Guest Post Today on John Scalzi's Whatever!

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The very cool John Scalzi invited me to write a Big Idea post about The Breach. His site, Whatever, is here (I doubt many people need that pointed out to them), and the direct link to the post is here. Needless to say I'm geeked! Thank you, John!

Pens Fatales!

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Sophie Littlefield was kind enough to invite me to do a guest post today on the Pens Fatales blog. I won't ruin it, but I will say it involves Bigfoot, and a dark flashback to the pre-internet (at least for me) days of early 1995.

Guest Blogging on Babel Clash

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This is fun! I'm guest blogging for the next week (minus a few days around Christmas) over at Babel Clash on the Borders website. The topic is the balancing act between creating the world of your story, and moving the action along quickly. Definitely something I spend a lot of time thinking about, so it's a great subject for this.

Check it out here: Babel Clash

Book Trailer

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A huge thanks to everyone at Harper who put this together. Especially for following the #1 rule for making a cool trailer, whether it's for a book, a film, or a TV show: military helicopters are always cool. (FYI, a corollary to this rule is that, in the case of a comedy, monkeys are always funny; alas there are no monkeys in The Breach.)

Excerpt

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The first few chapters of The Breach are available online now at the HarperCollins site! If you're not busy, you can check them out here. Hopefully you'll be hooked! (I'll settle for grudgingly compelled to find out how it ends.)

Thanks to my editor Diana Gill for the link, by way of a very kind post on the Eos Blog.

Starred review, and pick of the week, in Publisher's Weekly!!

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Now officially entering pinch-myself territory: check out the review here.

Thanks to Jordan Foster at Publisher's Weekly, and everyone else involved!! I can't say it enough!

Happy Birthday, Carl Sagan

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He would've only been 75 years old today. I was surprised to realize that, and reminded of how untimely his death was. It's hard to think about what else he would've written in these past thirteen years. Or the next thirteen, or more. If you've never read The Demon-Haunted World, I can't recommend it strongly enough. I've read it several times, and it's easily my favorite nonfiction book. And if you've never watched Cosmos, forget this blog post and get thee to Hulu. The whole series is there, and it's amazing how, after three decades, it's hardly dated at all. Just don't start it if you have any important work to do in the next thirteen hours.

Here are the first five minutes: