Ransom Riggs's Blog, page 3

Iceland: I'm Lichen It

I'm just back from a two week road trip around Iceland, and have a new photo essay about it up on mental floss. Check it out!

Yes, There Will Be A Sequel!

Everyone's been asking me, so I figured I'd put it out there in boldface type: YES!  In fact, I just got back from a whirlwind trip around the country to hunt down a new crop of peculiar photos for book 2. I scored lots of great images -- now I just have to figure out how to use them! But that, as they say, is the fun part.

Two Signings in July: San Diego Comic-Con & Easthampton, MA

I'll be appearing live-and-in-person to sign books and say things two times in the next few weeks.  Here are the details:

Friday, July 22 @ 2pm: I'll be at Comic-Con, at the Quirk Books booth, which is #1636.

Wednesday, July 27 @ 5-6pm: I'll be reading and signing at White Square Books in Easthampton, MA. Come say hi!

Overwhelmed and grateful

It's been an incredible few weeks since Miss Peregrine was published. It's difficult to overstate just how incredible. Suffice to say that I'm very good at keeping my expectations low in order to avoid serious disappointment. Before Miss Peregrine came out, I was just hoping that it would find an audience of any size -- that this strange little book full of odd black-and-white photographs and what seemed like risky plot twists would resonate with some readers, gain a little cult following, and maybe garner a few nice reviews. After all, my intrepid publisher, Quirk Books, didn't have gobs of money to throw at a splashy marketing campaign. They put together an eye-catching package for the book (as they always do), but the marketplace is crowded; the world is fuller than ever of books, movies, games; stories in every form imaginable, all loudly competing for attention. So as the book release approached, despite enthusiasm and encouragement from early reviewers and bloggers who'd read advance copies of Miss Peregrine, I tried to distract myself with other projects, assuming that my publication date would come and go without a whole lot of fuss.

Never in my life have I been happier to be wrong. A week before the book hit shelves, there was a heated auction that resulted in the film rights to Miss Peregrine being sold to 20th Century Fox.  Okay, I told myself. That was great, but don't get too excited. Just because they bought the rights to make a movie doesn't mean they're actually going to make one -- and it doesn't mean anyone's going to pay attention to the book. Movie rights sales happen all the time, to books no one's ever heard of. 

Which was true enough. But just as I was once again girding myself for disappointment, reviews started coming in. Good reviews. Entertainment Weekly, People, The Associated Press, CNN.com, The Christian Science Monitor, McClatchy's news service, Canada's National Post and The Los Angeles Times all had nice things to say. Not to mention the editors at Amazon.com, who named it the best YA book of June, and then one of the best YA books of 2011 (so far, it being only July). The cumulative effect of all this fuss about Miss Peregrine -- on me, psychologically -- has been a combination of delight, anxiety, and a kind of embarassment. (Are they really talking about my book? That thing I worked on alone in my spare bedroom for a year? God, that's weird.)

So we'd sold the film rights, and people were saying nice things. Still, I prepared myself to be disappointed. Just because some reveiwers like it doesn't mean anyone's actually going to buy it, I counseled myself. Don't get your hopes up. And then it hit the New York Times bestseller list, and the last of my defenses came tumbling down. There was no getting around it: I was -- am -- living the dream of countless struggling writers, who if they're anything like the struggling writer I was just a few months ago, hardly dare admit they dream of such things. 

I'll have more exciting developments to share soon. In the meantime, to all the book bloggers who took the time to write about Miss Peregrine, to all the enthusiastic readers who've enjoyed the book and reached out to me, to the photo collectors who welcomed me to their world and continue to help me find amazing images, and to the fantastic team at Quirk Books, I want to say thank you. I am humbled.

Trespassing in Time Capsules: Making the Miss Peregrine Trailer

Half of the Miss Peregrine trailer was shot in my house. The other half was shot many thousands of miles away, in Belgium and Luxembourg, where I tried to find the locations I'd dreamed up for my book in real life. Along the way I met up with a Dutch urban explorer, got yelled at by Flemish farmers, and discovered some truly creepy abandoned houses.

Miss Peregrine Book Trailer

"Prepare to have the hair on your arms stand up," quoth EW.com!

Miss Peregrine: the Movie!

I'm thrilled to finally be able to announce this most exciting bit of news: the film rights to Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children -- after what the Hollywood Reporter called "a heated auction" -- were snapped up by 20th Century Fox.  Now accepting casting suggestions!

The Accidental Sea

Here's a short film I made about my favorite post-apocalyptic Hell-hole, the Salton Sea. "A haunting and devastating video," tweeted Roger Ebert.

Talking Pictures

I have an unusual hobby: I collect snapshots of people I don't know.  I started collecting a few years ago — at swap meets, antique shops and the like — but the thing that got me started wasn't the photos themselves so much as the scribbles I'd sometimes find on the backs. When you're looking through bins of thousands of random, unsorted photos, every hundredth one or so will have some writing on it. It's generally just identifying information ("me and Jerry at the Grand Canyon, 1947″), but every once in a while I'll find a something surprising, emotional, candid, hilarious, heartbreaking -- a few words that bring the picture to life in a profound new way, transforming a blurry black-and-white snapshot of people who seem a million miles and a million years away into an intensely personal sliver of experience that anyone can relate to. It becomes something not just to look at, but to listen to.

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I began posting some of my favorite finds online in late 2010, and the reaction they got was amazing.  It wasn't long before publishers got interested -- and now, I'm happy to announce, HarperCollins will be releasing Talking Pictures as a book in January 2012.  If you've been a fan of the blogs, fear not -- there will be lots of new (actually, very old -- but new-to-you) pictures in it; I've found some of my very favorite images just in the last few weeks.

Praise for Talking Pictures

"I'm absolutely fascinated by Ransom Riggs' ongoing series at mental_floss called Talking Pictures—themed collections of found photographs that happen to have writing on them. Usually, there's just enough written to make each image more powerful, and leave you wanting more." - Boingboing

"Riggs' book is not exclusively devoted to the aesthetics of the snapshot image, but rather touches on the humor, romance, drama, or tragedy of life via the accompanying handwritten text.  These photos reveal something profound about our shared humanity in all its varied forms and are a poignant reminder of why we take pictures.  None of us who love snapshots will ever look at them the same way again." - Robert E. Jackson, whose collection was featured in The Art of the American Snapshot.

Sample Chapters

The photos will be organized into chapters by theme -- love and marriage, life during wartime, clowning around, and so on -- and the best way to get a sense of these is to take a look at some of the Talking Pictures blog posts I did for mental_floss:

Hide This Please

Love and Marriage

Times of Trouble

Or take a look at this sort-of-book-trailer I made:

 

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

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A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. And a strange collection of very curious photographs. It all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children who once lived here—one of whom was his own grandfather—were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a desolate island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive.

A spine-tingling fantasy illustrated with haunting vintage photography, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children will delight adults, teens, and anyone who relishes an adventure in the shadows. 

"A tense, moving, and wondrously strange first novel. The photographs and text work brilliantly together to create an unforgettable story."

- John Green, New York Times bestselling author of Paper Towns and Looking for Alaska

"A haunting and out-of-the-ordinary read, debut author Ransom Riggs' first-person narration is convincing and absorbing, and every detail he draws our eye to is deftly woven into an unforgettable whole. Interspersed with photos throughout, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is a truly atmospheric novel with plot twists, turns, and surprises that will delight readers of any age."

- Amazon.com editorial review

"An enjoyable, eccentric read, distinguished by well-developed characters and some very creepy monsters . . . dark but empowering."

- Publisher's Weekly

"An original work that defies categorization."

-Library Journal

An Amazon.com best book of the month, June 2011.

A Los Angeles Times Summer Reading Guide pick.

Coming to bookstores everywhere June 7, 2011. Available now for pre-order at Amazon.