New York Times and USA Today Bestseller Lists

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This is the part where I wake up and I'm back in seventh grade, studying the FOIL (First, Outer, Inner, Last) method for solving polynomial equations in pre-algebra.

The Breach is #29 on the New York Times mass-market paperback extended list, and #124 on the USA Today list. I remember reading these lists all the time in the newspapers, back in the mid-90's, around the time I was getting out of high school and considering taking a crack at writing. (I ended up going with screenplays for a long time, first, but obviously I had the book bug in me from the beginning.) Someone in my family must have had a subscription to USA Today, because it was always around, and I checked out the bestseller list every Thursday. Would've been fun to know that seven or eight hundred Thursdays later, I'd be on it. (For the record, neither of these listings will appear in the print versions of their respective papers; NYT prints the top 20, and USA Today prints the top 50, while the papers' websites show the full lists--and I won't be dwelling on this distinction for much longer than it takes to write this sentence.)

So many people to thank: Janet Reid, coolest agent in the business, and everyone else at FinePrint. My editor at HarperCollins, Diana Gill, as well as Christine Maddalena, Pamela Spengler-Jaffee, Danielle Bartlett, Michael Brennan, Carl Lennertz, and probably a few hundred others I just haven't gotten to meet yet. And a special thank you to Sarah Durand. I also want to thank Lee Child again (I was lucky enough to be able to thank him in person at Bouchercon) for a cover blurb which is probably having a bigger influence on potential buyers than I can know.

Above all, everyone out there who's reading the book. In the most literal sense, I can't say it enough: THANK YOU!!!

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.