News from Everywhere

AU REVOIR, CRAZY EUROPEAN CHICK has been out for almost two weeks, and people are starting to notice. In fact, it got reviewed in the LA Times this weekend, which is extra cool because my old friend of almost 30 years, Michael Ludy, got the author photo credit. Besides being a great photographer, Mike's an animator who's worked for Disney and The Simpsons, and he snapped this picture of me at his home in Burbank when I was out in LA a couple years ago for the Death Troopers book tour.

Meanwhile I've been busy adapting my horror novel Eat the Dark as a screenplay, which has been challenging and rewarding, usually at the same time. I can't talk much about this project at the moment, but I'm very excited about it. Likewise, the film version of Chasing the Dead is moving forward at its own pace -- I'm not as directly involved in this project, but I have read the screenplay and seen some pages of the comic book adaptation that the producers have developed, and it looks terrific.

What else? Well, I'm very excited to announce that Houghton Mifflin will be publishing my first middle-grade book in spring of 2013, called Lenny Cyrus, School Virus. It's about a very smart, very geeky kid -- a genius, really -- who manages to shrink himself down to travel inside the bloodstream of the girl he's been in love with since third grade, with the goal of changing her mind about him...from the inside. Imagine Diary of a Wimpy Kid set inside the human body, and that's a start. My editor and I are looking at different possible illustrators for this book now, and I'm thrilled to be in the process of undertaking a whole new type of storytelling.

Finally, the sequel to Au Revoir is coming out next fall. And although that seems like a long time from now, the edits of that book are already done -- hard to believe that it's been a year since I was in Europe, researching that book. (I actually wrote some of it at a cafe in Venice, trying to protect my laptop from some extremely aggressive Italian pigeons.) We've got a title for the book (we think) and some possible cover art...and I'll be sharing all of that with you here as soon as I can.

Meanwhile, I hope you're all doing well out there. Stay happy, healthy, useful, and we'll talk again soon.