We’re only a month away. 

One month and the book you power-wished into being will be released onto an unsuspecting public. Rumors are spreading that the books are back from the printer and will soon be making their way into your hands. You’ll get to read it first, and a month from now it will be out in the wild, impossible to reclaim. I have become a pulsing anxiety-cluster.

Let us focus on something more crucial. A party.

Asteroid Made of Dragons Launch Party

Avid Bookshop - Athens, GA - April 5th.

I adore Avid - this is my home bookshop, and I defy you to find a better. They are clever, courteous, cultured, and cute.

If you can come you should come. No excuses. Book the flights, project yourself through the medium of the astral plane, piggyback on a passing underwear salesman. Get here. You have a month to figure it out. There will be music. There will be me in a wizard cape. There will be a 17 act play I’ve entitled ’Hubris Poignant: A Portrait of the Writer as a Nuclear Firestorm’. We’ll go out for drinks afterwards. Then I’ll tell you what I really think about Lev Grossman and The Magicians. I’ll only have a few hours to spare before the Rich and Famous Bus arrives with my Genre Authority Shoes and Internet Sage Scepter, so enjoy these fleeting moments of my mortality before I ascend into something quite akin to a small, mewling god-baby.

I mean, how could you miss all that?

Hello Champions!

I don’t know about you guys but I had a cool day yesterday: I got to read the first chapter of Champions of the Third Planet to the fourth and fifth graders at Mid-City’s Prescott School of Enriched Sciences here in Los Angeles. 

It’s been a looooong time since I was in elementary school but the students and teachers and Principal Panes were very welcoming and highly enthusiastic. I also got to leave before anybody gave out homework. 

This was the first time I’ve read any of the book to anybody and I thought the reaction was FANTASTIC -- I hope the kids agree. The room got really quiet when I started to read about Milo and the Orb, the kids seemed to spark to the idea and asked me a lot of great questions afterward -- I really, really enjoyed it. Hopefully I can return when the book is on the shelves... 

 --Chris

(Rather lengthy note because I tend to write these monthly and all at once, but there are new pictures of Nina below if you want to skim.) 

To everyone reading this who pre-ordered: A half-thousand thank yous. 

 I’m starting to really like the 3rd of the month. The campaign to get These Are My Friends on Politics published launched on January 3rd. Thanks to a ton of you, it reached its light-publishing goal on February 3rd. A month later, thanks to a second ton of you, we’ve doubled that goal and stand more than two-thirds the way toward the full-service publishing deal. I won’t bore you with the details of what goes into that deal, except that it includes the ability for me to eventually walk into a physical bookstore and awkwardly stand near my own book and watch customers read it like David Duchovny’s character did in the first episode of “Californication.” (I hope that’s where the similarities between that character and me end, for the record.) 

So again, thank you. What has happened so far is miles beyond what I anticipated happening when I pressed the big green button to start this campaign. I cannot appreciate it enough. 

To everyone reading who has followed but not ordered: Thank you too. 

When you keep an idea to yourself for years while attempting to develop it into something tangible — I’m a big believer in the superstition that discussing projects before they’re presentable is a far worse jinx than walking under a ladder — it’s easy for that idea to grow stale before you even get to share it. Conversely, when you finally do share it, all at once, with people you know and don’t know, it’s extremely weird. But when I see someone react to the book upon seeing it for the first time, as brand new to them as it was to me when I first envisioned it, and when I see them respond positively enough to follow its progress, it’s gratifying every single time. There are myriad great projects in the works on Inkshares, all looking for support, and no one can monetarily support them all. So thank you for expressing the interest you’ve expressed in this project. It does not go unnoticed.

(I’d be remiss if I didn’t still encourage you to pre-order, of course, but mostly, I just want to say thank you.)

To everyone still reading: Here’s a small portion of a page you haven’t seen before, presented completely without context.

Only a portion, because I want to keep as many surprises locked down before the book is in your hands. But in case you’re worried the book is secretly only six pages long because that’s all I’ve shown off, here’s a completely vague part of another page. I won’t explain what’s going on though.

To everyone who’s just here to see the new pictures of Nina: I understand.

As promised. Enjoy. And thank you again. More to come. (Perhaps on April 3rd.)