how to get the advance copy of passenger

Many people have been asking me, how do I get an advance copy of Passenger?

Here's how:

Go to the American Library Association's Annual Conference being held this June. It will be in Anaheim, California.

It's just a little more than two months away now.

These are some of the places where I know I will be. There will probably be more added before the event:

• Friday, June 22: Booklist Youth Forum 8:00 - 10:00 p.m. I will be speaking with my good friend Michael Grant, Daniel Kraus, Daniel Handler, and Jon Scieszka. Pop Quiz: Which one of the guys on that list do I ALWAYS have to Google to check name spelling?

• Then there's the Macmillan Party afterwards... Um...

• Saturday, June 23: Guest speaker at Macmillan's Preview Breakfast Program. 7:00 - 9:00 a.m.

• Saturday, June 23: THIS IS IT -- Signing at MacKids booth #2534-2535. 10:00 - 11:00 a.m. ARCs of Passenger. This is real.

I am certain that there will be people who go through the convoluted and appropriate channels to obtain an ARC before June 23. They will be screened for their proclivity toward writing spoiler posts on social networking sites.

Other than that, June 23 is not that far off, is it?

Besides, you want this.

---

palindromes

As of now, two people in my family have read THE BEAST.

Well, it's not actually the beast, it's Passenger, which is THE SEQUEL to The Marbury Lens.

The back of the ARC says it's 480 pages, but it's actually 465. In any event, it is long, but my two readers have torn through it.

I am going to say a few things about Passenger at ALA this summer. I am also going to be signing ARCs of it at ALA on Saturday morning, June 23. Camping out in line is perfectly acceptable, since I am neither loaning out any copies of my own, nor sending any ARCs around. You'll have to get them from the folks in charge.

Sorry.

There are too many surprises in those 465 or 480 pages, and too many spoiler-geeks with Goodreads accounts.

So... no.

And it's kind of a long trip to October 2, which is the official release date.

Which is also a palindrome date.

If you employ the sensible, European method of numerical representations of dates, October 2, 2012 is written:

2-10-2012

...which is a palindrome day.

And that is cool.

You know... you see it in every book I have ever written, my fascination with numbers and patterns and connections and shit like that. It is an obsession I just can't shake.

I wrote a book that is coming out in fall of 2013 (which I will probably be telling you about in a week or so) that has a chapter called Palindromes in it.

Which is also cool.

Anyway, I was talking a bit with a reader about The Marbury Lens and how it relates to Passenger the other day.

This is what I said:

Whether you just take The Marbury Lens at face value or not (as a weird science fiction-type horror story), it is ultimately about how one messed-up event in your life can screw you over forever. The Marbury Lens is about how Jack tries, arguably with varying degrees of success, to deal with that issue despite his obvious flaws and predilection toward blaming himself. Passenger examines the effect of this on others: the people who love Jack. That's the bridge between these two books, and something to think about when you finally get your hands on this 465 or 480-page beast.

---

the crooked hand of reckoning

I am telling true stories this week. They have been requested.

I may have told this one before, but chances are you haven't read it. I am, after all, a bit of a hipster author. You probably never heard of me.

You know.

When I was in elementary school, it was not at all uncommon for teachers and principals to spank kids who didn't quite live up to their expectations. It wasn't actually spanking. It was, in honesty, something much worse than that.

And before I even begin, let me answer the question you are undoubtedly thinking:

Yes. I admit it. I was spanked -- beaten by teachers AND principals -- in elementary school and in junior high, too. I probably would have been beaten in high school, but it was against the law by that time.

In high school, they suspended me.

None of it changed anything.

Here is a question I am asked quite frequently: How did you get so twisted?

Hmm... Let me tell you a story.

The elementary school I attended for a while in Washington State was very much like the schools described in my novel, Stick. Same place, same systems.

And because the school was in Washington, all the classroom doors were on the inside, opening onto long, dark, linoleum-paved hallways.

Did I mention that it was perfectly okay for school staff to beat children in those days?

When I say children, I mean boys. For some reason, girls never did anything that required a beating.

The school was in the woods. During recesses, we (boys) would usually go out into the woods, which was not really allowed, but the school was not fenced, it was THE WOODS, and we were boys, also known as "children who get spanked."

So it was that just about every day after recess, one of us would be sacrificed to the paddle.

Yes, they used a big piece of wood to hit boys in those days, too. Nothing at all wrong with that idea, some wise old pedagogue probably said.

When the spankings occurred, there would actually be a sort of bizarre ceremony involved. The boy to be spanked would be taken out into the middle of the long linoleum hallway, then all the other boys in all the other classes would be called out into the hall to watch.

Not the girls, just the boys.

They made us watch.

SWAK! SWAK! SWAK!

The swats would echo, invariably punctuated with whining yelps and cries.

Pretty twisted, huh?

That's not even the bad part.

The bad part was this: The principal, the man who delivered the swats with the big piece of wood, was missing an arm. He had a prosthetic metal hook. And he held the paddle in his hook.

I am not making that shit up.

That shit was real.

This helped form us boys into the adults we are today. I think some of the boys from my school ended up murdering their parents and shit like that.

I wrote books like The Marbury Lens.

And speaking of The Marbury Lens, yesterday I received an Advance Copy of its sequel, Passenger.

It looks like this:

Nobody has read this yet.

I gave one to my son, who is home from Cal Berkeley for Spring Break. After he read about 100 pages, he said to me I think this is possibly even grimmer than The Marbury Lens.

Hmm... I didn't see that coming.

I heard him walking around at 2 in the morning. I think he stayed up all night to finish reading it.

That's what happens.

---

when opportunity kicks down your door, it may be carrying a gun

This is a true story.

In my younger days, after I graduated from college and devoted my life to unemployed drifting, I lived for a while in a small rental house on the beach. If you've read my book Stick, the house that I lived in was pretty much identical to the house Stark's Aunt Dahlia has in that novel: a two-bedroom little shack with a crooked fence in the sand.

It was cheap, and I had a roommate, a surfer kid named Brad, who happened to be gone with his girlfriend the night this particular true story in which I was nearly murdered took place.

In those days, I actually had a habit of being asleep at 3 a.m.

Imagine that!

What a bum!

Those were also the days before cellphones (I know!). Well, there were cellphones then, but they were like the size of microwave ovens and only rich people who later developed brain tumors owned them. I think you actually could melt cheese with them, too.

Let me tell you, too, the little community I lived in was rather bohemian. We were surfers, musicians, kids, dope dealers, shit like that. Since then, this little community has been entirely torn down and replaced by three-story view homes that are only occupied on weekends by lawyers and doctors who work endless hours in Los Angeles to maintain their empty beach houses.

It was a much cooler place when it was shacks and poor people.

Nobody locked their doors, either. In fact, on my little street it was normal for a neighbor to just pop over, open the front door, and come for a visit. We didn't even have the degree of social uptightness that required knocking.

I know. We were fucking communists or something.

This is what happened: my front door got kicked in.

At 3 a.m.

While I was doing what a good beach-dwelling unemployed communist would naturally be doing: sleeping.

I remember hearing the door being kicked in. It sounded like this:

KABOOM!!! YOU ARE GOING TO DIE!!!

Because, when you hear a sound like that at 3 a.m. your immediate assumption is that you are, indeed, about to die.

And I thought, What asshole does not know that my door is always unlocked?

I also kept a baseball bat beside my bed, which, I thought, came in handy at that exact moment.

I grabbed my baseball bat.

It was dark.

I went out of my bedroom and into the living room, a brave communist.

I had nothing on but a pair of underwear. And a baseball bat in my hand.

Guess what I saw?

Four police officers with guns drawn, pointed at me.

They had an arrest warrant and lots of firepower.

I have to hand it to those four well-armed policemen. You would think that when confronted with a crazed communist wearing nothing but underwear and wielding a baseball bat, there would be an immediate hail of bullets.

They did not shoot me!

This is why I did not get shot: The first cop through the door was a friend of mine.

His name was Ron.

Phew!

Ron, my friend, a cop, holding what looked like a 9mm Sig Sauer pointed directly at my forehead said to me, "Drew? What are you doing here?"

I said, "Um. Ron? What are you doing here?"

Here is a condensed version of how it was I would have certainly been murdered if any other police officer besides my friend Ron had come through my kicked-down door first:

The arrest warrant, properly executed and with MY address on it, was for a man named Danny B (I will leave out his last name so he doesn't come and kill me), who happened to be my next-door neighbor. Danny B ran an illegal gambling operation out of a local Irish pub. Danny B frequently hung out at my house and used my telephone (which had something called a cord attaching it to the wall and other lines all over the planet). Danny was a cool guy, even if he did almost get me killed because the phone at the Irish pub had been tapped (using a properly executed warrant) and traced back to my house, where the police assumed Danny B lived, but in fact found nobody home but a guy in his underwear who was definitely NOT Danny B, holding a baseball bat.

Sometimes I marvel that I ever made it out of my teens and eventually survived to breed.

Natural selection favors lucky communists.

---

back to marbury. or not-marbury.

---

more or less the truth

I am writing a series of true story blog posts at the request of an anonymous friend who is being held prisoner at a desolate Agricultural College where, no doubt, fishbowls with strips of paper (see yesterday's true story) are displayed like chalices containing the blackened internal organs of martyred saints upon the daises of echoing, abandoned lecture halls.

It is spring break for all the other future Doctors Moreau.

This, however, is immediately true: ARCs of Passenger, which is the sequel to The Marbury Lens, are arriving today.

I don't know much about it at all.

Well, I mean, I do know about the book since I wrote it and shit like that. It's pretty good. Kind of "out there." Big, big surprises in that story.

You will see.

It was a surprise to me when I came back from my afternoon run in the hills and I saw the email from my editor, telling me about the ARC's impending delivery. It happened very fast -- and the book is not coming out until October. I never even saw the page layout -- the "final pass" pages -- so I am as eager to actually hold and admire this thing as anyone could possibly be.

Liz [chimes!] commented something along the lines of This thing is so thick, will make a good weapon.

Well, it is substantial in content, but I doubt it would offer any significant degree of protection against a chicken the size of a fucking grizzly bear (see yesterday's true story).

So... um... yeah, I am excited.

I am more excited because my son, who is neither imprisoned at an Agricultural College nor a budding blasphemer of evolution, is coming home for spring break from UC Berkeley today. I haven't seen the kid since Christmas.

Anyway, today's immediate and hurried true story.

This photo was taken last Sunday, from my office desk, as the sun came up. I shot it with my new iPad, looking out across my backyard at the hills.

See those hills up there?

That is the Angeles National Forest.

Yesterday, my daughter and I were driving up the winding two-lane road over those hills, through the Angeles National Forest, coming home from THE BIG CITY, when we saw something that made me pull off into the dirt and snap a picture.

You ever notice how long it takes to get your phone out and actually snap a photograph when you see something really cool?

It takes for EVER.

Anyway, this is what we saw:

The reason it is hard to tell what is going on is because time expanded while I was getting out of my car and extracting my cellphone from my pocket.

There was a sheriff's helicopter dipping down into the canyon, right beside the road.

It had a long rope with a basket on it, and inside the basket there was a big pile of plants.

I thought, that was really cool!

My gardener just carries my yard trimmings away in a wheelbarrow.

I want him to start using a fucking helicopter, too!

I suppose this is what keeps Agricultural College kids busy over their spring breaks.

---

lucky, squared

Chickens, again unlike cats, are also not finicky eaters.

I have never seen a chicken vomit.

And if chickens were the size of grizzly bears, I am certain they would eat people.

That would be cool.

Research geneticists at Osaka University in Japan genetically modified mice so they could chirp like birds.

Why the hell would anyone do shit like that?

I don't really want an answer to that question. It is more or less rhetorical.

I wonder if genetic engineers sometimes put little strips of paper with characteristics into a fishbowl and then get drunk and randomly draw one strip from the "creature" bowl and one strip from the "traits" bowl and then laugh, laugh, laugh!

Then they get out their little Petri dishes with sperm and egg cells and go to town!

What crazy parties those genetic engineers must have!

Wheee! 

So I'm just waiting for them to pull out the "chicken" strip from the creature jar and the "size of a fucking grizzly bear" strip from the characteristics jar after they've knocked down a few quarts of vodka.

We already know what they did to every goddamned vegetable we stuff down the throats of our children.

But I got off track here. More or less.

Our chickens, who were happy free-roaming non-genetically-modified hens, would always return faithfully to their chicken coop every night.

Lucky, our buff Orpington hen with the broken, clawlike Richard III side-jutting foot, would always hop, hop, hop home every evening, too.

Hmmm... I've considered turning this into a picture book for kids, but I am told you are not allowed to drop EVEN ONE f-bomb in kids' picture books.

Go figure.

Who makes up such rules in this world where it is okay to just set drunken genetic engineers free to fuck with the machinery of evolution and natural selection?

That is also a rhetorical question, more or less.

If you have a big, wide-open chicken house, as we do, you are also going to attract mice.

The real kind, not the fucked-with kind that chirp like birds.

Anyway, whenever I'd go inside my buff Orpington hen named Lucky's house to feed my hens, if I'd kick around the straw, I could always stir up nests of mice and send them running around all over the floor.

My chickens used to like that very much, because they would actually chase the mice and eat them.

I am not making that up. It is another reason why chickens are superior to cats, and, believe me, I did not party with genetic engineers to elicit that particular quality in my hens.

Partying with genetic engineers would be really creepy.

Watching chickens eat mice is creepy, too.

So, this is how Lucky, my buff Orpington hen, finally died:

One morning, I went out to the barn to feed the horses, and I found Lucky, expired, a mound of ginger-colored feathers in the dust outside the henhouse.

Sad, sad, sad!

Lucky tried to swallow a mouse that was too big for Lucky's normal-sized chicken's throat.

The mouse was also dead, and its hind quarters were sticking out of Lucky's non-chirping beak.

This is how natural selection, in my estimation, will drive chickens to evolve to the size of grizzly bears.

And when that happens, genetic engineers better watch their fucking backs.

---