Clemency Pogue event at Books of Wonder NYC

I'll be signing copies of "The Scrivener Bees" this Saturday, June 23rd from 12-2pm at Books of Wonder in New York City. This is the third in the series of Clemency Pogue books, chronicling Clem and Chaphe's adventures with giant squid, a fugitive changeling, and the eponymous tattooing bees.

Books of Wonder is at 18 West 18th Street, in Manhattan, just west of 5th Avenue. It has an amazing selection of children's books and some of the best cupcakes in the city.

I've been silent on this blog for the last little while, and am sorry to report that the silence will become only more profound over the next few months. I'm in New Mexico until September, shooting a western, and well enough occupied to keep me away from posting. But I'll be back online in the fall, and full of stories about cowboys, indians, and huevos rancheros.

Rockaway Literary Arts Festival

This Sunday, April 22nd, I'm going to be speaking and signing books at the Rockaway Literary Arts Festival, an event so hip they don't even have a website. It's being held at the Rockaway Center for the Arts, in Fort Tilden, Queens, and doors open at 10am.

I'll be there all day, and my panel starts at 3:30. I'll be speaking with fellow authors Julie Mares, Amalia Hoffman, Stephen S. Yaeger, and Bonnie Timmermann. Should be a great time.

Nothing like the Sun

I've been making a point of re-reading books recently. Whenever I do videogame work, we're always talking about "replay value," how to make the same experience entertaining the second or third time around. My instincts are the same with books. When I was a kid, I'd read a book I liked four or five times at least, partly because they were fun, and partly because there was always a niggling sensation that I was still missing something, there was a little more juice to squeeze out of it.

I always think about that writing, and try to hide extra layers in the story, jokes under the jokes, puns you can read differently if you know what's coming. With that in mind, I'm rereading Anthony Burgess' "Nothing Like the Sun," which is great fun. It's brimful with lines like, "he deems himself to be above the supererogatory fripperosities of poetlings." That could be a grad student exercising his tuition, or Roald Dahl's BFG describing the occupants of a bellyflopper. I love it.

It also drew my attention to this line from Edmond Spenser's Epithalamion:

"Ne let hob Goblins, names whose sence we see not,
Fray us with things that be not:"

If the man wasn't four hundred years dead he could probably sue me for stealing material for the Clemency Pogue books.

But this rereading is taking its toll on my old books. This picture is the back corner of my copy of "Nothing Like the Sun." Sad to see a book falling apart, but I gotta say I kind of love how much it looks like erosion revealing the strata of ancient eras in a canyon

The Scrivener Bees

I just returned from the Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, which was great fun. Sarah and I met some great people, including Avery Chenoweth (who must be eponymous for something) and whose books are well worth checking out.

The next Clemency Pogue book, "The Scrivener Bees" has sneaked onto Amazon, available for pre-order. I recently received the galleys (pictured) with artwork from David Michael Friend. Very exciting.

And to the emails I'm getting about how woefully outdated this website is-- I'm working on it.