If you’re a librarian or teacher, you can win one of 22 copies of Hyacinth and the Secrets Beneath.
Plus, Curious City has created a game based on the book, perfect for story times at libraries and bookstores. It turns out that your bookshelves are actually magical sewers in disguise, just waiting for a group of kids brave enough to face their enchanted dangers. Download the complete event kit for free at Curious City’s website.
Not sure if you’ll like Hyacinth And The Secrets Beneath? Have a free sample! Here are the opening pages, read by the great Jessica Almasy.
There’s nothing more terrifying for an author than being reviewed (except possibly being reviewed by a shark while parachuting out of an exploding airplane.) Fortunately, Hyacinth And The Secrets Beneath has gotten some great and entirely shark-free reviews.
Kirkus says it’s “a rollicking adventure with a lulu of an ending that comes with the promise of a sequel. Middle graders will adore clever Hyacinth and enjoy the other humorous characters, the puns (Oaroboarus, indeed), and the suspenseful narrative.”
I started this website in 2004, under the name Yankeefog.Com, to share my observations as an American living in London. As the years went by, I posted here less often. That was partly because the speed and brevity of Twitter made it much easier than blogging. But it was also because I was channeling my observations about the strangeness of London life into fiction, in the form of a novel for children called The City of Secret Rivers.
You might remember I went to Reddit and did an “AMA” — “Ask Me Anything”. It was a blast, but it wasn’t exactly a hit. It got a total of 52 upvotes. Recently, a Redditor spotted How Not To Kill Your Baby in the bookstore, took a photo of the cover, and posted it to Reddit. It got 7,735 upvotes. That’s right. The cover of my book is officially more charismatic than I am. I’m going to view that as a good thing.
I’m going to be hanging out on Reddit.com this afternoon. Stop on by and ask me anything!
Over at the Huffington Post, I propose a simple modification to the United States legal system: put the toddlers in charge.
If you long for a copy of “How Not To Kill Your Baby” but you’ve blown all your money on luxuries like diapers and milk, then head on over to Goodreads where I’m giving away an autographed copy to one lucky winner.
As noted in the previous entry, I’ve mostly abandoned this blog. But in the next few weeks, I’m going to be trying an experiment. When you register as an author on Amazon or Goodreads, you can connect your author’s page there to your home blog, and post updates to people on those sites who have bought your books. So that’s what I’ll be doing.
As a result, expect the next few weeks of entries here to be a bit different in tone. Instead of general musings, I’ll be fairly focused on self-promotion.
You might have noticed I’ve mostly abandoned this blog. If you’re looking for me, the best place to find me nowadays is on Twitter.
However, if you are an old fashioned, early twenty-first century type who prefers blogs to Twitter, and you simply must know what I’ve been up to… My new book How Not To Kill Your Baby comes out next month. It’s a parody of pregnancy and parenting books.