FREE COOKIES (and reading)

This Saturday, September 2nd, at 3pm, I'm going to be reading from The Squampkin Patch at the Park Slope Barnes & Noble in the beautiful borough of Brooklyn. The address is 267 7th Avenue. Hop the F train to 7th Avenue and come watch children quake with fear and enjoy pumpkin chocolate-chip cookies.

The picture attached to this entry, though awesome, bears no relation to my book.

Sentence of the Week

From the New York Times:

"It’s a breezy frippery that welcomes molecular gastronomy into the mainstream."

Sci-Fi Wonderland

Your faithful dispatcher checking in from the town of Saint Michaels, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. It's a remote fishing village turned B&B tourist klatch, by which I mean, it's a science fiction wonderland.

Take for example:



That's an eel fork. That's right. For forking eels.

Or behold the wonder of:



That thing. Shiny shiny, pretty pretty.

Poor Willie

I flew back East from LA on the red eye this morning and found the airport crammed with soldiers. At the risk of sounding old (as in "I remember when a bowl of soup was a nickel!"), I remember when it was strange to see people with automatic rifles at the airport.

But I did overhear a fantastic conversation, here in movie script form:


INT. AIRPORT - MORNING

Walking past the Annie's Soft Pretzels stand, a TALL SOLDIER and TALLER SOLDIER converse cheerefully. The Tall Soldier adjusts his machine gun to free his arms, and then pantomimes strangling an old, red-headed man.

TALL SOLDIER
Willie Nelson!

TALLER SOLDIER
I HATE Willie Nelson!

The soldiers continue to protect our way of life.


THE END


True story. If you don't support our troops, Willie Nelson's already won.

In other news, my sister has a new dog, Kirby:



What up, dog.

The Squampkin Patch

Today, the Squampkin Patch arrives! It's my third book, illustrated by the mad genius David Michael Friend. It should be on the shelf at your local bookseller. Go buy eight of them.

'...ingeniously imaginative, hilariously suspenseful... keeps readers laughing but also has them continually on the edge of their seats. The perfect combination of darkness and light makes "The Squampkin Patch" a memorable page-turner.'
THE CAPITAL TIMES OF MADISON, WI

'those tempted to draw the obvious conclusions from the evidence may be in for a surprise. Readers who enjoy the gleefully grotesque and darkly farcical touches of Lemony Snicket will eat up this delightfully eerie misadventure.'
THE BULLETIN OF THE CENTER FOR CHILDREN'S BOOKS

'readers will relish Petty's joyous use of language in this tantalizing confection.'
SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL

Back from the Dead with a Squampkin

This was a terrible time for me to be absent for a week! The Squampkin Patch comes out tomorrow, and I haven't been blogging or spamming my mailing list. And my explanation is: everything I owned was murdered last week by the heat wave. My computer, my apartment, and my bicycle all succumbed to the 105 degree heat index in Brooklyn, NY, and exploded. I can do pretty well without a place to live or a way to get around, but when my computer died it took all my data with it, including the names of all the folks who volunteered to get spammed.

The good people at Tekserve assured me that I would have my computer (with a new logic board and hard drive) and all my data back by August 2nd, which seems less and less likely the further we climb into the month. Luckily, they have a service line where you can telephone and leave a voicemail that a team of experts will ignore and delete.

Here's a self-portrait photo from the heat wave.