly imported genre fiction.

(I have apologized for the rocks I threw without knowing already in this thread; I won't belabor the point. But please be aware that as of book two, I still had lots of rocks and no idea that they could hurt people.)

We're approaching the point where things get finicky, but before we get there, let me tell you about AN ARTIFICIAL NIGHT. When we took the Toby Daye books to DAW, this was the last one I had finished. It's also the one where the series kicks into high gear.

Basically, after book three, poor Toby never really gets to sleep again. Most of the important pieces are on the board. Most of the long-term plot threads have been introduced. She just has to try to keep them from killing her.

Acacia is entirely based on a gorgeous woman who showed up at my brother's place in Indianapolis, painted buttercup yellow, with moth wings in her hair. She wasn't in the original outline. Once around, she refused to leave.

For a lot of people, this book is still a favorite. That list includes me. This is the book where we pick up Raj, where Quentin gets locked into his position as unwitting sidekick, where the scope of Faerie becomes clear. I love it so.

A remarkable amount of this book was inspired by the song "Yearbook," by Hanson, and there was originally a set piece at Quentin's high school that I'm honestly glad got cut.

AN ARTIFICIAL NIGHT was originally published by DAW Books, and is available now from a bookstore near you.

(This book is also where we acquire May, who refused to leave when her "part in the story" was finished. May is best. We're lucky to have her.)

Back to our long, slow recapping of the October Daye series, in light of its third Hugo nomination for Best Series: when we sold Toby to DAW, it was with three books already finished, and a fourth book I had been struggling to finish for years.

(Yes, I am truly hoping that third time's the charm. And if Toby wins this year, there won't be a fourth time for a decade, if ever, as I will refuse any further nominations until the series is finished after she brings home a Hugo.)

LATE ECLIPSES was titled LATE ECLIPSES OF THE SUN AND MOON for a very long time, and then THESE LATE ECLIPSES. Somehow, "these" got dropped during the editorial process, making it the only Toby book with a two-word title.

Because I was living in a cycle of writing and rewriting books one-three, the changes every revision made were cascading into the rest of the series, and LATE ECLIPSES was among the hardest hit. I couldn't finish it until the first three locked for good.

LATE ECLIPSES is the book where I realized I had been wrong about who Toby's long-term love interest was going to be. Whoops. (These books are urban fantasy, not paranormal romance, because I am not good at writing romance. It's not my gig.)

(Sometimes people say they don't read Toby because they don't like supernatural romances. If my books contain too much romance for them, I wonder how they're able to read anything, ever. Romance is an ingredient as well as a genre, and it's everywhere.)

LATE ECLIPSES shook up the status quo I had defined in the first three books in a big, big way, removing characters who had been there since the beginning and introducing Walther, who would come to be more and more important as time went on.

LATE ECLIPSES was originally published by @dawbooks, and is available from bookstores and import stores everywhere.

To this day, LATE ECLIPSES holds the record for "book where the most text was written at Walt Disney World." It was also the first October Daye book to make the New York Times Bestseller list. And it's the first book where she's wearing a dress on the cover.

And then we reached book five, ONE SALT SEA, wherein I decided to answer the question "just how disgustingly self-indulgent can I be in a single book?" It's all about MERMAIDS. Punchy, punchy mermaids, and the punchiest mermaid of all is Dianda Lorden.

Toby rides a screaming, furious mermaid in a wheelchair down a hill into the San Francisco Bay. That scene alone marks this as my most self-indulgent book, period.

(Also, the dedication is an almost direct quote from an MTV mockumentary about boy bands. I have a brand, and that brand is WEIRD AS FUCK.)

By the time we hit ONE SALT SEA, the scope of the world had been well-established, and it was time to meet the aquatic fae. Dianda's husband, Patrick, is the only character with an editorial order of protection.

This is largely because killing Patrick would derail the rest of the series horrifically, replacing the next book with DIANDA LORDEN PUNCHES EVERYTHING FOREVER, PART ONE.

I'm honestly not sure Toby could ever wrest back control of her own series.

The name "Dianda" is one I have always loved. It was several years after I introduced the character when I was driving past a strip mall near my house and realized, maybe for the first time since I was eight, that it was named "Dianda Plaza."

So Di is technically named after the location of a Dairy Queen and a Grocery Outlet.

The cover of ONE SALT SEA is the single most passive in the series to date; Toby is unconscious and sprawled on a beach. It's also one of my favorites, on account of MERMAID. (The Toby-is-secretly-Merrow AU was one of my favorite go-to-sleep stories for years.)

Back to the long, slow October Daye thread! If you're using this to determine reading order, after ONE SALT SEA, you'll enjoy ASHES OF HONOR, wherein Toby has a series of very bad days.

Toby has and is intentionally written as having clinical depression. She never calls it that, because Faerie needs good therapists, but she is not in a good place during this book. She's suffered some of her worst losses to date. She's broken.

She gets better! ASHES OF HONOR introduces us to Chelsea, who is also having a bad day, and finally puts Li Qin on screen. Jan's wife is a joy and a delight, and I could write her forever.

Book six means we're approaching the end of act one, and there's no going back now.

ASHES OF HONOR is interesting to me, because it's the place where assumed straightness slams into assumed queerbaiting for many, many people.

Your critique of my work is always valid, because it belongs to YOU. I won't come into your space and tell you that you're wrong! But a remarkable number of people are comfortable coming into my space and telling me Li's existence is a retcon.

Straight characters have had spouses and ex-spouses they didn't mention in their first appearance, but because we culturally assume straightness, no one has ever called this a retcon.

There is nothing in A LOCAL HABITATION to indicate that Jan is straight. As her author, I see quite a lot to indicate that she's not. But because she didn't stand on a table and announce "I AM A LESBIAN I ONLY LIKE GIRLS," people assume I changed her after the fact.

Sometimes I fuck up and don't convey what I'm trying for, and that's on me. But in this specific case, I feel like we're all conditioned to assume straightness, and that is not my fault.

January O'Leary is queer as fuck. Always has been, and always will be.

We resume our slow crawl through the October Daye books with CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, in which an old enemy finally pushes things a little bit too far, and Toby is forced to begin solidifying her reputation as a hero.

(This is also the last book before some of our "wait WHAT" revelations start to pile up, which will make summarizing the rest of the series exciting for me, and fun for y'all.)

I legit can't name the important new characters who joined the cast with this book without spoiling a bunch of shit too important to spoil over Twitter.

The further into this series I get, the harder it can be to talk about it without feeling like an asshole. In my perfect world, all new readers would be excited enough by the enthusiasm of my existing readers to start from the beginning.

If a spoiler truly ruins the process of getting from point A to point B, you're not doing your job as an author. This is absolutely true. But knowing certain things WILL color how you view/interpret other things, and how you read characters.

I've had people tell me that Toby seems much smarter on their first read, before they knew all these things that she didn't know at the time. Now her inability to know things she can't possibly know makes her seem inattentive.

It's the Ayla Effect, and while I recognize and even exploit it, I hate it when characters get unfairly judged because of it. So I try to skip the spoilers whenever I possibly can. Anyway, I like this book a lot. You should read it.

As we continue our gradual October Daye recap, we reach THE WINTER LONG. This is the book that someone in Penguin Marketing accurately predicted from the title of book one. It's also the book whose back cover text fits in a tweet.

This was book eight. The book I never expected to have the opportunity to write. The book everything else had been building toward, the whole time. It's hard to talk about. It's basically a three hundred page spoiler. It changes EVERYTHING.

This is the book where I learned that if they spell your main character's name wrong on the front cover, they will reprint IMMEDIATELY. So that was educational!

This book is so far from the end of the story that it's ridiculous, but reaching it was still my primary goal for a very long time. This book matters. It matters to me, it matters to Toby, and it concludes Act One.

And now we have reached A RED-ROSE CHAIN, the book where I had to make an impassioned plea for the fact that hyphenate words are only one word from a word count standpoint, meaning this is still a three-word title.

I had a tiny meltdown when I reached this book, because to be honest, I had never really believed--not really--that I'd be allowed to keep going past THE WINTER LONG. If I could get that far, I'd be content with the series ending. Happy, no, content, yes.

A RED-ROSE CHAIN is the first book to take place mostly outside the San Francisco Bay Area, introducing as it does the Kingdom of Silences, further up the coast.

At this point, a remarkable amount of the shit Toby's dealing with is basically of the "you fucked around, now I get to find out" category.

This book changes some things for the rest of the series and the world as a whole on a profound level. It is also the book in which everyone falls in love with Walther. Just completely and profoundly falls in love with him.

(Thankfully, Walther is awesome, and doesn't mind people falling in love with him. Honestly, he kinda takes it for granted.)

And now, ONCE BROKEN FAITH. Sometimes books in this series sneak up on me. Sometimes they're 100% the consequences of Toby's actions. Everything that happens in this book is absolutely the consequence of the books prior.

Fun fact: This was originally intended as the first hardcover in the series, which is why it includes the first novella. Second fun fact: Because this was decided too late in the process to make it manifest, I was allowed to keep doing novellas.

The last paperback cannot have more bonus material than the first hardback, solely from a value-added perspective. So now "what's the novella?" is a standard question.

Toby is the Baymax of diplomacy. She is not fast.

I don't think we get any new, major characters out of this book, but we get to see quite a bit of characters we don't see all that often, and we finally learn more of the political shape of the west coast.

Oh boy oh boy it's time for THE BRIGHTEST FELL, which includes what may be the best "holy shit wait how is it that I LIKE this character?!" turn around in the series to date.

One of my beta readers who's been with me for the beginning called to inform me, angrily, that "NAME doesn't deserve NAME!" when I sent her this book, and no. No, she did not.

This is the book where many of Toby's mother issues come to the forefront, and I became genuinely astonished by my own mother's ability to enjoy reading this series. Like, really, Mom? You don't, like, RECOGNIZE anything?

We acquire two new, seemingly major, seemingly permanent characters in this book (I say "seemingly" not to hint, but because it hasn't been long enough to be absolutely sure).

And the idea that plot hooks I baited ten books ago really are going to be used someday is reintroduced, with a vengeance!

NIGHT AND SILENCE! Yes, good! So all the Toby books have three word Shakespeare quote for titles, and at one point, I was wailing about how it was getting increasingly hard to find new ones.

And around that same time, I had a tendency to answer the phone with a chirpy "Night and silence, who is there?".

...so sometimes I'm very clever is what I'm saying here.

Anyway, this is the book where I answer some questions that have been looming since book one, live with the consequences of my (and Toby's) actions, and drive the plot along at a nice swift clip. I had a very good time in this one.

This is also one of the books where I have to acknowledge that I'm deep in a long-running series, because explaining what happens is borderline impossible. It all make sense, and people seemed to like it.

Plus there's a chicken-legged house that has yet to be fully explained, and that makes me happy.

So the October Daye series includes a take on Selkies that I, as a water-fae obsessed folklorist, have always been very proud of, and readers had been asking me to expound on for years. And with THE UNKINDEST TIDE, we finally get the chance.

THE UNKINDEST TIDE takes place mostly in the Undersea Duchy of Ships, anchored far from land and answering to no land Kingdom. It's a home and a haven for the seafaring fae who live there, and it serves the pleasure of the mysterious Captain Pete.

I LOVE Pete. Pete is best. Pete is possibly the only one of the Luidaeg's half-sisters who doesn't need to be hit with a brick...most of the time.

So this is the Selkies book, and it's sort of an Undersea book, although not as much as ONE SALT SEA was (although that would be hard to top), and in a way, it's a chance for Toby to catch her breath. Like everything else at this point in the series, it builds...

...off of everything that came before it, making it difficult to pick up in a void. The emotional connections and deeper logic just won't be there if you try.

Shortly after this book, the political makeup of the local Undersea changes rather dramatically, so this was a nice chance to visit a status quo I was fond of one last time before I broke it.

...and now, at last, we are come to A KILLING FROST, which was released in 2020, and is thus the last full-length October Daye novel considered a part of this year's Hugo nomination.

There is...basically nothing I can say about this book that isn't going to be a spoiler for new readers. Wow, way to make things easier for yourself, blondie. So I'm going to talk about the way this book made me FEEL.

Getting to write this book was a victory. I come from the fanfic community originally; those are my roots. And sometimes I'd write hard stories just to earn myself the soft ones that came as a consequence.

Because A KILLING FROST is novel-length, it's both a hard story AND a soft story. It technically introduces a new major character...but only technically. Mostly, it's about healing the people we already knew.

Something I am occasionally called out on, and fairly, is how little explicitly queer content there is in the first several books, given that fae society supposedly doesn't have a lot of hangups. And that's not wrong!

At the same time, these books started coming out in 2009, when any queer content in mainstream science fiction/fantasy was a much harder sell, and I was a baby author with no credit to burn on getting my own way. I made safe choices when I was starting out.

Do I wish I had been braver? Sometimes. Mostly not. Because if I had been braver in the beginning, I might not be where I am now, where I can do virtually anything I want to as long as it makes sense in the context of the story I'm telling.

And all of this is by way of saying that there's a reason--one of many--that I delayed dealing with the central conflict of A KILLING FROST until I reached the "Seanan makes us money, we will basically leave her alone while she plays with her toys" stage of characterization.

I had a couple people look at that resolution and say "I got a misprinted copy, there's no way you actually did that," to which I reply, "I am a daughter of the fanfic mines, and I have not forgotten the face of my father."

Faerie changes forever as a consequence of this book, and I think it's for the better.

...and this brings us to the end of the thread, if not the series. I hope you will consider the October Daye books when it comes time to vote for the Best Series Hugo.

Community wisdom says it's gauche to talk about wanting to win, and maybe community wisdom is right, but I wear orange glitter pants and eat with my hands. I am gauche on main.

And I have had a couple of people tell me, sometimes apologetically, sometimes not, that they didn't vote for me because I seemed disengaged or like I didn't care.

I care so very, very much. I care more than anyone will ever believe. I care too much. So please, remember me.

Thank you for joining us for this two-week-long thread from hell.