Dragons Dragons Everywhere
Hello all!
Mark your calendars! Two exciting events coming up!
First: this SUNDAY, March 23, at 4pm, my wonderful sister Kari will be appearing at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, NY along with Aaron Starmer — I’m sorry I can’t be there, too, but please go see her (and tell her I said hi!) and get her to sign your copy of Menagerie 2: Dragon on Trial! (Available now! So exciting!)
Then: on Sunday, MARCH 30, at 2pm, I’ll be having a launch party for Wings of Fire 5: The Brightest Night at Newtonville Books in Newton, MA.
Yay! Come celebrate with me! There will be signed books and dragon tattoos! And you can ask me oodles of questions about books 6 through 10 if you want to! 🙂
Speaking of which, I’ve realized that there’s almost nothing I can tell you about the next five books without possibly spoiling book 5 (ack!), which of course I don’t want to do. So what I figure I’ll do is tell you what I can right now, and then after book 5 comes out (in less than two weeks! really soon!), I’ll write a post full of spoiler warnings with more information for anyone who’s actually finished the first five books. Deal?
Oh, AND if you get book five, there’s a tiny bit of information at the end about what’s coming next!
So let’s see what I can tell you now . . .
There will be five more books, and right now we’re calling them book 6, book 7, etc., rather than giving it a new subtitle and starting over at book 1. (These covers are so pretty, who wants to cover them up with more words, right?) 🙂
I don’t have more specific titles than that yet, though. I’m terrible at titles! In fact, that’s often the last part of the book I write, seriously. Over my publishing career, I’d say half the time my editors have rejected all my suggestions and come up with my book titles for me (starting with This Must Be Love and including many of the Pet Trouble titles and also The Brightest Night). I know, that sounds a little crazy, right? I’m like, oh, I’ll write the other 60,000 words if someone else will just come up with the three that go on the cover. 😉 But titles are hard! Especially for the more long-winded among us, I suspect.
Then, of course, the question I’ve gotten the most so far is “when are they coming out?” What I know right now is: 2015. That’s the plan, although it’s hard to be more specific when they aren’t exactly written yet! La la la. But Scholastic kindly moved the book 5 publication date earlier so you wouldn’t all have to wait for it, so my guess is they’ll be giving you book 6 just as soon as they possibly can! And then book 7 as fast as possible after that! 🙂 When I know more, I’ll let you know, but I’m pretty sure you can count on 2015 sometime. It all depends on me writing like the wind and my children not being too impossibly crazy (ha ha! that’ll happen). 🙂
AAAAND . . . what are they about? The non-spoiler-y version:
(1) Each book will star a different dragon — like the first five books — and they won’t be the five dragonets you already know.
(2) But you WILL still get to see the original five dragonets and various other dragons you met in the first five books (whoever SURVIVES BOOK FIVE anyway, MWA HA HA . . .). 🙂
(3) Book 6 will be set not long after book 5 (maybe a few months later, is how I’m currently writing it).
(4) One of the new dragons is someone you’ve already met (and I think — I hope! — you’ll all be pretty excited about this one). By the end of The Brightest Night, you will also have met another of the dragons and briefly heard about a third. The fourth will be a new dragon who’s related to someone you know, and the fifth will be (hooray!) an ICEWING! I think he’s getting book 7, and I cannot wait to see his cover! I bet it’ll be amazing! (Although, poor talented Joy, my cover suggestions are all “I’d like a snow-white dragon on a snowy background with some ice and glaciers and lots of white snow, please.” And yet I know she’ll somehow do something utterly perfect!)
OK, I’m going to stop myself there before I do inadvertently spoil book 5 . . . but come back after you read The Brightest Night and I’ll try to tell you a bit more!
And in the meanwhile, you can read The Menagerie Book 2: Dragon on Trial! It is dragon-tastic, too, although the Wyoming Menagerie dragons are pretty different from the Pyrrhia dragons. And please come see Kari or me at our events!
If you can’t make it to the Newtonville Books event, by the way, I bet you can call them beforehand and order a personalized copy (of any of my books!), which I can sign for you on March 30. That would be awesome, totally do that! 🙂
OK, I’d better get to writing so you can have book 6 ASAP, right? 🙂 Happy month full of dragons! More soon!
Quote of the Day: “I’m going to tell you something important. Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they’re big and thoughtless and they always know what they’re doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. The truth is, there aren’t any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world.”
— from The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman