If You Wanna Get Me A Birthday Present…

Okay, listen, today it will be my blood-soaked nativity under the platinum Birthday Moon — an occurrence that only rolls around once per year, and upon this night, I slough off my skin-kite suit of soggy chitin and regrow a new human-shaped costume, and then there’s a lot of dancing and chanting and sacrifices on this anvil-shaped stone and —

Well, you already know the details.

Normally, normally I’d not dare be so bold as to ask for a Birthday Present from all y’all, and if I did, I would make it something selfless like asking you to contribute to a GoFundMe for an orphaned rabbit or to the presidential campaign of Paul Reubens (whose motto is, of course, “I know you are but what am I?!”). But this time, I’m going FULL SELFISH. I’m embracing my GREEDY MONSTERNESS. I’m showing off my rigid exoskeleton, my fringed gills, my acid plumes!

What I’m trying to say is, as you well know by now, I wrote a book.

That book is called Wanderers.

It’s about what happens when a sleepwalking disease takes over people, one by one. It’s about what that does to our country. It’s about the people — the “shepherds” — who follow and guard this slow-growing flock of sleepwalkers. It’s about the flock’s mysterious purpose. It’s a big book. A lot going on. A twisty, turny modern epic existing somewhere in the interstitial terrain between Stephen King’s The Stand and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.

You can find an excerpt here at Entertainment Weekly.

There is a starred review at Publisher’s Weekly, and now at Kirkus.

We optioned it for TV with QC, wonderful folks who are also behind Get Out, Us, BlacKKKlansman.

A lot of really great authors have said really nice things:

It’s coming out in about two-and-a-half months. (Which still feels like a very long time, to be honest!) So, one of the things that can really help is pre-ordering a book. Pre-ordering helps the author, but it also helps the publisher, and it helps the bookstore. It helps the whole dang bookish ecosystem. It sends a signal that the book is popular, that people are excited, and it also tells bookstores how many to order, and tells publishers how many to print, and so on, and so forth. Further, it’s also a fun present from PRESENT YOU to FUTURE YOU, and when FUTURE YOU becomes PRESENT YOU, you can thank PAST YOU for pre-ordering a book that appears almost as if by fucking magic in your life.

So, for my birthday, I’d love it if you pre-ordered the book.

And, if you’re pre-ordering print? Then it’d be swell if you ordered from an independent bookstore. Indie stores are wonderful places that curate for you, dear bibliophages, glorious fantastic meals of narrative nummies. They are community-facing places and author-friendly locations that let us, ideally, meet in the middle. An online merchant is hard to truly browse, but a bookstore can be a very special thing. And bookstores are generally staffed by knowledgeable people who know and love books. Further, once again cleaving to the selfish, I’ll note that this is how authors make the NYT bestseller list — by buying the books from independent bookstores.

Here I remind you that you can of course find the book at an independent bookmonger using Indiebound. And, please note that many booksellers — like Mysterious Galaxy, where I’ll be on July 22nd with Adam Christopher, post-SDCC! — happily ship books right to you.

Of course, you can pre-order the e-book, too —

Amazon! B&N! Apple Books! Kobo! Google Play!

And there’s always audio, via Audible.

(And I’ll get more pre-order links as they become available.)

If you pre-order, you get a gift too —

A cool SHEPHERD 1024 pin.

Of course if you were planning on nabbing it at a local library, you can always contact them in advance to make sure they’re ordering copies.

So, that’s it, that’s my BIRTHDAY PLEA to satisfy the ANCIENT BLOOD PACTS on this, my GRIM NATIVITY. You are of course, free to ignore this! But you do so at your peril, and I’d only say, sorry about the ripening boils on all your secretmost body parts. I think the book is maybe actually good? And I hope that you’ll enjoy it, should you choose to honor me and the day of my heretical emergence into your world. Ha ha I mean “our” world!

OKAY BYE.