Good News and Bad News
Hey, everyone. I know, I know. Another newsletter?!? What the freakin’ hell?!? You were promised no spam, and here I am almost sending out one week for the past month.
There’s reasons, I promise.
First—the book tour schedule. You’ve heard it all before, but Blackstone made up this very nice graphic with all the dates and times and locations.
It’s so handy! You can easily check when and where I’ll be near you. You can share it was friends and family on social media. You can clip it out and keep it in your wallet for emergencies. Keep it next to your money clip. Never go to a secondary location.
That’s the good news. Yay. We could all use some good news these days.
The bad news, some of you may have already seen. The audiobook version of God’s Junk Drawer has been pushed back to January 20th because it’s been dealing with a sort of rolling technical difficulty. One of the downsides of so much of this process being digital these days. There was a big issue about six or seven weeks back which led to a delay, which led to another delay as different schedules got adjusted, tweaked, readjusted, re-tweaked, which meant another delay, and so on. Nobody’s fault, just... tech crapping out. It’s happened to all of us.
To be clear, sooooooooooo many people have been trying to get this done on time. You seriously wouldn’t believe how many discussions we’ve had in the past few weeks trying to figure out how to make this happen faster, could we pick up that slack this way, how long would X take if Y more people worked on it.
Over the weekend someone made the call and decided it just couldn’t be done in time. Which relaxed a bunch of things and, alas, made God’s Junk Drawer slide back in the production line a bit. Now that it wasn’t an urgent priority it just, y’know, wasn’t a priority. So everyone's’ going to take a breath after three solid weeks of stressing about this and the book’s going to get done right, not rushed.
Again, nobody’s at fault here. No one got lazy. Nobody messed up. It was just exactly the right thing crashing at exactly the wrong time. And I’m so very sorry it means a lot of you aren’t going to get to listen to the book for another two months.
So that’s the bad news.
Tomorrow’s release day for the hardcover and ebook. I’m excited, but I know it’s going to be a let down for some of you. If you come out to a signing, I’ll make sure you get an extra dinosaur (some of them glow in the dark).
Now that I think about it, this’ll probably be the newsletter for November. Normally it’d go out on Friday or Saturday but I’ll be in... Eureka? Portland? Driving around the Pacific Northwest and not really having time for the usual update.
So let me give you a few last things...
Cool Stuff I’ve Been Watching
Finally got to see Fantastic Four: First Steps and holy crap did I love it. This is easily my favorite Marvel movie of the year. Probably of the past several years. Still enjoying Avatar: The Last Airbender. Oh, and finally saw Hocus Pocus. Yes, that Hocus Pocus. I’d somehow never seen it, neither had my beloved, so we sat down the night before Halloween and filled that hole in our lives.
Cool Stuff I’ve Been Reading
A few different things, but the standout by far is Django Wexler’s Everybody Wants To Rule The World (Except Me), which has been sitting in my to-be-read pile for a few months now and I figured I should finally read before he and I sit down to talk in just, wow, six days! Can also recommend Elena Taylor’s The Haunting of Emily Grace, which is a meditation on grief cleverly disguised as a mystery/ thriller.
Cool New Toys
I spent three days opening all the Operation: Monster Force figures I got last month. There were quite a few of them, mostly because about two years worth of preorders all came in at the same time. They’re all kind of fantastic in their own way, but my favorites by far are the Aerial Assault Sleepwalkers. Retro bad guy soldiers with jetpacks and creepy gas masks. I liked them from the first time I saw them, and they lived up to all my expectations. Other than that... I’m not really supposed to get anything else for myself as we’re deep into the holiday months now. But sometimes preorders show up...
And I think that’s everything, yes? I’ve got to pack. Getting on the road in about 40 hours. Hoping to see some of you out there.
God’s Junk Drawer! Tomorrow!
