Hello friends, and happy new year!
My family and I spent the holidays among the timeless mountains and islands off the coast of British Columbia. We took a lot of ferries…
Saw lots of bald eagles…
(That one is young, and its head and tail feathers haven’t turned white yet.)
Hung out with the hilarious harbor seals who sunned themselves on the swimming dock near our house…
Went on hikes, played board games, watched movies, and read books.
It was an incredibly restorative vacation, and we all returned rested, refreshed, and ready for the new year. I hope your holidays were similarly re-energizing!
New year, new virtual events!
My free, live, virtual school events are back this spring! Once a month in January, February, March, April, and May, I’ll be hopping online for an hour to talk about my books, my background, and my writing process. I give a presentation for the first half hour, and then spend the next thirty minutes answering live questions from attendees. Whether you’re watching from home, a classroom, or an auditorium, there’s no fee to attend, and no limit on how many people can watch.
Here’s the schedule for this spring. Click the links below to register!
Thursday, January 22 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT
Tuesday, February 24 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT
Tuesday, March 24 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT
Thursday, April 23 at 11am ET, 10am CT, 9am MT, 8am PT
Tuesday, May 19 at 1pm ET, 12pm CT, 11am MT, 10am PT
Can’t join me live? Want to replay an event for readers who missed it? Each virtual event is recorded, and is available for at least a month afterward to anyone with the link. (I usually just take the old one down as soon as a new recording is available.) You can even sign up and view a presentation after the fact! Regardless of how or when you watch, I hope you’ll tune in.
I’m not doing in-person school visits anymore, and rarely do paid virtual visits, but if you’ve got a larger event you’d like to invite me to, check out my Speaker Profile at Authors Unbound. Thanks!
War Games Goodies
War Games has been on the New York Times bestseller list all thirteen weeks it’s been out, which is incredible! Thank you to everyone who’s bought a copy between now and then. I hope you loved reading it as much as I loved writing it!
I have a few fun War Games things to share with you. First up, I’ve posted my War Games virtual launch event on YouTube! If you missed it back in October, you can now watch my presentation online, any time.
If you haven’t seen it yet, the official book trailer Scholastic created for War Games is pretty cool. It’s so much like a real movie trailer, people keep asking me when the movie is coming out! (There’s no movie really in the works at present. Sorry.)
Scholastic has posted an excerpt from the audiobook version of War Games, which you can listen to here. When you go to the site, it may hit you with a pop up that asks you to sign in or sign up for a Soundcloud account. You don’t need to do either one. If it asks, just click the X in the top right corner to get rid of the pop up, and then you can listen to the excerpt.
You can read the first two chapters of War Games online here.
And Scholastic has created a Book Guide for War Games! It includes a short summary of the book, reading group questions, and an author Q&A with yours truly. I talk about my inspiration, my research, the real people who appear in the story, and all the themes I touch on in the book—despite coming around in the end to the same theme I always come around to in my books! To find out what that is, you’ll have to read the Book Guide…
An eccellente book giveaway!
Just look at that gorgeous Italian coastal town. Wouldn’t you like to go to there?
You can, in a figurative way, when you read Proibito Leggere, the Italian edition of Ban This Book! * I’ve got a dozen or so copies of Proibito Leggere in hardcover, and now you can enter to win a free book.
Each entry will be assigned a number, and winners will be selected using a random number generator. So that everyone has an equal chance to win, please enter only once. Thanks! And sorry, due to the number of submissions I expect to get, only the giveaway winners will be notified of the results. But that means if you hear from me, it’ll be good news!
The deadline to enter is the end of the day on Sunday, January 25, 2026. Thanks, and buona fortuna!
* I cannot guarantee you’ll actually see any towns like that in the Italian edition of Ban This Book, figuratively or literally, as I can’t speak or read Italian.
What I’m Reading
Talk about two books with very different vibes!
The first, for kids, is my friend John Claude Bemis’s new graphic novel, Rodeo Hawkins and the Daughters of Mayhem. Listen, if you put “mayhem” in the title, you gotta deliver—and John and illustrator Nicole Miles certainly do. Thanks to a prophecy that a kid named “Sidney Poblocki” will destroy all of existence, interdimensional assassins are picking off every last Sidney Poblocki in the multiverse. Enter Rodeo Hawkins and her Daughters of Mayhem, to save the last Sidney Poblocki in existence—and the entire multiverse too! It’s a rip-roaring adventure from the word go, and the dynamic, stylish art is a perfect compliment to the manic story. Ten out of ten—would travel the multiverse with Rodeo Hawkins again.
And then, have you ever chanced to pick up a book you’ve never heard of before that quickly became an all-time favorite? I happened on The Curve of Time by M. Wylie “Capi” Blanchet in a little shop on the island where we were staying in Canada, and read it throughout our vacation. (You can see me sitting with it, meditatively, in the last holiday photo above.) The book is the absolutely charming account of a thirty-five year old widow who packed her five young children into a 25-foot motor boat over a series of summers in the 1920s and 30s, and cruised up and down the coast of British Columbia with them, exploring inlets and islands and having adventures.
The title comes from a popular philosophy of the 1920s and 30s known as “Serialism,” which suggested that our experience of time is multidirectional, but that our perception of it is limited by our consciousness. It is in our dreams, the philosophy contends, that we can “travel to” or see moments from our personal pasts and futures. Capi Blanchet wasn’t a true adherent of Serialism, but she was a reader, and a thinker, and The Curve of Time is, in a way, a perfect example of serialism in literature—a nostalgic tale of the past, told in its “present,” with the knowledge of what was to come in the future, when the book was written in 1961. It’s a cozy adventure story, an account of a long-lost place and people, and a meditative treatise on life, all rolled into one. And one of my new favorites too.
That’s it for this month! If you liked this newsletter, please share it online, or with anyone you think would be interested:
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In the meantime, a salute to my fellow time travelers out there:
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