1. To my blogger friends: If you'd like a Passenger countdown widget like that one over there on the right, drop me a line and I will send you the code.
2. I have been receiving a number of messages from people who are reading Passenger from NetGalley. This is a good thing, right? I don't know what NetGalley is, but I'm starting to think it's some kind of orgy.
3. I was thinking the other day about all this stuff, about how I never wanted people to read my books. This is a true story. I'd been writing all my life, and I never considered trying to get one of my books published until I was dared into doing it by a friend, author Kelly Milner Halls. That "dare" resulted in getting the first book I sent out to anybody published. I was terrified at the prospect. You know why I never thought about getting one of my books published? Because I didn't want REAL PEOPLE to read my books.
I have not really gotten over that.
You know the first book I wrote that I actually wanted people to read? Winger, which is coming out in May.
I let a couple people read Winger a while back: author friends Bill Konigsberg and Joe Lunievicz. I have not let my son read Winger yet. And he's read other books of mine which are not yet published, but he's going to have to wait until the ARCs come out.
4. When I wrote The Marbury Lens, I had intended it to be a sort of gallows speech for my career. I was not going to write again after that. Seriously. So what did I do? I wrote a 500-freaking-page-long follow-up to it, and other books as well. Um. Yeah.
You remember last June when a columnist for the Wall Street Journal came out of the corner swinging right at my guts with her attack on The Marbury Lens? I was definitely going to quit writing after that. In fact, I told my then-agent that I was quitting writing at the end of last summer.
I know this is rambling, but I finally "get" what Andrew Karre has been saying about YA being a genre and not an age-level. The problem is, as evidenced by most bookstore shelves and misguided tirade-spewers like that certain columnist for the Wall Street Journal is that YA is condemned to being perceived as age-level FIRST and genre SECOND.
5. Some people who have now read Passenger have asked me this: Will there be a third Marbury book?
Here is my answer: If you read the two amazing reviews from Booklist and Kirkus, you will probably get the idea that Passenger is a fitting conclusion to Jack's story. You could get that idea. But the answer is yes, I am going to write a third Marbury book.
One day.
