See You In September

Unless something really extraordinary happens between now and then.

I'm about to have an onslaught of (beloved) house guests. The next couple of weeks are going to be (by my standards at least) quite the social whirl.

Sadly, when I'm not whirling with my friends, I'll be cleaning the apartment in preparation. Which is what I must do now.

Have an excellent rest of August. For those of you (like me) who enjoy Labor Day Weekend, enjoy Labor Day Weekend.

So don't think of this as a dust off, but I'm off to dust!

Another Way To Read My Books In Europe

Over a year ago, I got an email from a woman who lived in an Eastern European country. She had seen a recommendation of Life As We Knew It and was interested in reading it. But living where she was, it would have cost a lot of money to have a copy shipped to her. And the book wasn't available for her Kindle, at least not in English.

At that point, I didn't know a lot about Amazon/Kindle, so I contacted my agent to ask why that was. It seems that when we sold the UK rights to the moon books, we hadn't included the ebook rights in the contracts.

We asked the UK publisher if they would like the ebook rights, and they hemmed and hawed and ultimately decided they didn't. Don't ask me why not, because it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but a no is a no.

So my agent contacted Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and asked them if they would like the ebook English language rights, and they said sure, why not. So we signed contracts. They didn't have to pay me a penny more, but I get a nice royalty rate, which works fine for me.

Now if you're in a country which has Amazon/Kindle available, you can now buy a number of my books in English (the German versions have been available on Kindle from the beginning). All three moon books are  there, as well as my older titles that I put up as ebooks (see the right side of the blog for information about them). In addition, Blood Wounds can be bought on Kindle outside of the United States and Canada. Since Blood Wounds hasn't been published outside of the United States/Canada, this is pretty much the only way of reading it without having to pay for shipping.

Here's the Amazon/Kindle listing from Amazon UK.com and Amazon Germany. com  and Amazon France. com (notice that the French versions of my books aren't available on Kindle, for reasons I don't understand). Those are the only countries I have listings for. Amazon isn't available every country, and when you google in something like Amazon Brazil, you get a lot of listings for some river or another.

But if you're in a country where you can use a Kindle, and you're interested in reading one or more of my books, you now can, thanks in part to a woman in an Eastern European country who took the time to email me to ask why she couldn't!

I'll Write A Sensible Informative Post Next Week I Promise

I actually have two in mind.

But this week has been crazy, partly because of the Olympics, which I love on TV and online (do you know, well of course you don't but you will momentarily, that I even watched the Men's Triple Jump online  because the competitor from Haiti is actually from about 20 miles from here).

And if the Olympics weren't enough, my carpet got stretched yesterday (no doubt in training for the Triple Carpet Jump event). I'd been told it would get stretched Wednesday, so I moved all the books and CDs and    DVDs and pictures out of the living room Tuesday night, only it didn't get stretched until Thursday, so I spent last night and this morning moving all the books and CDs and DVDs and pictures back into the living room. The carpet definitely looks better, although it remains old and ratty (the disadvantage of renting).

But in the midst of all this chaos, I made a magnificent change to the right side of the blog. See? I added a slideshow of Scooter at his most intellectual. It took me a long long time to figure out how to do it, and I'll never do it again, since I have no idea how I actually got it up there. But it was definitely my accomplishment of the week, and it merited a line in my Friday gratitude diary.

All right. I still have dozens of plastic bags to put away and my mother's laundry (done yesterday) to take out of the drier, before watching track and field online.

Next week had better be calmer!

A Quick (By My Standards At Least) Announcement Before I Start Watching Trampoline

My absolute favorite Olympic sport, and why there's no cable network devoted exclusively to it, I'll never understand.

But onto the announcement. My editor emailed me yesterday to ask if I wanted The Shade Of The Moon to come out in Fall 2013 or Spring 2014. Fall would require me to finish the rewrites by October, and Spring would give me until January to do same.

I emailed back to say the people who read my blog (i.e. you) are eager to read The Shade Of The Moon and would prefer the Fall date. My editor understood why that was so important to me, and agreed to get to work almost instantly, since I can't do the rewrites until she writes her notes suggesting what needs improvement.

What I didn't tell her was the only chance I have to test my No Complaining Resolution was if I had to do the rewrites almost immediately, since by December, I will undoubtedly have slipped into my whining ways, because I won't have had anything much to complain about between now and then to put my No Complaining Resolution to the test.

Yes, people who read my blog (i.e. you). I used you (i.e. you).

Hmm. This is now an announcement and a confession. Two for the price of zero (thank you, Blogspot*, for this gift of free space).

So The Shade Of The Moon will be published a little over a year from now. Let's see how much complaining I don't do between now and then!

*Blogspot's very own spellcheck doesn't think Blogspot is a word. It offered me as an alternative "Bloodsport." I'll let you come up with the jokes about that while I watch trampoline.

ETA: Scooter isn't nearly as interested in the Olympics as I am!

Saya Sangat Gembira

Yes, you guessed it. I am very excited to announce we've sold the Indonesian rights to Life As We Knew It, The Dead And The Gone, and This World We Live In.

I must now go and cheer the Indonesian Olympic team to victory (and no badminton jokes please!).

I Just Blogged To Say I Thank You

I don't know if I say it enough. At least not to you.

Blogging is a strange beast. I talk about myself, my work, my family and friends, my cats, my complaints (and yes, I'm good at those), trying to make it interesting, if only to myself. Then I press the Publish button, and off my entry goes to be read by a handful of my friends and an unknown number of strangers.

In real life, I've met a handful of you strangers. I've exchanged emails with a few more. But mostly I know you from the comments you leave (and I'm sure there are many of you who haven't left comments, and that's fine too). Some of you use names that might actually be your name. Others use make believe names. And of course there are the Anonymouses who stay Anonymous and those who add real names or make believe names to their comments.

The blog entry that got the greatest number of comments was one I wrote a little over a year ago, asking if there should be a fourth moon book. There are 126 comments, and they continue to come in.

And so, with your encouragement, I wrote a fourth moon book. And then I tried a different approach to a fourth moon book. And then, finally, I wrote a fourth moon book and got it right, in my eyes and the eyes of my publisher.

I wrote about all those efforts and you stuck with me. You encouraged me. You sympathized and empathized. You were on my side. Or if you weren't, you kept your thoughts to yourself, which I also appreciate.

Since the end of December, I've kept a gratitude diary. Every Friday I write down five things I've been grateful for during the week. Some weeks I have a lot more than five things to be grateful about, so I shove a few together. Some weeks it's a struggle to come up with five things, but I think about it, and end up with five   real things.

During the week, I think sometimes about what I'll put in the diary. Last night I thought about it. I knew the first thing I'd list was my publisher accepting The Shade Of The Moon.

But then I thought I should list how much I appreciate your comments. And I decided while it would be fine to put that in a diary only I read, I should let you know as well.

So thank you. Thank each and every one of you. Thank you more than you can imagine.

Oh, and if you can think of three more things I should be grateful for this week, I'll be even more grateful!

Bad News/Good News

The bad news is since I made that resolution not to complain, I won't be able to complain when I have to do rewrites on The Shade Of The Moon.

The good news is I'll have to do rewrites on The Shade Of The Moon because Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has accepted it for publication!!!

I don't have a publication date yet, having only gotten the acceptance email a couple of hours ago, but until I hear otherwise I'm going to assume it will come out in the fall of 2013. Which is really hardly more than a year from now.

However, a year is a long long time to leave all of you in the middle of a sentence, so I'm going to put the rest of Chapter 1 in this entry. It's a long chapter, and will probably take you a year to read, so that should work out just fine.

First though, I'll put the links to entries where I put arbitrary pages of manuscript. After you finish reading Chapter One In Its Entirety, you might want to read the pages, since you'll be more familiar with the characters and situation.

Okay. Here's link one and link two. I'm too lazy to see which order they should be read in.

Now here's the link for the beginning of Chapter One.

Here's the rest of Chapter One. I hope you'll enjoy it. If you don't, well, if I can't complain, neither can you!