Oh! Also! The thing I was going to mention and forgot!

I have a book signing tonight at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh. Actually, I and another author will be addressing a group called "The View From Tuesday" which is a sort of book club about what’s going on in children’s literature at the moment, mostly with teachers and librarians and whatnot, but everybody is welcome to attend, totally open to the public and all. There’ll be a booksigning thingy afterwards, it’s at 7pm, they’ll have copies of Nurk, etc. (Honestly, everybody’s probably gonna come out for Deborah Miles, the other author, but hey, a signing at Quail Ridge is nothing to sneeze at.) 

One of the weird mental things about publishing is that the delay completely breaks my brain (and I suspect, a lot of other authors.) Nurk seems like something I wrote a thousand years ago. I can remember writing it, sitting in that colorless house in Raleigh in 2006, and yet I’ve written so much since then, it seems odd sometimes that that’s the book I’m still signing. Dragonbreath has been done for so long in my head that it blows my mind a little that it still isn’t OUT–June 11th is both almost incomprehensibly distant and terrifyingly close. And that leads to another problem–I sorta feel like Ninjabreath is a superior book, and I squirm a little, going "No, wait! Read THIS one!" except that it won’t be out until next spring.

(Part of the problem with–oh, holy crap, there’s a spectacular black snake in the front yard, eighteen inches at least, just cause a glimpse of him undulating across the driveway–anyway, part of the problem with Dragonbreath is that I’m actually starting to hope a little. I blame Wal-Mart. They ordered a bunch of copies. That sort of thing is potentially career-making, and despite my protective pessimism, I’m actually hoping that Dragonbreath might do well…maybe not bestseller, certainly nobody thinks it’ll be the next Harry Potter, but I can at least aspire to "seemingly infinite series that small children nag their parents about" which is a perfectly respectable niche in which to spend my thirties.)

And I got off track again, but anyway, Quail Ridge Books! Tonight! 7pm!