Were you wondering where I was?

Friends, I was here, but not online. In the buildup to the release of Girl At Sea, the tour, and work on the new book . . . much work had to be done.

Not the least of which was the repainting, rearranging, and rewiring of the New York office. This was done with the aid of Oscar Gingersnort, who flew over from London last weekend. One week of plastering, moving, taping, boxing, and generally chaos ensued (Oscar knows how to have a good time in the US). But now, the new office is up and running! The Girl At Sea cards are stacked up right next to me, ready for the signing workshop to open. Even bigger stacks of Girl At Seas are right here as well.

ALL SYSTEMS ARE GO!

Obviously, I missed YOU. And I have a backlog of information to get to. So today will be full of bulletins. I will likely be posting every single day this week to catch you up on all of my other thoughts, of which I have had MANY. I have thoughts on writing, revising, painting, ancient history . . . and, of course, there will be an update on what I am now calling The Great Bartlesville Conundrum.

Let’s do the news now. Bonus: I have TWO videos to share with you today!

GIRL AT SEA AND MJ TOUR

Guys, I can’t believe it. The time is almost here. Girl At Sea will be released in the next few days. I say few, because it seems that some stores will be getting it in two days time, and some in three, and some in four. Amazon and Barnes and Noble will start shipping it on Tuesday. Why the many dates? I have no idea. I finished making all the photocopies and gluing on the covers WEEKS ago.

If you order it now, you can have a copy in your hot little hands by next weekend.

If you are in New York this upcoming week or two and you DON’T see me, you’re being deliberately difficult. I’m going to be everywhere but IN YOUR HOUSE. (And this last one isn’t even that certain. I am very expert at gaining admittance to places by fire escape and dumbwaiter. I could magically appear in your shower in the morning, singing my favorite Abba tunes and handing you your soap. You never know.)

I have many ways of gaining access to your house. Not all of them all legal, but they are effective.

You can see the entire list of events on the news page, but here are the events for this upcoming week, May 28-June 2nd.

May 31st: Borders Columbus Circle (Time Warner Center), 5:30PM
with Jenny Pollack, Bennett Madison, Emily Gould, and Zareen Jaffery

June 1st: two places!

Book Expo America, Jacob Javits Center, 8:00 AM-4:00 PM
(This is a professional publishing event—I’ll be at the children’s books breakfast starting at eight, and will be at large with other YA writers through the afternoon. Anyone wishing to meet with me/Free Monkey at BEA should send me an e-mail and we will see what we can do.)

Barnes and Noble Park Slope, Brooklyn, 6:30 PM
with Bennett Madison and Jenny Pollack

June 2nd: BEA, con’t
Still generally at large, but mostly at the social stuff. FREE MONKEY likes canapés.

WIN GIRL AT SEA

I will be giving away copies of Girl at Sea starting this week, and I’m going to KEEP giving them away throughout June.

But one copy is going out right now to Joanna Milner, who gave a generous donation to City Harvest’s Skip Lunch Fight Hunger. Thank you to all who donated! The money you sent in will go right to feeding kids here in New York.

In the meantime, the signed cards will be going out the door starting this week. If you’d like one, just write in and ask. I’ll be sending them throughout June.

FREE MONKEY UPDATE, WORLD TOUR ANNOUCEMENTS!

Thank you to all who wrote in to FREE MONKEY to request his visit on the World Tour. As you will see in the video below, he has made his pre-tour stop with Hank Green.

Sadly, he could not take all of you up on your invitations, only because if he did, I would never see him again. (There were a lot of them.) We read each and every one, and I can tell you . . . he loved them. Making the decisions was a hard process. He had to do it, but I could tell it was difficult.

Originally, Free Monkey said he would be visiting five places, but the demand for his visits was larger than we anticipated, so the tour was lengthened. We managed, through creative scheduling, to get this up to six visits in the US in June, and four international visits in July.

The Free Monkey World Tour hosts are:

Elisabeth Sanders, San Francisco, California
Little Willow, Los Angeles, California
Joanna Milner, Portland, Oregon
Breca Halley, San Antonio, Texas
Laura Reece, Bartlesville, Oklahoma
Kiersten Gutherman, Penndel, Pennsylvania
Hanna Khan, London, England
Tobias Huisman, Rouveen, The Netherlands
Susan Kämpfer, Ballenberg, Switzerland
Lili Wilkinson, Melbourne, Australia

FREE MONKEY pre-World Tour greetings and instructions will be e-mailed this week.

Thanks again to everyone!

EVIL VIDEO

I did take time this week to escape the paint fumes and film my response to the Brotherhood2.0 Evil Baby Orphanage discussion.

For now, I have to put Oscar on a plane. I’ll see you tomorrow.

Posted: Sunday, May 27th, 2007 @ 7:15 pm
Categories: Uncategorized.
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