Miss Peregrine Paperback Tour!

It's been ALMOST A YEAR since I've posted anything here -- I live mostly on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr -- but I'm stopping back in to announce that Miss Peregrine is coming out in paperback in early June, and I'm going on tour! 

I've seen the paperback and it's a gorgeous thing to behold. It also has a long Q&A with me in the back, creepy bonus photos, and a big chunk of the first chapter of Miss Peregrine book II as a teaser! (Miss Peregrine II comes out January 2014, BTW.) 

So, tour! I'll be joined by the wonderful and talented Tahereh Mafi on a all stops, and a number of other author friends here and there along the way, TBA! Here's the schedule:

Sunday, June 2 - NEW YORK CITY -- 4pm at Books of Wonder, 18 W 18th St.

Tuesday, June 4 - PHILIADELPHIA -- 7pm at the Fairless Hills Barnes and Noble, 210 Commerce Blvd, Fairless Hills, PA

Wednesday, June 5 - WASHINGTON, DC -- 7pm at the Loudoun County Public Library, 24600 Millstream Drive, Stone Ridge, VA 20105

Saturday, June 8 - SARASOTA, FL -- 11am at Bookstore1, 1359 Main St.

Sunday, June 9 - MIAMI, FL -- 2pm at Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave, Coral Gables, FL

Monday, June 10 - PETALUMA, CA -- 7pm at Copperfield's Books, 140 Kentucky St

Tuesday, June 11 - BERKELEY, CA -- 7pm at Books, Inc., 1760 Fourth St.

Thursday, June 13 - SANTA MONICA, CA -- 7pm at Santa Monica Public Library, 601 Santa Monica Blvd

Friday, June 14 - SEATTLE, WA -- 7pm at University Books, 15311 Main Street, Mill Creek, WA

Saturday, June 15 - PORTLAND, OR -- Powell's City of Books, 1005 Burnside 

Can't wait to meet you, sign books, and maybe even read some non-spoilery teaser bits from Miss P II aloud! 

What a year, and some updates.

I'm a bit flabbergasted, really, at the continuing popularity of that quirky little novel-illustrated-with-photos I wrote awhile back, which debuted on the New York Times bestseller list last June and has remained there, somewhat stubbornly, for 56 weeks now. This bestseller-ness is something of an abstract concept (what does that mean? how many books? etc), but to put things in context Quirk Books crunched some numbers and used the results to create a nice infographic, which among other factoids points out that if you stacked up all the copies Miss P has sold to-date, they would be taller than Mount Everest:

In other words, I should feel very lucky, and I do. It's been a year of meeting engaged readers and passionate booksellers and librarians and being pleasantly weirded out by the fact that strangers seem to be at least dimly aware of who I am (this happens at book conferences and the like, not at, you know, the mall), and being made to feel welcome in this little corner of the book universe we call YA by a cadre of brilliant and charming and disarmingly unpretentious writers, several of whom I am grateful now to call friends. Even without an Everest-surpassing stack of sold books, all of that would've made for a very excellent year.

Hey, how about a little Q&A?

Q: When's the next Miss Peregrine book?

I'm working on it now! But second books are hard, especially if you want them not to suck, which I do. It'll be coming out in 2013 though exactly when in 2013 I'm not sure yet.

Q: What do I do till then?

You can pre-order Talking Pictures, my purdy coffee table book of captioned found photographs which comes out October 16th. Think of it this way: if Miss Peregrine was a story I made up about photographs I found, then Talking Pictures is photos that already have stories attached to them, written by anonymous hands years ago. (If you haven't seen the video where I explain what the heck a "talking picture" is, watch it here.) And oh, oh! There's a new cover for the book, which I'm really fond of:

Q: Are you doing any signings or events in my town?

I'll be at Comic-Con on Friday, July 13, for a signing at Quirk Books' booth, #1636, at 2pm. And I'll be giving away photos from my vintage photo collection! I don't have any signings scheduled after that, but things are always cropping up at the last minute, so I'll be sure and trumpet it from the treetops if something gets set up.

Q: Are you going to make any more videos?

Yes! I'm just not sure when. They take me forever, and book-writing also takes forever, and because I get paid to write books but not to make videos, book-writing tends to win. But I really miss making videos, and if I don't get back to it soon I'll be super pissed at myself. So: yes!

Thanks again for an amazing year. I can't wait to see what the next one brings.

34 weeks is a lot of weeks

So I've been off in writing-Miss-Peregrine-Book-Two land and haven't been posting much on the ol' bloggy-blog, but that's going to change, I sort-of promise! I felt like I had to pop my head out of my cave to at least acknowledge the ongoing unlikeliness and insanity of Miss Peregrine still, eight months and counting after its publication, occupying a rather prominant spot on the bestseller list. Which is in itself nothing short of amazing. But still more amazing is that I managed to hang on long enough to be list-neighbors with my dear old friend John Green, whose astoundingly good novel The Fault in Our Stars has held the #1 spot the last few weeks (which it richly deserves). It is, as John himself pointed out, a weird and magical thing. (It would be slightly more magical, I suppose, if Rick Riordan and I could switch places for a week, but still.)

A lot of other amazing things have happened in the last 34 weeks, as well, not least of which is that the Miss Peregrine movie went from being a twinkle in Fox's eye to being a project with Tim Burton attached as director and Jane Goldman, who wrote X-Men: First Class, Kick-Ass and The Woman in Black, adapting the screenplay. (And by the way, a lot of people ask me if I am bothered by other people writing/directing the adaptation of my book, since I make movies and write scripts too. When it's Tim Burton and Jane Goldman who are doing the writing and directing, the answer is easy: Not. In. The. Slightest.)

Also, does this Woman in Black poster remind you of anything? Ahem! Just sayin'.

Iceland: I'm Lichen It

I'm just back from a two week road trip around Iceland, and have a new photo essay about it up on mental floss. Check it out!

Yes, There Will Be A Sequel!

Everyone's been asking me, so I figured I'd put it out there in boldface type: YES!  In fact, I just got back from a whirlwind trip around the country to hunt down a new crop of peculiar photos for book 2. I scored lots of great images -- now I just have to figure out how to use them! But that, as they say, is the fun part.

Overwhelmed and grateful

It's been an incredible few weeks since Miss Peregrine was published. It's difficult to overstate just how incredible. Suffice to say that I'm very good at keeping my expectations low in order to avoid serious disappointment. Before Miss Peregrine came out, I was just hoping that it would find an audience of any size -- that this strange little book full of odd black-and-white photographs and what seemed like risky plot twists would resonate with some readers, gain a little cult following, and maybe garner a few nice reviews. After all, my intrepid publisher, Quirk Books, didn't have gobs of money to throw at a splashy marketing campaign. They put together an eye-catching package for the book (as they always do), but the marketplace is crowded; the world is fuller than ever of books, movies, games; stories in every form imaginable, all loudly competing for attention. So as the book release approached, despite enthusiasm and encouragement from early reviewers and bloggers who'd read advance copies of Miss Peregrine, I tried to distract myself with other projects, assuming that my publication date would come and go without a whole lot of fuss.

Never in my life have I been happier to be wrong. A week before the book hit shelves, there was a heated auction that resulted in the film rights to Miss Peregrine being sold to 20th Century Fox.  Okay, I told myself. That was great, but don't get too excited. Just because they bought the rights to make a movie doesn't mean they're actually going to make one -- and it doesn't mean anyone's going to pay attention to the book. Movie rights sales happen all the time, to books no one's ever heard of. 

Which was true enough. But just as I was once again girding myself for disappointment, reviews started coming in. Good reviews. Entertainment Weekly, People, The Associated Press, CNN.com, The Christian Science Monitor, McClatchy's news service, Canada's National Post and The Los Angeles Times all had nice things to say. Not to mention the editors at Amazon.com, who named it the best YA book of June, and then one of the best YA books of 2011 (so far, it being only July). The cumulative effect of all this fuss about Miss Peregrine -- on me, psychologically -- has been a combination of delight, anxiety, and a kind of embarassment. (Are they really talking about my book? That thing I worked on alone in my spare bedroom for a year? God, that's weird.)

So we'd sold the film rights, and people were saying nice things. Still, I prepared myself to be disappointed. Just because some reveiwers like it doesn't mean anyone's actually going to buy it, I counseled myself. Don't get your hopes up. And then it hit the New York Times bestseller list, and the last of my defenses came tumbling down. There was no getting around it: I was -- am -- living the dream of countless struggling writers, who if they're anything like the struggling writer I was just a few months ago, hardly dare admit they dream of such things. 

I'll have more exciting developments to share soon. In the meantime, to all the book bloggers who took the time to write about Miss Peregrine, to all the enthusiastic readers who've enjoyed the book and reached out to me, to the photo collectors who welcomed me to their world and continue to help me find amazing images, and to the fantastic team at Quirk Books, I want to say thank you. I am humbled.

Trespassing in Time Capsules: Making the Miss Peregrine Trailer

Half of the Miss Peregrine trailer was shot in my house. The other half was shot many thousands of miles away, in Belgium and Luxembourg, where I tried to find the locations I'd dreamed up for my book in real life. Along the way I met up with a Dutch urban explorer, got yelled at by Flemish farmers, and discovered some truly creepy abandoned houses.

Miss Peregrine Book Trailer

"Prepare to have the hair on your arms stand up," quoth EW.com!

Miss Peregrine: the Movie!

I'm thrilled to finally be able to announce this most exciting bit of news: the film rights to Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children -- after what the Hollywood Reporter called "a heated auction" -- were snapped up by 20th Century Fox.  Now accepting casting suggestions!

The Accidental Sea

Here's a short film I made about my favorite post-apocalyptic Hell-hole, the Salton Sea. "A haunting and devastating video," tweeted Roger Ebert.