Earlier this week, I trudged to my mailbox.  There, amid the catalogs for clothes I don’t need and the flyers for food I don’t want to eat was a white Tyvek envelope, bearing my name and address.  Inside the white envelope was a manila envelope.  And inside the manila envelope was a *huge* sheet of paper, with a lovely message from Mrs. Lese’s third grade class, thanking me for helping them to celebrate their “Reader Leader” goal of 100,000 minutes of reading from all class members, combined, since the start of the school year.  (Earlier this year, I attended their Reader Leader party, sharing bookmarks and postcards from DARKBEAST, and talking about my career as a writer.)

Every student signed the letter, and they used *cursive*!  (And here, I’d just been reading this past weekend that no one was learning cursive any more!)

The thank you note made my day.  I’m really looking forward to making more author visits when DARKBEAST REBELLION comes out in September!

So, first it was a story in Publishers Weekly; then, it was a story in the New York Times:  Simon & Schuster and Barnes & Noble are in a power struggle.  As a result, authors — myself included — are being badly hurt.  The details are murky.  Neither side is sharing detailed information, but it boils down to this:

Barnes & Noble is dying on the retail vine; they’re desperate for every red cent of cash that they can receive.  To bolster their nearly-empty coffers, they have demanded deeper-than-usual discounts from publishers on books that will be sold in B&N stores.  They’ve also demanded higher-than-usual kickbacks (in the form of so-called co-op payments) for in-store placement of books.

Most publishers have gone along with the increases because, you know, B&N is the only national chain left in the country.  But Simon & Schuster have put their foot down and said they won’t pay up.  As a result, B&N has refused to stock the vast majority of S&S books, and they aren’t placing orders for future books.

DARKBEAST is caught up in this mess.  (As you may recall, B&N didn’t pick up the book at first, because they didn’t like its message.  Eventually, they changed their minds and brought the book into their top stores, albeit they never put it on the “new fiction” shelves, so that it remained nearly invisible to potential readers.  Now, alas, they’ve returned DARKBEAST to their blacklist.)

Even more devastating to me, my readers, and the future of the Darkbeast Chronicles, DARKBEAST REBELLION is caught up in the chaos.  These days, bookstores place orders for books about seven or eight months out.  Therefore, B&N would typically be ordering REBELLION now, to prepare for the book’s September 24 release.  Those orders aren’t being placed.

With orders down, S&S will print fewer copies of DARKBEAST REBELLION.  Sales will plummet.  And that will be the end of Keara, Caw, and the entire darkbeast world — even though these two books are the best things that I’ve ever written.  Really.

Authors — lots of us — are being hurt by this war.  Readers — lots of us — are being hurt.

Ultimately, readers are being trained not to go to Barnes & Noble, even if those readers are fortunate enough to have a store in their area, because B&N won’t have books on its shelves.

What can you do?

• Order advance copies of DARKBEAST REBELLION from vendors who will sell it:  Indiebound | Amazon
• Support independent bookstores near you, so that venues for selling print books remain available.
• Link to this post.  Tell friends about this pitched battle, so that they can order books like DARKBEAST and DARKBEAST REBELLION and all those other wonderful S&S books that aren’t going to be in B&N stores through the end of the year, if ever.

Thanks, as always, for your help!

I know, I know.  I’m supposed to hint around for weeks.  I’m supposed to make you go to a bunch of different websites, so that you can see the Big News there.  I’m supposed to be all cool, and stand-off-ish and so very, very chicly bored.

But I’m not feeling or doing any of those things.  Instead, I’m sharing my news with you now.

[Ahem.]  Here it is.  The cover of DARKBEAST REBELLION:

Isn’t it beautiful?  Aren’t you wondering why Keara and Goran and Caw are wandering in a snowy forest?  Don’t you wish it was September 24, 2013 already?!?

Mindy, already having fun with the second DARKBEAST book!

So, yesterday brought me back to my days of lawyer-ing and librarian-ing.  I set my alarm for an hour earlier than usual.  Shortly after it went off, I was headed to Union Station, to the Amtrak train to New York.

I used to be a Master of Amtrak, knowing precisely how much time it took to get tea, a breakfast pastry, and a copy of the Washington Post, and still make my train before it left the station.  My skills are a little rusty, but I did get all my necessities in place (except, alas, a knife to spread cream cheese on my bagel, but I was able to improvise, dipping the bagel into the cream cheese )

The train had no quiet car (grrrrrrr!), but that oversight was made up for when the man sitting in front of me turned out to be a former lawyer-coworker.  We spent about half an hour catching up on old friends (“He went from Firm A to Firm B to Firm C, and now he’s working on his own” was an unfortunate refrain…), and then we settled down to complete our respective work.

Arriving in New York brought back a strong sense of deja vu.  I haven’t roamed those streets much recently, but I used to know them quite well.  I grabbed an early lunch at Schnipper’s Quality Kitchen (one of my favorite NYC guilty pleasures — the beet and goat cheese salad was divine, and the mac and cheese side dish was pure decadence!)

With two hours to kill before my meeting, I headed over to the main branch of the public library.  They had a ***wonderful*** exhibit about “Lunch Hour” — how the meal evolved from “dinner” eaten in homes to various snack- or complete meals eaten in restaurants.  The exhibit was very well curated and I learned a lot of little facts — plus, I smiled a lot.

Then, it was time for the Main Event — a meeting with my agent, my editor, and my publicity team, at Simon and Schuster.  Most of what we discussed is still hush-hush (mostly, about the DARKBEAST sequel).  Suffice to say, I learned a tremendous amount, heard some very exciting things, saw some wonderful other things, and I’ll tell you more as soon as I can!

After the meeting, I headed back to Penn Station.  My return ticket wasn’t until 7:40, but I decided to pay for an upgrade to take an earlier train.  (There were storms on the East Coast, and my original arrival time was 11 p.m. – rather late for my taste.)  My decision to upgrade proved ***brilliant*** when the storms brought down the signals along the last hour or so of the trip.  It took us nearly 2.5 hours to complete that leg.  By the time I got to Union Station, my original train wasn’t *due* in until 1:30 a.m., and I strongly suspect it was delayed from there (as the posted arrival times often are!)

I retrieved my car from the lot, drove home, and collapsed.

And that was how I spent my Tuesday.

Mindy, who enjoys knowing how to do the New York business trip thing but is glad she doesn’t have to do it on a regular basis!

Okay, I know that I’ve been pretty Darkbeast-intense here (and, truth be told, I will be for another couple of weeks, through the end of the book’s first month.  Did I mention that it’s now in stock at Amazon, after some very aggravating delays?  No?  Well, it is — go get your copy today!)

But what I really wanted to write about was my weekend.  My weekend, which was almost entirely Darkbeast-free.  Well, after Friday afternoon, anyway, when I turned in the revisions on Darkbeast Rebellion to my editor!

The “weekend” actually began on Thursday night, when we went to see Invisible Man at Studio Theatre.  This adaptation of Ralph Ellison’s novel is the first that the author’s estate has allowed.  It was a *huge* play — almost three hours long, dozens of characters portrayed by about 10 actors, long, wordy speeches (all taken *directly* from the novel)…  At the first (of two) intermission, Mark compared the play to Eugene O’Neill, and he hit the nail on the head.  That’s exactly what they were going for — family saga and social commentary all wrapped up in meaty language.  The show wasn’t perfect, but it was fascinating — a great launch for the new theater season.

On Friday night, Mark headed off to Nationals Stadium with his best friend to see Bruuuuuuuce.  (Before they left, I cornered the best friend, a judge in the juvenile justice system, to work out some plot points in my next novel…)  While the guys rocked the stadium, I went out to dinner with Tiffany Trent.  We may have closed down the Thai restaurant we found.  We may even have criss-crossed Alexandria about a half-dozen times, getting lost on the way to Tiffany’s hotel.  And we may have had a *lot* of fun, discussing current books we’re writing, future books we want to write, fellow writers, etc.  I had a wonderful, relaxing, hair-down evening!

The rest of the weekend was a flurry of reading (I’m reading books by Jonathan Auxier, Jessica Day George, and Shannon Hale, in preparation for our panel at the Baltimore Book Festival), knitting (I finished the double-knit checked scarf and bought some *gorgeous* Dragonfly Squishy Lace for a shawl), movie watching (THE ICE STORM, which remains as much about broken people as I remember it being), etc.

And now?  It’s Monday.  Time for a whole new work week.  I loved my weekend.  May I have it back?

Mindy, really needing to get to work on that cloning technology!

I don’t know what it was about my tween years, but I was *totally* into rites and rituals.  My favorite series of fantasy novels fairly dripped with those things, and I contemplated adding quite a few rites to my own life.  Want to know more about my crazy life as a middle school student?  Check out Tansy Roberts’s blog!

Mindy, checking in late because the final revisions to DARKBEAST REBELLION are thisclose to being finished!